Battlefield 4 review: a little acting goes a long way

You’d have to be living under a rock to be unaware that Battlefield 4, DICE and EA’s answer to the blockbuster behmoth that is the Call of Duty series, was coming out this fall. The game, which was released on today in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan (it’s coming to Japan on November 7), has been hotly anticipated by FPS fans around the globe. But does it deliver the goods, or is this year’s entry just another rehash of what’s quickly becoming a tired genre?

Gameplay: The same old Battlefield

If you’ve played any of the previous Battlefield games, you’re not going to find any surprises in Battlefield 4. In fact, if you’ve played shooters at all, you’re likely to feel right at home here. You’ll drive vehicles. You’ll blow up walls, mark targets, take down tanks, and shoot a boatload of people (literally) before the game is over, and that’s exactly how it should be. Like previous entries in the Battlefield series, it’s a bit more open than Call of Duty in terms of how you can approach each battle, but it’s certainly not an open world game and you’ll still find yourself getting funneled down more than a few narrow corridors.

Battlefield‘s controls feel as tight as ever, and every gun I fired in the game felt weighty and powerful, as though I was operating a heavy (and deadly) piece of machinery. That’s not to say they all felt the same, of course — each of the many guns has its quirks, and one of the little innovations that makes this game enjoyable is that players have more choice than ever about the weapons they use. In the story mode, at every ammo crate you can select from all the weapons you’ve encountered so far in the game, not just the ones you can find lying around. Early on you don’t have a lot of choice, but later in the game you’ll find this frees you up to experiment and switch weapons around as the situation warrants. You can still only carry two regular guns and two explosive devices at a time, but you’ll never be limited in terms of which ones you can choose.

The enemy AI in Battlefield 4 is excellent. They stick to cover, and will work very quickly to root you out if you try to stay in one location, either by tossing a grenade your way or moving swiftly to flank you. How difficult they are to take down (and how easy you are to take down) depends on what difficulty level you choose to play on, but you won’t see too many enemies standing still in the open firing at you, running into walls, or failing to see you when you’re standing right in front of them the way you often do in games with lesser AI. The squad AI is pretty good too; they got in my way while I was walking a few times, but they tended to stay out of my way when I was firing, which was nice, and they never got stuck on geometry or otherwise held up my progress.

I did run into a few bugs during my time with Battlefield 4, but most of them were resolved by simply updating my graphics card drivers. The few others I encountered — a mysterious hovering corpse, and a strange bug that flung me off a ladder to my death — were isolated incidents and didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game at all.

It is true that there’s really not much in the way of innovation in Battlefield 4‘s gameplay, but in my opinion, there didn’t need to be. Battlefield 3‘s failings had more to do with its lackluster story than any flaws in the gameplay department, and as we’ll see, it’s here that Battlefield 4 really sets itself apart.

Story: a little acting goes a long way

Battlefield 4‘s predecessor Battlefield 3 included a much-lauded multiplayer component, but its single-player story mode left something to be desired. While full of the big-budget set pieces players have come to expect from triple-A shooters, but its story mode was ultimately empty and forgettable. Battlefield 4 improves on this experience in almost every way, offering a focused campaign with compelling characters whose names and personalities you’ll remember long after the credits roll.