Battlefield 3 is the new benchmark online FPS

In the years between BF1942 and Battlefield 3 DICE has persisted with its particular flavour of multiplayer, honing and tweaking it to fit onto consoles while still nurturing the hardcore PC community. Like many titles in recent times, the single player experience is seemingly defined by the hardware requirements of consoles, but the multiplayer is truly sublime, leveraging the PC wonderfully to deliver an engrossing combat experience that is unrivalled in the current generation of shooters.

Much as we expected, the new Frostbite 2 engine is the star of the game – but not neccesarily in the obvious ways. There is no doubt that BF3 running at Ultra detail settings is the prettiest thing to ever smear itself across a monitor, and the sound is pure ear candy, but what has impressed us even more is just how well DICE puts the engine to work to improve gameplay and its mechanics.

This is pretty apparent in the single player campaign, which is the kind of corridor shooting experience that we have been trained to expect from the big military blockbusters. It is clear that the scope of singleplayer has been defined by consoles, necessitating an experience that doesn’t leverage the grand environments seen in multiplayer. At every turn there seems to be visual showmanship, from harshly lit corridors that show off the shadowing, to setpieces showing off the destructible environments that are core to the Frostbite engine.

Single player is fun, but clearly demonstrates where DICE’s strengths lie. The story and characters are pretty forgettable, areas are marred by infinitely spawning enemies, and the scripting gets in the way of the experience. Making a return are doors that are incapable of being opened until your teammates arrive, annoying quicktime sequences (oh look, my teammates have stepped back and let me lead, incoming enemy jumping from shadows in 3, 2, 1…) and brutal and repeated deaths. It is an enjoyable experience nonetheless, and is incredibly pretty at times, but it is not the reason to get this game.

You want Battlefield 3 for the multiplayer. Not the single player-esque co-op, but the fully-fledged 64 player battles that the game delivers on the PC. In these matches you choose from one of four classes – Assault, Engineer, Recon and Support. Each of these has access to specific weapons types, and secondary abilities.

DICE has smartly made the Assault class a medic, giving it the ability to drop health packs. The engineer packs a rocket launcher and the ability to repair vehicles. Support is able to resupply ammo, and focuses on machine guns, while the Recon guys can be found loitering in far away places gazing down the scope of a sniper rifle.

Your character can choose any of these per round, or jump in a free vehicle. Not only do all your actions level your soldier, but classes and vehicles level depending on the amount of time you put in to them. Weapons are similar, with each kill taking you closer to the next modification. This does mean that new players are in for a rough time until they gear up a bit (not having a scope is painful early on), but it does provide a massive amount of flexibility in the way in which you level.

All of this data can be accessed via Battlelog, the web-based hub for the game. While BF3 requires Origin on the PC to install, all the game related features, including server browsing, friends lists and voice comms are controlled via Battlelog. It is an initially confusing system if you’re used to in-game browsers, but it soon becomes quite user friendly, with nice touches like being able to peruse your unlocks while the game connects to servers. It didn’t take us long to fall in love with the system, despite our initial worries. Even better, is that following the serious browser and stability issues at Bad Company 2’s launch, Battlefield 3’s launch window has been – at least in our experience – as close to flawless as we could want.

Once you find a server in Battlelog and join the game the real magic begins. It quickly becomes clear that the gameplay isn’t just about shooting the enemy in the head. Tactics like suppression, spotting for other players and defending positions all contribute to your score, and while you will initially spend a lot of time dead BF3 has that amazing knack of keeping the game enjoyable through all of this. There are just so many ways to enjoy the game, from laying down a curtain of fire to suppress enemy positions so that your teammates can advance, to thrilling sniper duels, to simply spotting... and it all delivers XP.

And of course, Frost Bite 2 is even better with 64 other players. Effects like lens flare level the playing field against snipers very effectively, and we’re already finding far less Recon players than in any other Battlefield game. The destructive environments mean gameplay can change from minute to minute, and the particle effects add a frenetic sense of a clear, present and constant danger as shrapnel, debris and flame flies across the map. At Ultra settings, you’ll likely be wanting a current gen graphics card, but there’s a lot of scope for tweaking the game to run on older hardware; thankfully, on PC the video settings are fully fleshed out.

On our test rig, powered by a Core i7 2600 and a 5970 video card, plus 6GB of RAM, we get solid frames with only three of the settings bumped down. And yes, this is a game we’ll upgrade for – it’s simply that good.

Battlefield 3 is a truly remarkable game. Not only is it the new Crysis in terms of visual fidelity on the PC, but it packs an incredibly enjoyable multiplayer experience under the shaders. Single player is somewhat meh, but the multiplayer more than makes up for that pretty yet hollow experience. Not only has DICE made the prettiest game of all time, it is insanely fun to boot.