I've played a lot of DICE's Battlefield over the years. Admittedly, I wasn't there from the start. World War II shooters bore me—Hitler's firearms were totes imba, so if the games are authentic, the Germans get all the good guns, and if they're balanced, they might as well not be set in World War II—so I never played Battlefield 1942. But I sunk hundreds upon hundreds of hours into Battlefield 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3.

What's the draw to the Battlefield series? For a first-person shooter, the gameplay is rich and varied. It's class-based (after experimentation in past titles, the franchise now seems to have settled on four: the combat medic assault class, the anti-armor engineer, the sniping recon, and the machine gun-toting support), which means that everyone can find something useful to do, even if they're not the best shot. It has a handful of game-modes, with the objective-based Rush, my favorite, particularly emphasizing its squad-based teamplay. It has an extensive system of persistent ranking and unlocks, to ensure that there are plenty of goals to aim for. It has a wide range of vehicles, on land, sea, and in the air.

But more than anything else, Battlefield has enormous scale. Rich, sprawling, varied maps. Maps that take minutes to cross on foot, capable of sustaining multiple simultaneous skirmishes or huge multi-vehicular 32-on-32 battles. And in the newer games of the series, these maps have become important participants in the battle in their own right, with destructible buildings and scenery that mean that the structure giving you cover and concealment one second could betray you the next, crushing you beneath a pile of rubble.

And these enormous, complex maps have always looked gorgeous, thanks to DICE's Frostbite engine.

My love of Battlefield has, however, always been tempered. When they have worked, the Battlefield games have provided unrivaled first person shooter experiences. But they haven't always worked. Regular crashes and hangs have been recurring features of the series, and the games have often been just plain buggy.

For as long as I played Battlefield 2, for example, it had a bug known as the "red name bug." A simple thing: people on your team would appear to have a red indicator above their head, denoting that they're an enemy, rather than a blue indicator, denoting that they're friendly. Harmless enough—unless the server had friendly fire enabled, in which case I'd be blowing away teammates thinking that they were the bad guys. For a time, Battlefield 3 had a bug where each pellet of M26 shotgun would do as much damage and have as much range as the bullets of the assault rifle it was paired with. It turned what should have been a niche-use, high-damage, short-range weapon into a long-range, unstoppable death machine.

So throughout my Battlefield career, I've been perplexed. The same company, DICE, that has managed to construct this fantastic engine and rich gameplay has also shipped glaring bugs and occasionally rampant imbalance issues and then struggled to fix those issues quickly, if at all. How one company could do both was never clear to me, and the result is that while I've loved Battlefield, I've also hated it, ragequitting in disgust as the game crapped out for no good reason again.

As a result of this history, although I didn't get to play the Battlefield 4 beta (my gaming PC was in US customs at the time), I had a good idea of what to expect going into the game. With Battlefield 4, DICE has delivered, in spades.

Although the multiplayer game is the main point of the series—early Battlefield games were only multiplayer, with a single-player game only coming later in the series—I'm going to make a quick detour into the single player game first.

The unloved single-player campaign

I realize it's not at all fashionable these days, and I fear that sooner or later game companies will just abandon them entirely, but I enjoy single player first person shooters. Sometimes these games try to be thoughtful, story-driven pieces, such as the enjoyable, albeit flawed, BioShock Infinite. Other times they are nothing more than action flicks. Just as there is a warm place in my heart for Jason Statham movies (he's surely overdue for an Oscar), there is room for military shooter single player campaigns.

It's a great shame, then, that the Battlefield 4 single player game is not very good. Mechanically, it's fine enough. It has one or two nice ideas. You unlock weapons as you progress through the single player by finding them scattered around the maps. You can then pick the weapons you want to use at various weapon crates scattered throughout the game, so if there's a particular gun you like, you can use it whenever you like.

There's also a spotting mechanism, wherein you can pick out enemies with some IR goggles and then direct your cast of NPCs to attack them.

In principle, at least, I like both of these systems. I think they give a taste of the multiplayer game—with its classes, weapon unlocks, and squads—while still respecting the structure of a checkpoint-based campaign.

The missions are generally mediocre. They strive to tick the right boxes—buildings blowing up, troops jumping out of planes, helicopters crashing, that kind of thing—but they lack any real variety. There are no missions where we're alone, for example; we always have a squad (though its composition occasionally varies). There are no missions where we do anything other than go in, guns blazing. There are no escort missions, which in some ways is good, because they're almost invariably terrible, but the change of pace would have been welcome.

The missions are also unbelievably linear. The multiplayer aspect of Battlefield is anything but linear. The huge maps, vehicles, and destruction mean that there are almost always multiple ways of getting from A to B, and the best approach will vary depending on the flow of the battle. That characteristic of the game is completely missing from the single player.

Random ideas flung haphazardly together

And then there's the story. Oh boy.

So what's wrong with it? I'm going to do my best to spoil the story, but with the understanding that I'm still not entirely clear on what the story was, so if you care, I guess you'll have to stop reading (NB: you shouldn't care).

It's important to know that the story is poorly communicated and poorly written, so if things don't sound like they're making sense, it's apparently what the authors intended. The basic setup, as I understand it, is that a Chinese admiral wants to do... something. It's not entirely clear what. We know that he assassinates liberalizing, progressive politician Jin Jie, who's thought of as the country's next leader. We discover that the Russians support the admiral in his bid to do whatever it is he wants to do. So it's pretty clear that he's some kind of traditionalist hardliner who wants to rule China. It's just the other stuff he apparently does that I can't fathom.

You play as Recker, member of the gun-toting, ass-kicking Tombstone squad. You're the standard mute character with no control over the action, being continually directed to do pretty much everything, from opening doors to planting C4 on tanks to shooting down helicopters. Recker is the new Ramirez.

The opening level of the game sees Tombstone squad fleeing Baku, Azerbaijan, after securing some piece of intelligence. Along the way, you'll meet the short-lived squad leader Dunn, the idiotically disobedient and childish Irish (though the game leaves us in no doubt that his heart is in the right place), and the utterly forgettable and entirely devoid of character, or even the crudest of characterizations, Pac. Irish may be an annoying moron, but at least he's a predictable one-dimensional character. Pac doesn't even manage that much. I don't even understand why they gave him a name.

We go to Shanghai to rescue a VIP and his CIA handler, Hannah. For some reason the admiral attacks Shanghai with an EMP. Or perhaps he's attacking the Pacific Fleet directly (or at least part of it), which happens to be a couple of miles off the Chinese coast. I figure this would be utterly idiotic, because if an American aircraft carrier got attacked like this, I'm pretty sure the US would retaliate, but it happens, and it's apparently consequence-free. Then again, I suspect that if American ships were parked so close to Shanghai, the Chinese would have torpedoed them anyway.

Either way, we rescue the VIP and get him to our boat, but because of the EMP, the ships are mostly crippled, dead in the water, and without any comms. Conveniently, that's except for our ship, the Valkyrie, whose engines were running at the time of the EMP and so is still mobile.

At this point it's imperative to get the VIP to safety. The logical, obvious thing to do would be to go to a nearby friendly place, such as South Korea or Japan, and then stick him on a plane to the US. If that wasn't an option for some reason, the next best bet would surely be to steam across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor. It's 4,939 miles as the crow flies, and apart from having to take a slight detour to avoid crashing into Japan, you could take an optimal great circle route.

But no. Apparently the preferred route is to go to the Suez Canal. Never mind that this requires taking our crippled ship thousands of extra miles, and no matter that it means navigating potentially hostile waters around the Saudi peninsula. That's where we're going. There might have been some blink-and-you'll-miss-it explanation in the game, I don't know. But it struck me as basically absurd.

Along the way you stop off at Singapore to blow up an airfield. Why do the Chinese have an airfield in Singapore? Who even knows. They probably invaded, but I feel sure that this would be treated as a major international incident, and that our crippled ship wouldn't be the only thing there to take them on. Because Dunn is dead, Hannah joins your squad. This causes Irish to be basically a jerk to her, claiming that she's untrustworthy for literally no good reason. There's nothing she's done to provoke his hostility. He's just rude and dismissive. But his rudeness appears to be vindicated at the end of the mission when, surprise, Hannah turns traitor and you get knocked out and captured by Chinese troops.

You wake up in a prison in the Kunlun Mountains in China. Sharing your cell is a radiation-scarred Russian, who for some reason speaks English, and together you break out of your cell and escape the prison. In theory, we're meant to recognize the Russian as a character from Battlefield 3's story. If you remembered who he was, then all I can say is, you were paying more attention than I was. While escaping from the prison, you're joined by Hannah, who's... friendly now. She only turned traitor as a cunning ploy to uhhh...

Yeah I dunno. It doesn't make sense. Her apparent betrayal didn't protect the team. It's not as if we needed to somehow infiltrate the prison to obtain some important MacGuffin or anything like that. It's just a place for us to fight our way out of. I guess that the hope was that we'd think "Oh wow, Irish was right all along!" but since this kind of fake double cross is such a damn cliché, we don't. We just think that Irish is a jerk.

From there, you fight your way through China until you team up with some American troops (yes: American troops, holed up in China), blowing up a dam as you go and then getting back to the Valkyrie, which has just reached the Red Sea or thereabouts. Along the way you learn that the VIP is none other than Jin Jie, who hasn't been assassinated after all.

In the final mission, you rescue Jin Jie from the clutches of the admiral's troops. The game manages another absurdity here; Jin Jie insists that instead of killing enemy troops that are about to storm the room you're in, you let them see him and hear him. The troops immediately recognize him and become loyal to him; they stop attacking and become friendly. Not one of the troops attacking is loyal to the admiral. They all immediately swear fealty to Jin and start radioing their colleagues to tell them the good news.

Troops on the admiral's ship apparently don't care, however, and they're continuing to attack the Valkyrie. You go with Hannah and Irish to blow it up, but the detonators fail, so you have to choose either Hannah or Irish to sacrifice themselves and blow it up manually. Since Irish was far and away the more annoying of the two, I chose him, without a moment's hesitation.