by: Michael Barnes

The opening retail salvo in 2011’s military shooter square-off has been fired, with the long-running Battlefield franchise aggressively groomed to lock horns with this year’s installment of Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, Modern Warfare 3. The good news is that the pre-emptive strike is hardly a dud. Battlefield 3, at least when it sticks to its core competencies, is a worthy competitor in the military shooter sweepstakes that is absolutely best-in-class in terms of multiplayer.

The bad news is that the commercial and creative product suffers when the developers stray too far from competency, attempting to match Infinity Ward’s gazillion-dollar formula bullet point-by-bullet point. It’s a piece of software that is split down the middle of its content. It’s a sometimes extraordinary multiplayer title pulling the dead weight of atrociously misguided and abhorrently soulless single-player and co-op modes that should never have seen the light of commercial release.

Most Battlefield vets are likely to treat the solo campaign like the salad bar at a Brazilian steakhouse anyway, but there is no excuse for such a high profile, big-budget game to have shipped with such a poorly designed, written, and paced example of virtually every single thing wrong with modern shooter design. Extremely linear levels with zero opportunity for meaningful tactics or creative solutions, difficulty spikes matched with poorly timed checkpointing, pop-and-shoot galleries of endless generic enemies bereft of any kind of intelligence, and numerous completely scripted non-interactive or on-rails sequences that take the action out of the player’s hands are all present and accounted for.

Ironically, the campaign’s biggest problems are inherited more from Call of Duty games than legacy Battlefield ones. Despite surprise nukes, a clone of Modern Warfare’s AC-130 gunship sequence, and shifting character perspectives, DICE does not have the Hollywood chops to go head-to-head with Call of Duty’s drunk-with-machismo, bombastic blockbuster camp. When the game heads in that direction on its rigid, unwavering path toward the doldrums, players would do well to head for the exit.

Despite whatever justification you (or EA’s executives) offer for the single player game’s presence, it’s disappointing that development resources were invested in it and the adjunct co-op mode without at least tailoring them to support the stronger multiplayer package—vehicle and weapon training missions with bots would have been greatly appreciated, for example. Instead of trying to meet Modern Warfare head-on along three fronts, they should have given all they’ve got to the squad-based multiplayer that has always been the biggest differentiator (and selling point) that Battlefield has over Call of Duty.

None of Call of Duty’s team-based modes are nearly as strategic, pitched, or thrilling as those in Battlefield 3. The signature Rush and Conquest modes are far more compelling than any of the game types the competition has to offer, and excellently designed, highly organic maps that synthesize wide open areas with long sight lines contrasting with tight terrain more suited to CQB give players much more to do than run around in constrained mazes, gunning for headshots. A veritable showroom of military vehicles for you to commandeer litters the maps, including jets, helicopters, tanks, and boats. Every vehicle and weapon in the game is upgradable with progression unlocks.