Battlefield 4 is one of the two big shooter titles out on consoles and PC. I have been playing it on the Sony PS4 and I am breaking it into categories and some sub categories within the larger ones for ease of reading.
CAMPAIGN:
First I must say that I am not a person that normally plays campaign. In BF4 you unlock weapons just by playing the campaign. I won’t reveal which ones but I will say it’s a shotgun, pistol, assault rifle and a light machine gun. This campaign is VERY short. 6 missions to be exact. I guess it’s a little better that each mission is 20 minutes and some a bit longer. Again, I don’t like campaign so I only played to get the guns so I don’t mind how short it is.
MULTIPLAYER:
There are very large differences in the online play between the two huge shooter titles. The only bad thing I have been through on multiplayer is the amount of time it takes to rank up. It takes a while and I am currently only on level 14. So just imagine how long it would take to get way up there in rank.
Everyone knows Call of Duty is only small warfare with 6v6. BF4 in the other hand has what Call Of Duty has but it also has game modes that takes it way beyond. Here are a couple game modes I will be talking about.
TEAM DEATHMATCH:
TDM is essentially what Call Of Duty is. You just run around a smaller version of maps and just kill enemy soldiers till you have killed 100 as a team to be victorious. There are no vehicles present in this game mode. These games don’t last too long and is a good way to rank up on classes because you always see the enemy. You don’t respawn on solders, rather just wherever the game spawns you in the map. Being spawned near enemies is sometimes an issue but nowhere as bad as it is in Call Of Duty so I’ll take it.
RUSH:
This is almost the same as TDM but you actually have an objective. At any given time there are two places that you can plant a bomb on. Every person on the attacking team had a bomb. Once planted, you have to protect it from the defending team defusing it. It’s the defending teams goal to stop the attacking team from planting and blowing up the target. The attacking team has a number of “tickets”. Tickets are lives of soldiers. If you deplete the attacking team of their tickets before they can blow up the objective then the defending team wins. When the attacking team blows up a target, the map expands. The base of the attacking team moves up and there are two more objectives to blow up. This continues to three locations and after the third, the game is won by the attacking team. In this game mode there are some lighter vehicles and the occasional helicopters.
CONQUEST:
Conquest is the largest game mode in BF4. 32v32 adds a total of 64 players to this map. There are vehicles of all kinds including jets and helicopters. The point of this game mode is to capture the bases, capture flags, eliminate enemy soldiers, and bring the enemy’s ticket count down to zero. The best way to do that is to make sure you own a majority of the available flags on the map. Since this mode is so much larger, you may get less kills but also have the potential to get a lot more. Team work is very helpful in conquest. This brings vehicle warfare to the max.
COMMANDER MODE:
Being the commander is interesting. You are not physically playing as a person. You see the whole battlefield in a map form and from your teammates getting points you get to use UAV’s, EMP’s, vehicle drops, gunships, tomahawk missiles, etc… you still receive a score that goes towards your commander ranking and rank score. You also can kill people from what you call in but you can never die. If commander mode is used, it will help your K/D ratio. Very cool feature and glad the makers of BF4 made this mode.
DESTRUCTIBLE TERRAIN :
In most games when you’re behind any kind of cover you’re safe. The Frostbite 2 game engine from BF3 changed that forever. No longer was anyone safe. If you had the right equipment you could drop a whole building. BF4 uses the new Frostbite 3 engine, the upgrade to the Frostbite 3. For example, if you know someone is in this building laying down and aiming towards the only foot into the house, you can throw CQ on the outside and blow them to make your own door. You can drive a tank clear through a building, no problem. When a sniper is laying on top of a house, a rocket launcher can take what he’s laying on and make it disappear in a fiery explosion which will also probably kill the sniper while shaping the environment for the remainder of the game. The building and terrain never return to what they once were until you start a brand new game. What started as a nice city at the start of the match turned into many piles of rubble and building and roads with giant holes in them. This brought another whole level of realism to playing this video game that has yet to be matched or even challenged.
CUSTOMIZATION:
You can’t really customize your person, but the weapons you use, that’s a different story. You can put anything you can think of on all your weapons including your pistol. The classes you can use are Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon. With any class you can use some of the same guns like shotguns, carbine rifles and dedicated marksman rifles. Each class has their unique items you can use. Assault has a defibrillator to revive fallen teammates if done within a certain amount of time from death. Engineers have a torch that fixed vehicles. Support has a mirror system you can set up and remotely fire. Recon has a Portable Laser Designator that paints a target with a laser and allows a teammate in a jet or helicopter to fire missiles and hit what’s painted with the laser. You actually rank up each class individually and unlock things within that class accordingly.
VEHICLE:
There are many vehicles. Jeeps, armored personnel carriers with cannons on it, main battle tanks, boats, helicopters, almost anything you can think of. All vehicles can hold at least one other teammate and most have guns the passenger would use. The vehicle use takes this game way beyond any other first person shooter game out there.
There is just so much to do in this game. You can’t reach max level on rank and be done. No. There’s ranking up on rank, each class of vehicle and each gun class too. This allows you to not get bored being stuck in leveling limbo for a longer time then in other games. The realism this game has is amazing right down to the bullet drop. I would definitely recommend this game to others. Especially if you have the PS4 or Xbox One since those consoles have the 64 player ability..