Affectionate Diary

The single player campaign is fucking shit.

Well, that’s not fair. It’s awesome if you love corridors full of trigger points for bad guys that are always placed somewhere that makes it really hard to survive unless you do anything other than run backwards to cover. So your flow is run forward, die, repeat but understand the trigger point and then run back to cover, shoot some people from afar and then carry on. The AI is terrible, the story is terrible, the environments boring (though technically pleasing) and I don’t give a shit that you can blow some walls up. So actually, yeah -

The single player campaign is fucking shit.

Where’s the fucking helicopter mission? All anyone does is play far enough to be able to pilot the helicopter so that they can get in it in multiplayer and not fly backwards out of the area, killing everyone inside and causing them to lose points for a suicide, making you the biggest dick in the game by far. So give me that helicopter mission, and give it to me STAT. Then fuck off forever and never come back.

The Conquest and Rush modes are REALLY FUCKING GOOD. And you can blow up the walls! Which means that guy in the attic shooting through the tiny window can be exposed with a quick rocket, and you can have switched to your Uzi and be shooting at that attic before the rocket has even reached him. FUCK YES! But you know that, probably. And you know that if you try and play this game as straight shooter not only will you not do very well, but you’re also a total cock face. OH LOOK, THE CHARGE IS ARMED, WHY ARE YOU STILL ON THE .50 CAL TRYING TO SHOOT A HELICOPTER THAT ISN’T EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR US.

I know! What a cunt. Who would even consider playing like that? Can you imagine someone playing Medic class but running out in front trying to shoot people? What a dick. Are you dead? TOUGH FUCKING SHIT. That’s people being shit, though, and can be easily remedied by never playing with strangers. Which is the opposite of what I recommend for life outside of videogames, but easily the most important rule of Battlefield.

I really love everything about the game once you’re playing. Let’s not talk about what might be the best use of sound in a shooter ever, and let’s not talk about the near-perfect destructive design, or how well the different classes work together to create a sense of a living battlefield. Actually, that’s a lie, let’s talk about the sound.

The sound! I know homes has my back when he tells me he’s put a medi pack down for me (assuming I’m on the English-speaking side). I know how far an explosion was from the intensity of the blast sound. I know when it’s nearly the end of a game of Conquest because of the REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING PIERCING HORN. I know when I’m near my motion sensor, or when it’s no longer working. I know all of these things and more through sound alone, which is what I need because my eyes are focussed on one thing only: children. I mean killing. Same thing, really.

There are 24 people playing at any one time. Ace! Because I regularly play with a large group of people! But obviously if I want to enter a game as more than four people at once, I can fucking whistle. Thanks, EA! How about if I create a squad of four people and we want to enter a game and play together, in a squad of four, taking on the world? 50 per cent of the time I can fucking whistle! Why the FUCK do we enter a game as a team of four, and then when we start one of us is on the other team? DON’T PUT ME IN THAT FUCKING GAME IF THERE’S NOT SPACE FOR FOUR OF US TO BE ON THE SAME SIDE YOU FUCKING CUNT. If we wanted to be on opposite sides, we wouldn’t form a fucking squad! Fucking EA cunts. I bet they had a clause in the contract that stated they must have minimal wait times as a key differentiator to Modern Warfare 2, and so by following that clause they fucked us over (but kept the money men sweet).

What else? Oh yeah, when medics start they can’t heal, and when engineers start they can’t repair. Are you fucking mental? You already have such a huge selection of unlocks and an enjoyably protracted levelling process without those needless steps at the beginning, you stupid fucking cunts. I know, I know, you want to ease us in so that we’re not overwhelmed by the dizzying levels of excellence that your game exhibits when things are running at their very best. Well, I guess you could have done that with the single player, using a story to wrap together a series of objectives that gradually explain how the multiplayer works in an interesting and informative fashion. That way, we wouldn’t need to work our way through the abortion that currently exists for no reason other than we feel we have to for a sense of completion. I mean, you have the mechanics in place, so why not do that? Nobody bought your fucking game to play through another stupid fucking corridor shooter, they bought it to play the multiplayer. They just feel they need to have a single player bit in so they don’t feel cheated. That doesn’t give you the right to then abuse us, though, with tedium so strong I feel like you’re shitting in my mouth. Still, at least it’s not as bad as Heavy Rain. You can always say that. But so can everyone.

“Darling, why did sex only last four seconds? It’s bad enough your penis is tiny, the least you could do is last longer than the time it took to put it in.”
“Yes, but was it better than Heavy Rain?”
“Of course, I’m not going that far.”

I tell you what, though - the server technology is mind-fuckingly good. 24 players, vehicles, trajectory tracking, destructible environments and what feels like zero lag almost all of the time? Impossible.

The best game of all time for at least a month, which is quite a long time.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 10:48 am and is filed under Definitive Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.