i dunno if this is crossposting, but it is battlefield related so
I'd comment but you have me blocked.
Battlefield 3 singleplayer missions
[The following preview contains details of the first three missions in the Battlefield 3 campaign mode. Very little of the story is revealed, but aspects of those levels are discussed.]We can't tell you how it starts. That's the big secret. EA Dice has revealed very little about the story behind the Battlefield 3 campaign mode – although, of course, we know it involves a flare-up in the Middle East with a fictitious military faction known as the PLR, looking to seize control of the entire area. In the background, some kind of terrorist threat has been made against "the free world" (whatever that means) and lead character Sgt Blackburn of the US marines is somehow slap-bang in the middle of it all.
After a prelude mission that we're not allowed to write about, the action kicks off with Blackburn being interrogated by two fist-banging funsters from Homeland Security. They shout about his involvement in some sort of covert military activity, then threaten him with the fact they already know the truth. And at the end, there's a flashback to that fateful event, which becomes mission two, Operation Sword Breaker. Ah yes, you may already be thinking, we're back to Black Ops again: frame narrative, implicated lead character, angry anonymous men… Although at least this time, no one is shouting "Those loving numbers!" every five seconds.
Sword Breaker, it turns out is a level that's been heavily previewed in trailers for the game. Set in a crumbling city on the Iran-Iraq border, the mission involves Sgt Blackburn and his squad setting out to locate a group of marines who've gone missing while investigating a possible IED in the crowded meat market.
It's in to the backstreets of this scorched town that we venture first, through alleys thick with rubbish and rubble, following squad-mates Montes, Chaffin, Campo and Mantovic. I played the Xbox 360 version, and despite some minor scenic pop-up, the visuals are intricate and impressive. Sun light glints off the screen and hits the narrow streets with intermittent beams in which dust and refuse glint and swirl. We bundle through as squalid apartment block, its pulverised rooms littered with skeletal furniture, and out into an open street. "No civvies – I don't like this stuff," says one of your men as, on cue, a sniper shot rings out and Chaffin collapses to the deck.
From here, there's a frenzied firefight as PLR fighters clamber over walls and into a nearby car park, letting rip with AK-47s. In a battered building, there are two men with RPGs, firing down onto our position. At one point I run to hide behind a truck, just as it's obliterated by a rocket, a severed door zooms past my head. It's visceral, gripping stuff, the slightly grainy graphics and grimly authentic gunfire sounds giving the set piece a documentary feel. As I fire at the RPG positions, great clumps explode out of the concrete walls, leaving craters the size of dustbin lids.
Later, we're out on a rooftop, trying to locate a sniper in another building. Our small squad ducks between cover positions, and in these moments of safety it's possible to look out over the city, a mass of sandy coloured blocks, with an outcrop of shadowed skyscrapers in the distance. It's the sort of vista we've been seeing for years on news reports from the Middle East – the familiarity, the level of intricate detail, is weirdly unsettling.
And then, the climax. There's a pitch battle along a multi-lane highway pockmarked with burnt-out vehicles. At one point, you have to follow a wire leading from an unexploded IED fitted under a truck to a dank cellar where the detonator device sits. There's some quick QTE melee combat against the bomber, an elaborate tussle that only requires two button inputs, and then we're on the street again, mounting an RPG point on a road bridge, and then clambering onto a machine gun, mounted in a flat-bed truck. At times, there's confusion about where I'm supposed to be going, who I'm firing at, where they are; AI soldiers hide amid vehicles and pop-our briefly on rooftops; there are few spawned groups of idiots running down the street.
And of course, as you'll have seen from the trailers, this one ends in a gigantic earthquake, which brings down a building just yards from your position.
The next mission kicks off hours later. It's night and PLR troops are patrolling the wrecked city looking for US troops. Blackburn is holed up alone amid the wreckage and must crawl through the rubble (at one point doing a QTE combat with a rat – seriously) to reach a safe point. Once again, the detail is impressive; rubbish swirls through the air, cars can be seen teetering on the brink of chasms split into the eight-lane roadway. Blackburn stumbles into what looks like an abandoned church, where three guards stand idly chatting. The one nearest you has an assault rifle. It's time to take it.
The next mission is a stark contrast, and as hinted in the tank-dominated Thunder Run trailer, it shows that the single-player campaign will be littered with vehicle missions. We're out in the Persian Gulf on an aircraft carrier, this time controlling Lt Colby Hawkins, the female co-pilot in an F-18, about to carry out a raid on an enemy airfield where a key PLR leader may be hiding out. First, there's some routine air combat, in which the player must lock the target reticule on MiG jets, blasting them out of the skies in an impressive rumbling blast of fire and smoke. There's also a counter-measure option on the left trigger, which dumps flares in your wake to misdirect enemy missiles. It's all very fast and tense.
Then, similarly to the aircraft missions in Call of Duty, we get a bird's eye view of the landing strip below, laser sighting taxiing fighter planes for air strikes. This sequence is a little confusing; the craft are hard to spot without zooming in your camera view, but then you're too close to survey the area properly, so its easy to miss the jets readying for take off. AS in Black Ops or Modern Warfare, you're either going to see all this as a interesting change of pace or a frustrating aside to the main action. Story-wise, it's there to build the tension and widen the scope of the story. We've got to work out Blackburn's role in all this.
EA Dice has been teasing a different approach to narrative but so far this seems to be military shooter business as usual. There are corridor runs through decrepit buildings, sudden skirmishes in open streets, then little mini-quests to diffuse bombs or hop on gun emplacements. This is the same sort of territory as Medal of Honor and CoD.
Yet in the dialogue, there's a weird dichotomy between cynicism and jingoism: one minute it's all gung-ho chatter, the next someone is pointing out that America was founded, "by terrorists, for terrorists" – "What do you think the revolutionary war was?" he continues as you creep up on a potential firefight. "History is defined by the victors…" It's like half the development team was watching Generation Kill while the other half was high-fiving its way through George Bush war speeches. But that could be a good thing; it's interesting. It makes you wonder where this story is going. Just as long as its framed narrative, its focus on one soldier amid a vast conflict, and the faint whiff of paranoia and conspiracy doesn't run us too close to a certain 20m-selling Treyarch game released last year…
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