Benchmarking the system with some beautiful scenery rendered by the new Frostbite 3 engine

Here we have the latest long anticipated entry in the Battlefield series. Touting the latest and greatest Frostbite 3 engine developed by the awesome DICE. Although I'm sure the anticipation for most people was for the multiplayer. However, I do not give two shits about multiplayer but after hearing that this one had an actual campaign this time, I was keen to give it a go and see how it would run on my rig as it is touted to be a very visually impressive engine with beautiful vistas, great detail everywhere, super realistic character models and the series' signature feature, destructible environments including whole skyscrapers.

As you can see from the screenshot roll above, it is undoubtedly a very very pretty game. And it features a very realistically modelled Chalky White from Boardwalk Empire starring as the aptly named "Irish".

However, once you are beyond the eye candy, the game itself is a fairly standard FPS affair. The only differences from the usual formula are modifying loadouts of 2 normal weapons (pistols, rifles, etc) and 2 gadgets (mines, bombs, grenade launchers, RPGS, etc). You can also use a tactical scanner to mark and tag enemies and then send your team-mates after them. I haven't played a lot of the Battlefield games, but the do seem to err on the side of realism in the way that there is excessive weapons wobble and recoil and it is quite hard to actually get shots to land most of the time. You'd probably get used to this over time if you did a lot of the multiplayer, but just going through the campaign it took a bit of adjusting to.

The campaign itself revolves around an escalating war in the east between 'Murica, the Russians and the Chinese. You start off trying to escape with intel and VIPs, but it soon escalates into all out war and you have to ensure the survival of one of the last US ships in the region.

I don't plan to touch the multiplayer but the campaign was a fun, if fairly safe and run of the mill soldier romp. It did however create a real feeling of being in war with the chaos and cover being shot or blown to bits and not being able to see or hit shit most of the time. Give it a go if you're a fan of FPS or gorgeous visuals but if not, don't bother. But I still had fun going thorugh it.