Battlefield 3

Yeah I know, I said I wasn't going to get it.

What can I say, I've been so very bored. Waiting for MW3 has been driving me positively insane, and there are only so many times you can play the MW2 campaign over and over.

Granted, thanks to a nice trade-in at EB, Battlefield 3 didn't actually cost me anything. As it turns out, that's just as well, because if I'm being honest, I'm not really having the time of my life with it.

That's partly my fault though, because as you know I'm not really a multiplayer gamer these days, so it was arguably pretty stupid of me to invest in what is primarily a multiplayer game.

They have gone to the trouble of creating a single player campaign this time around, along with a couple of missions that you can actually coop with a friend, so you could argue there's now something for everyone.

I must be about 2/3rds of the way through the campaign, but I'll admit that I'm really not enjoying myself all that much with it.

I'd have to say the biggest problem I have with it is that the game's AI completely sucks. For both the bad guys, and also my teammates.

Teammates have not been programmed to adjust to what you're doing atall. A number of times I've actually been pushed out of a cover location by an AI teammate who has just decided that it's a spot he will be occupying instead.

This complete indifference also includes running out in front of you while you're busy shooting at bad guys.

Speaking of which, most of the bad guys will pretty much only ever shoot at the player. I've completed a number of escort quests during the game, and I've lost count the number of times they've focused just on me.

Basically, each and every play is a setup, and a rather obvious one at that. We advance to a certain area. Bad guys show up. They take cover, my teammates take cover.

At this point, they could all shoot at each other until the cows come home for the difference that it will make, because advancement is only ever made when the player caps all of the bad guys. A number of times, it's actually been obvious that my teammates aren't even really actively trying to kill anyone in particular. The job's always up to me.

And that's pretty much how it is. That ever constant reminder that you're just playing a videogame, it breaks the immersion every time. Takes you right out of it.

I don't know how else to describe it, and it's such a pity, because it's a great, great engine. Nothing else looks or sounds quite like it, and I should be having the time of my life.

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