Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 went on sale for half-off during Thanksgiving and Black Friday. I've played through the (thankfully) short singleplayer campaign and played several hours of multiplayer before I go back to the dorm and have to deal with their unstable connection again. So here are some of my opinions on the game, one tiny voice among a veritable sea of louder opinions with actual followings.
TL;DR? My opinion: BF4 is pretty good.

Singleplayer: Let's just get this out of the way.
It's no secret that these days, the multiplayer experience of modern shooter games is the most important (if not only) draw for players. I'm not going to hate on it too much, but I think anyone who played Battlefield 3's singleplayer campaign would agree that it left something to be desired. BF4's singleplayer is basically more of the same, with a few added bells and whistles to spice things up.

I went into the game expecting to answer some questions I had from the multiplayer. Why exactly were the United States, Russia, and China each fighting against the other two? Unfortunately for me, this question was left unanswered because the story of the game focused on the plight of the USS Valkyrie, an aircraft carrier inexplicably trying to fight its way out of enemy waters after picking the player character Recker and the rest of Tombstone Squad, who were retrieving some intelligence from Azerbaijan, also for some inexplicable reason. The gameplay is no more complex; the goal is the same throughout: shoot your way through hundreds of bad dudes to reach the objective. I gotta hand it to the developers, though, the gunfights were varied in scale and location and offered me chances to try out new playstyles. I liked that supply crates were placed throughout the levels, because I had a lot of fun switching to different guns to see how they differed. As far as pacing goes, there were some quiet moments to make the fighting seem more intense by comparison, but they could have used many more to make the story feel less rushed, which is something I dislike about a lot of shooters today.

And what is it with Battlefield games and killing off characters? Within the game's seven levels, four important characters and one important bad guy either died or went missing in action. There was never much character development to begin with, so there wasn't much of a chance to feel bad for these guys. The music and the sad, slow-motion death scenes tell you you should feel bad. But you only end up feeling kind of silly because you do not, in fact, feel bad at all. As a sort of storyteller myself, this lack of character development annoys me. It's almost cliche to kill off a character too early now.

Despite all this, I enjoyed the singleplayer experience somewhat in the same way I enjoy poorly-thought-out action movies- they're simple, blow-stuff-up fun. Now, enough of the singleplayer. It's time to hear about the real game!

The Conquest gamemode on the map Rogue Transmission

Multiplayer: The next big thing!
Battlefield 4 was marketed as the first-person-shooter to dominate all the competition. Seeing as the only competition with close to the same size of advertising campaign was Call of Duty: Ghosts, I think it was successful. It's not too far off from the experience of Battlefield 3, but there's something to be said about the freshness of BF4. If you remember the blue-orange filter that made the previous game look cold and lifeless, you'll be happy to know that this filter has been completely removed. I'm not saying it looks as lush and vibrant as Far Cry 3, but it certainly is nice to see some color for once. The classes have had a slight rework, as have some elements such as suppression and gun customization.

Suppression was a gameplay element introduced in the previous installment of the Battlefield series designed to emulate the terrifying effect that bullets and shrapnel whizzing by your head can have, but a lot of players hated how it was represented visually. If someone missed your face with a sniper round from 400 meters away, your screen would go all blurry as if your eyes had suddenly developed astigmatism. In Battlefield 4, being suppressed makes you aim like a drunkard but you still see as if you were sober. It's nice that it keeps your screen clear of obnoxious blur effects but I've found it's hard to tell if you're suppressed or not until you start missing targets from 10 meters away.

They've added a completely new gameplay element to try to encourage team cooperation: Commander Mode. This lets a player see the battlefield from above as a real-time strategy game, and order each squad of players around, give them supplies and airstrikes, and in general try to coordinate them to fight more effectively. I played as Commander for a few rounds of Conquest, and it was a lot of fun but was only effective when I was commanding a team that actually wanted to follow orders. It appeared that most players wanted to strike out on their own rather than stick to my planning, and there was a significant lack of feedback from the squad leaders on what exactly was going on down there. I think that as more people purchase the game and become acclimated to the Commander system, there will be more willingness to work as a team.

But what about the guns? Apart from the fact that you can now have four attachments to pimp out your favorite firearm and give it a wide variety of paintjobs, there isn't much of a difference in variety or mechanics. Pull the trigger and bullets come out the front, it's not that complicated. Many of the guns carried over from Battlefield 3, and still have almost the same statistics. So if you liked shredding people in half with an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon in BF3, your wish has been granted because it hasn't gone anywhere in BF4. Personally, I think the guns look and feel better in BF4, from the amazing sound design to the modernized Chinese and Russian weaponry.

Should you buy this game?
Give it a bit of thought first. Read some reviews. Watch some videos of it, because this game has a lot of flaws. For one, at least on PC, there are a lot of bugs that DICE didn't fix before release, so you'll have to deal with crashes and glitches until they're patched. If you were looking for a game that takes the gaming industry in a new and exciting direction, don't get this game. It's a very solid first-person shooter, but in the end it's nothing more. I am having just as much fun with it as I had with BF3, so think of Battlefield 4 as the same sort of experience, but fresh and new again.

P.S. Here's a screenshot I accidentally took at the moment of being shot in the face:

It's like chucking a rock into a flatscreen TV!