Battlefield 4 Review (PC)

👤by Craig Farren Comments 📅26-11-13
Options and Campaign
For starters the options menu in the game is very detailed. There are a lot of graphical options to make the game look as good as it can be on your given machine. Notably there is a Field of View slider for the game which is always a welcome option to have. Field of View (FoV) is essentially how much of the surrounds the player can see on the screen at a given time. The lower the FoV, the less “peripheral” vision you have. Low FoV’s are fine for consoles because the player is usually sitting further away from the screen but on PC it can cause some players to experience headaches and motion sickness. What is on offer in terms of graphical customisation is very impressive and combined with some nice high resolution textures this should make the vast majority of PC gamers very happy.

Sound
Another impressive aspect of Battlefield 4 is the sound. The weapons and vehicles have impact and even the voice acting is of high quality. While each sound setting is great, it is hard to beat the sound that comes from the War Tapes mode. Enable it and hear the difference.


Campaign
As was mentioned earlier, Battlefield 4’s campaign follows on from the events in Battlefield 3’s campaign. The campaign is mediocre at best. The characters are boring, there’s nothing new, the story is unimaginative and the AI is brain dead. Many times I found enemies would stand behind a set piece of cover and pop their heads out only to shoot. Even when they had been flanked, they barely moved from the spot despite now being out in the open. I found it quite difficult at times to find the motivation to continue playing it.

The story is pretty weak, the level design is linear with short breaks and narrow corridors that seem to be there simply to break up the explosions. There are some more open areas but you can see the border’s so they still feel boxed in as a result and almost discourage you from exploring. This isn’t all bad though as it gives you lots of time to soak in the atmosphere and the scenery which is spectacular. The graphics in this game are really something to behold and not just at a distance either. Textures on most things up close are of a very high standard too and the skybox is phenomenal! However, water in this game is the stand out. There’s a section early on in the game where you run through a flooded corridor and the way the water interacts with everything around it, including light is as close to the real thing as you can get.

However, for some reason DICE has decided to limit the Field of View to 55 which can’t be changed. I mentioned earlier that a narrow FoV can make some gamers feel sick. That normally doesn’t affect me but I found myself feeling light headed after around an hour or so of play time. Another problem with the narrow FoV is that the gun model takes up most of the screen and can get in the way of the scenery, easily the most interesting aspect of the single player campaign.

If you plan on buying Battlefield 4 purely for the single player experience then I feel you would be wasting your money. In fact, the only reason to play the single player campaign is to unlock some weapons and dog tags etc so unless you have to have everything then avoid the campaign altogether. You won’t be missing anything.


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