Crunch Time

Now I know what you may be thinking. You might be thinking, “Man Crunch, who cares about single player in Battlefield? Multi-player is where it is at and aint nobody got time for single player!” I know and I hear you, however DICE and EA have made a big deal about how the single player is longer and better and more than what Battlefield 3 single player was. Also, we bought it and it is part of the game. DICE spent time making it and EA spent time marketing it and we spent money to have it, rather we play it or not. Also, for some, single player is still fun and important to others. For me it’s also tradition. I played the Bad Company 2 single player before multi-player and same for BF3.  So I decided to write up a review on the single player aspect of Battlefield 4.

**DISCLAIMER: There will be spoilers in the review so if you have not played or plan to play later you may not want to continue or skip down to the last paragraph for final thoughts. I played the PC version of BF4 single player.**

OK, still with me? Alright then. What I plan to do is break down the single player into several categories and give some brief descriptions as to why I think something is the way it is. At the end will be a little wrap up and my score of 1 to 10, because people like scores. 10 is the most awesome single player ever made.

Graphics – I wanted to get this easy one out of the way. The game looks amazing. The lighting, shadows, flashes, textures, water, all of it looks great. I played on low settings ( just because ) and it still looked amazing. It’s the Frostbite engine and it is going to make it look great. I really don’t think I need to say a lot more about the graphics.

Audio – Another easy section. The sounds are great. The weather, gun fire, water dripping, rocks tumbling, people yelling, it all sounds really good and you can tell if someone is far away or up close and what direction. The game is as good sounding as it is good looking.

Map Layout – The maps are very nicely done with a lot of detail and eye candy around. There is no longer this narrow corridor feel to the maps. You can flank very far right or left or go up the middle. You don’t feel like you are being herded along to finish the missions. There is even this one naval battle where we are in an attack boat trying to reach our base and I actually got lost at sea for a few moments and had to circle back around. You can climb up and down things and go around objects. There are narrow passages at times, but that is OK as you have to go through doors now and again and all doors are narrow passages.

Another little thing I liked is all the multiplayer maps are in the single player. Call of Duty 4 did that and it was fun to see the maps and how they changed them between the two modes. The maps are different between the two and its just pieces here and there. It’s just something I noticed and liked.

One weird downside were the enemy spawn locations. A number of times I cleared a bridge or room and then moved to find the area with enemy again, after I just checked it! There was also one time where I went too far ahead and came back and went onto a bride to the far end for cover. My AI guys finally got close enough that they triggered enemy spawns and the enemy was spawning right in front of me on that bridge. Luckily I had an LMG and just shot them down, like the dogs they were, as they spawned.

Enemy AI – Alright now here we go. I played the single player on normal mode and I found that it should have been easy mode. AI did a good job retreating, going for cover, throwing grenades, but a lot of times I found that they just stared at you and were shooting in a strange sequence at you. They would stop and look at you. A few times as my team was firing on them, I was flanking, and would see the AI spin in my direction to shoot at me. Also, it did not matter if you ran full speed at them or crept along as all the enemy soldiers were deaf, probably from all the shooting.

There was also this one scene where the AI had a stationary machine gun and as I killed the gunner, the next closest AI would stop shooting and run to man that gun. I just kept sniping the gunner until there were no more enemies and we could move on.

There were also some AI cheating where during a tank battle the same enemy tank actually shot at, and hit me, twice in rapid fire, at my tank. I thought that was uncool. Fortunately tank AI was also dumb.

Overall I really wished I started the single player in hard mode as it was probably more like normal.

Friendly AI – This mostly relates to your squad mates throughout the single player. You can give them attack orders and they actually follow them. They give suppressive fire and help keep enemy pinned down for you. It’s nice and helpful, even on the easy normal mode.

The downside to the friendly AI is the same as any other FPS single player, they just really don’t do much. They give cover fire and kill a few bad guys, but I think that is all by accident. Sometimes they open doors and sometimes they require you to open the door, which makes things very confusing. They also have a hard time keeping up with you. If you get too far ahead they seem to stop and I had to go back a few times to reset their little AI minds.

Secondary Friendly AI are mostly there as props. They just don’t seem to really fit in and they mostly ignore you. I don’t really know why that is, but if you play the single player you will see what I mean.

Polish – What I mean by this is how buggy or finished was the overall experience. Were their issues that too away from the game?

I feel there were some problems that were not too bad. The enemy AI tended to hide behind railing that you could see them through. They acted like it was solid, but it was just a little silly. There was also a problem in one scene where you were fighting Russian soldiers and they were coming at you in blue camo but as you got closer they were wearing green. It’s like they did a wardrobe change. It also seemed like they were Chinese that turned Russian, though I couldn’t be sure on that.

One scene that really got to me was during a mission where you had to get to a Major in the game and they demanded their cup of coffee from an officer with them and the guy went over and made a cup of coffee from a coffee machine that wasn’t there! He stirred with a spoon that wasn’t in his hand and there were noises for coffee, but just a cup and some make believe. Now that could have been due to my graphics settings, but I am sorry, you can’t put a low resolution coffee pot and spoon in the game? Makes no sense to me.

Relationships – This one is in regards to your squad and how you felt toward them. The jerks on our side were good and I hated their guts. I was also sad to see a few people die. I could tell right away though what was going on and who was who when it was supposed to be a secret. I knew the hurt guy was Jei and that Hannah was a CIA agent the second I saw them.

Then the fighting between Hannah and Irish about trust just kept getting old to the point I didn’t care if they both died. I mean Irish sent 396 refugees to the Valkyries with no idea who they were or what they were doing and yet he wont trust a CIA agent that was under cover because she could be working for the other side. What? She is deep undercover CIA! I *think* the CIA may have been able to clear that she was OK. Then Hannah was just a crybaby overall and “Why wont you trust me?” and “Please trust me!” Come on lady, you’re deep undercover CIA, act like it!

Then there is you…or me… I mean the character you play. So early on you become squad leader of Tombstone Company but I sure do not see that happening. It seemed more to me that making us the leader of the company was an after-thought and was inserted in a few scenes showing that. Otherwise, people ran around doing what they wanted and disobeyed your orders all the time. I think it would have been better to make you a second in command and move on.

Overall the relationships you have with the characters seem a bit forced and you don’t really connect to anyone. They just annoyed me too much and if I was Recker I would have just requested a transfer out of Tombstone Company.

Storyline – The story throughout the game was good, but not great. There is a lot of questions left unanswered and items just forgotten about.  Here are a few:

There was a large part of the first part of the game about getting hard drive intel off the USS Titan. A little while later everyone has forgotten about that and the hard drive disappears. I guess that was need-to-know information we didn’t need to know.

China get an EMP blast on it and no one knows why. It’s a question asked, but never answered. It’s assumed the Chinese did it to themselves as well as the US fleet in the ocean. That is one big EMP blast and makes no sense when you are about to go to war with the United States.

Dimitri Mayakovsky makes a return from BF3 and that was pretty awesome. He is the Russian guy that tried to stop the nukes in Paris and failed. You meet up with him in prison. Why is he in prison? No one knows! In BF3 he was a guy for Russia that got things done. Now he is in prison and decides to break out, easily I might add, and take Recker and the Tombstone with him. I think an opportunity was missed to tie some things together with BF3 and the story of BF4.

So I guess the overall idea of stopping a war between China, Russia, and the US is the goal and the jest of it, it just did not make since on how it went about as well as we kill a lot of Chinese and Russians in the entire process.

I did like how there are three choices at the end.

Conclusion – Overall the single player campaign is good. It is fun to play and looks and sounds great. It is a lot larger and the effects and wow moments are really nice touches. There is not a lot of connection with characters and plot holes throughout, but it is fun to play at least one time through, though I would set it to hard difficulty. Though DICE said they were making it longer, it seemed very short to me.

Overall I would give the single player campaign of Battlefield 4 a 6.5/10.

To give you an idea of my score; the BF3 campaign would be about a 6/10 and the Call of Duty 4 campaign an 8/10.