![]() Later on you get to take aim at ground targets, a duck hunt dressed up in a Tom Clancy uniform. Your job is to point and shoot at the enemy fighters as the plane goes through its scripted banks and rolls. It's also almost entirely non-interactive, and leads into a mission that starts disappointing and only goes downhill from there. ![]() It's amazing stuff, a true work of digital theatre, offering immersion and realism beyond anything we've seen in games before. And then you're off, catapulted off the deck so fast that you physically feel the dip in your stomach as gravity tries and fails to pull you down. You can see the scuffs and scratches on the canopy, the cloud-dimmed light sparkling on the ocean. You go through the pre-flight routine, looking left and right to check the flaps and stabs. Climb into the cockpit, lower the canopy and you shrink in your seat, the claustrophobia almost unbearable. Then a door opens and suddenly there's the roar of the sea, wind and spray fills the air, and it's so tangible you can almost taste the salt. The clank of boots on metal floors echoes beneath the sickly glow of electric lights. You walk through the bowels of an aircraft carrier, being briefed as you go. Having hopped into the story of a completely different and almost entirely irrelevant character (another hand-me-down from COD's fractured campaigns), we're treated to a remarkable experience that uses the first-person perspective to the full. No level illustrates this straitjacket design ethos better than Going Hunting, the third mission and one that introduces jets for the first time. "Friendly fire will not be tolerated" admonishes the game. That's if they're not barging you out of the way because you've strayed into their rigid path, or wandering into your line of sight as you take a shot. It's yet another military shooter that casts you as a follower, not a leader, your way ahead constantly dictated by AI partners who tell you exactly what to do and when. Yet even here, the game doesn't trust the player to experience its lavishly designed corridors correctly. Things pick up once the game starts properly, and we find ourselves in a flashback to Iraqi Kurdistan. Press B to dive out of the train window, then hammer A to climb onto the roof. Press the right trigger to display a non-interactive animation of our hero, disgraced marine Sgt Blackburn, beating up an enemy. It opens, ominously enough, with a quick-time event. Only tangentially related to the multiplayer side of the game, and more concerned with the sort of Hollywood heroics that propelled Activision's franchise to the top of the tree, it's remarkable just how badly it sells the Battlefield brand. ![]() Nowhere is this more obvious than in the single-player campaign, which rather appropriately occupies a disc all to itself on the 360. If Call of Duty is Bridget Fonda, then Battlefield just became Jennifer Jason Leigh. In retooling DICE's military multiplayer favourite as a direct competitor to reigning heavyweight champ Call of Duty, EA has constructed a package that echoes its rival in so many ways it's downright eerie. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the folks at Infinity Ward and Treyarch must be feeling pretty special right now. ![]()
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