Before diving into the heart of Battlefield 3, I should address the window dressing: Namely its single-player campaign. As I mentioned in a preview several weeks ago, this portion of the game really is a round of terrorist whack-a-mole, just like Call of Duty. You'll face an unending wave of brain-dead suicidal terrorists until you manage to inch your way up to whatever checkpoint controls enemy spawning, take a few seconds' break, and do the whole thing all over again. It's not bad, but it is frankly uninspired. The gameplay itself is indistinguishable from COD, though the narrative trappings are a bit more down-to-earth. While this works well (in the sense that it's one of the few elements of the campaign that distinguishes itself from the game's competition), BF3's reach exceeds its grasp near the end of the campaign when the story takes a sharp left turn into crazy town. The campaign trades in its pseudo-realistic credentials for a finale straight out of an '80s action movie, with giant plot holes to match. The schizophrenic nature of the single-player is disappointing in light of the campaigns in the Bad Company spin-offs, which also take cues from COD but manage to maintain their own narrative voice.
