Battlefield 4 Reviews

OK I may be creating a rod for my own back here attempting to review BF4 but I think the game deserves a more constructive review than the current offering. Firstly I’m a big fan of the BF series but I, like many others, have been very disappointed with how BF4 turned out on the Xbox One. I’m not going to pretend that the amount of issues which have plagued the game since launch have been nothing more than a shambles at times. All that being said DICE have provided many patches (some better than others) and now with the latest changes* the game plays a lot more like I expected it to eight months ago at launch. I intend to base the review of the multi-player on how the game currently plays and not the disastrous launch version.

Game play: Campaign (3 out of 5)
When I played the first campaign mission ‘Fishing in Baku’ I thought wow this games is going to be brilliant! Unfortunately that was the peak for the campaign and the rest was a little more downhill from there. The game play is pretty much the same as BF3, and many other modern FPS games, fairly good but no surprises. I found the whole storyline behind the campaign a little bit farfetched and generally quite forgettable (I’m struggling to remember what it was all about after completing it six months ago… there was a US aircraft carrier fleet helping the ‘good’ Chinese Army fight the ‘bad’ Chinese Army and that’s about all I got from it!)

Game play: Multiplayer (4 out of 5)**
As usual the real part of any BF game is the online experience and that’s why I keep going back to play each version of the game. The usual Conquest, Rush and Deathmatch game modes have been supplemented with a few new modes Defuse, Domination and Obliteration. Conquest supports the highly anticipated large 64 player games while the other modes are still 32 player. I generally play Conquest and Team Deathmatch so I can’t review the other modes at this point, but I’ll update this section once I get more games under my belt.

In an attempt to take the diplomatic approach (for now maybe) if you liked the multiplayer in previous BF games then you will like this version too. If you didn’t like it then you probably still won't. I personally feel you don’t get the kind of team based FPS experience, with large maps and numerous different vehicles, in any other game I’ve played on the 360/One and if you’re playing in a squad with mates then it’s excellent. If you’re trying to play the game ‘lone wolf’ style then your experience might not be as enjoyable (except TDM and Domination).

Graphics (5 out of 5)
In short I’m impressed with the graphics and think they do look ‘next gen’ compared to BF3 on the 360 (sorry I haven’t seen BF4 on 360 to make a comparison). There just seems to be an extra level of detail in all the levels/maps that wasn't there in BF3.

Sound (4 out of 5)
The sound effect for the guns and vehicles are good and help immerse you into the games environment. I’m can’t remember what the music was like in the campaign, apart from the first mission... "turn around.... bright eyes!", but it’s not really the music that makes or breaks a FPS game for me.

Achievements (2 out of 5)
I found the achievements easy but fairly boring to get and consist of the standard level and collectables based ones in the campaign. I don’t like collectables so if you do then give this section a higher score. I would also recommend doing all of the collectables in one play through (without playing online in between) and then you should avoid the issues with losing your campaign save (in my experience). There are only a handful of online achievements and the ‘.45 Old School' is the only one that could be tricky/grindy if you’re not playing the game long-term (as you need to get a lot of pistol kills to unlock the 1911).


Levelling up is almost too easy (with the help of numerous in game XP boosts) and the 'Call me Sir' achievement isn’t difficult to get.

Overall I would recommend BF4 to any FPS fan (since the 'High Frequency Update').

*The High Frequency update seems to make multiplayer better than it was. From the Options menu set 'High Frequency Network Update' = HIGH and 'Network Smoothing Factor' = 0% (This appears to turn off the lag compensation so you know you're in a room with laggy players straight away instead of the game trying to "smooth things over"!
**Review based on the latest patch and lag compensation turned off in settings (I would have rated this as 1 out of 5 at launch, and stopped playing the game previously for 6 months because of the online issues).
Related info see: Battlefield 4 High Frequency Update Detailed

If my memory is right, this was the first Battlefield game that I ever played. Even before starting it I guessed that it would bear some resemblance to Call of Duty and others of the genre. I am (or at least “was”) more of a Halo person, both in terms of story as well as playing online, but I keep an open mind to any quality FPS out there. That being said, I will now briefly share my experiences with this game as of July, 2016 (any previous issues before patches, I won’t have knowledge of).

The campaign obviously isn’t the strongest suit of this game. By that I don’t mean to say that it sucks, it’s actually pretty average (good, period), but when you compare it to the multiplayer experience you then realize that THAT is what this game is truly about, its true aim. There are official and private servers to host the matches and I could find enough people playing it both day and night times. It left me with the impression that many people are currently playing it and will keep playing it online for a long time.

But back to the campaign then, its story isn’t what I’d call remarkable and there are only 7 missions (it feels like less) but the maps are big and you can spend a good amount of hours before completing it the first time through. And fortunately there’s not a lot of collectibles to increase play time, no, no, the achievements require you to find only a few of them, most of which are weapons that you can find around. In that matter, my only complaint is the absence of something to help you finding dog tags since they aren’t easy to spot with bare eyes, so the not so diligent player might need a video guide to grab some of them. I think it's also important to point out that there's a "replay mission" option, so the player can load up specific missions if they missed any achievements along the way, which also contributes for a more relaxed experience for completionists.

On to the multiplayer experience, besides what I’ve already said, I had little to no trouble connecting to games, even some that were already in progress. There’s one achievement related to reaching level 25, which compared to some other games is a pretty good number. In fact, I’m glad they asked me to play online until I reached that level, not only because it’s a lot more reasonable than 50 or even 100, but also because it made me explore it enough to start enjoying it and caring about it.

One of the things that I started to value in time was the art in this game. The maps and the design and graphics, specially on the MP experience, are great, rich in details and maybe a little too big, which is comprehensible since they can host matches with 32 people at once... Yes, the battles almost always are very, very messy.

All in all, I’m glad I bought this game and tried it out. Now I can say that I know something about the BF brand. The MP experience was fun and remarkable in its own way, despite if the campaign was only mediocre. And most of the achievements of the base game are reasonable, which also contributes for me to rate this game a 3.5 to 4 stars title.

Opening
I came at this game probably completely differently than many gamers on this website. My experience with shooters was Metro 2033: Redux and Star Wars: Battlefront (SWBF) (currently at level 65). I have not played COD. I played Doom, Doom2, and Quake back in the day. When I read the reviews of Star Wars: Battlefront, alot of them were negative because of the mechanics of that game did not come close to the mechanics of games, such as this. I loved Star Wars: Battlefront because it had photorealistic settings and it allowed me to recreate my 8 year old childhood fantasies playing Star Wars.The music and the sound are awesome with this game as well.
As of this writing, http://swbstats.com/ says there is 33,104 who are playing SWBF, while BF4 has 93,852. So when this came out free in EA Access, I wanted to see what the community was thinking about.

Setting

The settings include Singapore, a city that I have been to. Nothing in the setting really looked like my experience being there. Singapore is a great vibrant city with a very high density. Here is a picture I took on the street on a Sunday night in May 2006: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bx56OMD1DBiVSF9Ob3Z4d2kwWl...

This is a picture of downtown, with the Lionshead: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bx56OMD1DBiVajJIdm1PMWpYcF...

I didn't see anything like that when I played. It was washed out by a "storm." A clip of my playthrough is here: "

Where are the people? Where is the traffic (its bad there)? The setting made no sense.

Others are a non-descriptive island. A ship. Whatever.

Generally they looked good for a 7th generation console game. But compared to SWBF, it was not as good. For other games of that generation, this could be a 3-1/2 star look, but now it looks kind-of dated.

Based on what I have seen with BF1, BF1 looks much more realistic than this.

Campaign mode

I found that the story was generic and the characters were uninteresting. The episodes jumped quickly from one theater to another. I got sick of hearing my characters name "Recker" over and over again. The AI teammates did really dumb things like let the enemy flank me after I just cleared out everyone in the front and then ducked for cover. On some occasions, I saw them standing up taking fire, but not dying. The opposition seemed to spawn with no rhyme or reason. Recker also made choices to believe characters who had just betrayed him. I wouldn't have made these choices.



Based on what I saw here, I could see why DICE decided to abandon it altogether for SWBF. At this stage, it didn't seem that they really cared about the stories or characters. I played Battlefield: Hardline after this, and I found that story better than this one. Maybe after their experience with BFHL and BF4, maybe they gave up.

Multiplayer

The gameplay itself is ok, but I found that changing out guns was kind of a waste of time. It is great that there are multiple gunsights, but when I changed them out, I didn't find any difference. There was a difference in some gun performance though, but I didn't know based on the information offered of what was better than another. After trial and error, I picked a gun and went with it. Getting into the maps took along time. One thing I didn't like was how in many of the games a person would take a sniping position. The other was when many would quit leaving me the only one playing the game. The other thing that was meh was that I was put into matches where I was a Russian or Chinese. As a American, was this a good thing? Maybe they should have made up some countries instead.

What I liked was being able to get into tanks, armored personnel carriers, and vehicles. This made my experience magical as I drove around and laid my enemies to waste. I could see how this mechanic was missing in SWBF and this type of gameplay would be great in that setting.

There are four roles in BF4, One of the loadouts was "engineer" which I loved. I would drive my tank around, and when it got hit, I would get out to "fix" it. I thought that was kind-of fun.

Flying the aircraft was tough to do. I crashed my craft multiple times. I wish that the game had some sort of training mode. This was addressed in SWBF. I hope they have training missions in BF1.

Summary

Although the campaign mode is wanting, I could see why people compared other games to this game. To me the varying of loadouts and the ability to clearly define a role was cool. This is definitely better than SWBF, where with the cards, it is difficult to assign a role. I liked that I could pickup a gun lying there and use it. I liked that I could get into a tank or vehicle and go nuts. The settings are meh, considering what is offered now, but is reasonably ok. All-in-all the game is getting kind-of dated, but I hope that they improve on the formula in the game after BF1, with better settings and training.

So this game has been out for months and none of the problems have been rectified. Today 7/12/14 was supposed to launch a double xp boost in honor of the DLC launch ( that we shouldn't be paying for since this game is beyond repair).

Well guess what?

The double XP weekend hasn't launched and they cant figure out a solution.
How embarrassing and terrible.
I will never buy another Dice game.

Total losers from day one. Its almost a year later and still same problems with campaign save wipes and now this, the latest in never ending failure.

They should be giving us all the DLC for free.

Dice is greedy

bad company, bad customer support, overall bad game.