Well how you doing there Spectrumites (?)! Joe here, bringing you another FPS game to look at, and one of my favorite game series of all; Battlefield! Now, this isn’t a continue of the Bad Company series as many of you think, which I would personally love to see more of, but what can ya do? Don’t be so sad though, because BF is back with a new game due this autumn, with more guns, varying terrain, and best of all, more destruction than ever! Developed by EA’s Digital Illusions CE (better known as DICE), Battlefield looks like it’s pulling out all the stops this time around.

First, before we dive into the gameplay I want to take a look at what really makes BF different then other modern shooters out on the market (Call of Duty): The brand new Frostbite 2 engine, which has what many of us love: Destruction 3.0, which means blowing up more $#17 then you know what to do with! Almost everything is destructible in this game, so there’s nothing holding you back! For all of you CoD players new to the BF series, good luck camping behind a box, because as soon as someone finds you, your box won’t magically stay around for too long… And neither will you…

Alright, let’s talk continue on to the gameplay. REMEMBER: THIS IS NOT THE FINAL VERSION OF THE GAME, JUST AN OPEN BETA!!! Ehm, anyway… The gameplay is fantastic, the guns seem fairly balanced at this point with some minor annoying glitches that can be easily taken care of, and the visuals are just astonishing. Something to point out: I hope you don’t get motion sickness too easily, as your screen will be shaking with all the explosions and rockets and grenades and rockets and explosions and all that jazz.

In Black Ops, you have dolphin diving. In this game, you hav (sort of) more epic dolphin diving, and the fact that when you (awesomely) climb over stuff, you can still shoot your gun (epic-ally). Crawling on the ground is actually useful to this game, because without it you’d get your head shot off every five seconds.

The maps are pretty god dayum awesome and beautiful as well if I do say so myself. Being the open Beta, you get one map – Operation Metro, and it does not disappoint. At the moment, you can only play one game mode on it – Rush, which isn’t too bad (to compare it to Call of Duty, it’s Demolition x4). You have 4 different parts of the map; the Park, the Subway, the, uh, Subway Station, and outside again to the Streets. Once you destroy 2 bombs, you move onto the next bomb site again and again. The Defenders, luckily, have unlimited lives. The attackers, not so much; only 100 lives for the whole team.

Now for the inevitable downsides of the game!

To my knowledge, there are only one or two glitches, which is only being able to shoot through the ground and being able to get under the map. Now you’re probably thinking, “oh no! However could we kill them?!” Well fear not little Susie Q., because it’s not hard to shoot through the ground, just got to find a spot where you can see under the map (I’m the map, I’m the map I’M THE MAP!), and then unload your hell fiery shells of fury on them.

Now, the second thing that isn’t a glitch, but ANNOYS THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF ME is the recon kit. Look, I have nothing against snipers, but when 8/16 people are using snipers on your team, it gets a bit ridiculous. Since there are no replay-style kill cams, you don’t always know where they are. So you better find them before they shoot you (which will probably be the outcome). Another thing that I can’t stand is when you’re attacking and moving onto a new area and the enemy decides it’s a good idea to sit in the back of your spawn and unleash lead whenever you spawn there.

To be frank through since I don’t have too much time left to write this up, this game is amazing and it’s a free beta. What’s not better then that?

~ Joe

P.S: Sorry for the long post, just wanted to cover ever (epic) aspect of this (awesome) game. This is the part where you say, “cool story bro.”

Hey Activision, you mad bro?