Battlefield 4 Review: A Bug-Ridden Modern Military Crash-Fest

Battlefield has been a beloved series since Battlefield 1942 took us out to war on the PC. Many gamers, including myself, were excited when the 4th installment of the game was announced to have an October 29th release date. The game quickly moved into open beta where the mechanics of the game were great for that stage of development.

Unfortunately, that is the stage where all development seemed to stop. 

Let's talk about Campaign Mode

Campaign mode started out promising but quickly turned into a bug ridden mess. You are consistently being pushed out of the way by many non-player characters in the game when they are speaking their dialogue. Your character, Recker, encounters many spots of being completely pinned down in an area or being thrown into the ocean--like in the South China Sea Mission. The worst thing about these bugs is that you really can't do anything but restart the entire mission. After you are forced to restart missions over and over, you will definitely get frustrated with the game--just like I did! 

Just a small example of what I am talking about: let's look at an instance of bugs when I was finally able to play through to the last mission. My game crashed on that last mission and the game didn't autosave any of my progress from the previous checkpoint.. Which was in Mission 3--a total of four missions prior. 

Overall, when you are able to get through the game, the missions themselves seem a little too easy for my liking. Although it is true that I played through on the standard difficulty, I was able to beat the game without dying more than once. And that was when my game froze and somehow the enemy still got me. The guns feel too light and the vehicles feel as through they are toy trucks and tanks. 

Multiplayer...Where do I begin?

From day one, the multiplayer had connectivity issues and crashes that prohibited some people from even being able to play the game. I was one of those people. It took up until the first patch was released in order for me to open a game and play at all, let alone finish a match. 

It was, and somewhat still is, almost impossible to play Battlefield 4 for more than fifteen minutes without finding a bug, your game freezing, or your game crashing. I stopped trying to play the multiplayer component recently because it seems as though I get through one match and then my game crashes. Also there is a chance that your XP won't be saved. Many times I have finished a match and ranked up only to find out next round that I had gone back to my previous rank.

Battlefield 4 is beyond frustrating for PC, Xbox 360 and One, and PlayStation 3 and 4 players alike. Most players are having connectivity issues on all the consoles and are experiencing the same kind of issues as I faced on the PC version. 

The saving grace of this game is that when you can play it, it is an excellent shooter despite some mechanics that I am not fond of. But overall Battlefield 4 needs to make extreme improvements over the next couple of weeks to be anywhere near the hype that the game received just before its release date. 

My advice: Buy the game if you see it on sale somewhere or wait a couple of weeks before you buy your copy and either way you go, definitely don't play the game until there is a major update, because odds are you won't be able to play it anyways!