Brain Hood

If you’re one of the many people who unwrapped a copy of DICE’s wonderful Battlefield 3 this Christmas, you may well be feeling the late-to-the-party pressure right now; especially if you’ve arrived fresh from the haphazard Call of Duty boulevard. Battlefield 3 patently isn’t a lightning paced run-and-gun mash up, and because its matchmaking system isn’t shy about lumping newcomers in with hardened vets, the online learning curve can appear to be quite bewilderingly steep at times. Here are ten very elementary pointers to assist you…

1. Spot your enemies

The most fundamental suggestion, and always the first port of call on lists like this. By hitting the Spot command as soon as you have any enemy infantry or vehicle in your sights, you immediately make their location known to everyone on your team. If you’re playing Battlefield 3 correctly you should be spotting even as you’re about to pull the trigger on an opponent; that way even if they win the gunfight, you’ll highlight their location so that one of your teammates can go and finish them off.

2. Don’t stay in one place for too long

It’s always best to assume that you’ve already been spotted by a member of the opposition. Even if you haven’t, Battlefield 3 is rife with players who are either looking to flank you (in order to score a sly melee kill) or hog mortar stations that obviously thrive on stationary targets. Keep moving.

3. Make sure you’re in a squad

If Battlefield 3′s squad matchmaking tool isn’t working for you – and it can occasionally hang you out to dry in a permanent dead zone for some reason – try to join a squad manually via the pause menu. Your teammates act as mobile spawn points, and they’re utterly invaluable when you need to get back into the heart of the action quickly, however…

4. Don’t spawn on a squad mate when they’re in a gunfight

Unlike in Bad Company 2 – which granted you a brief spell of invincibility whenever you spawned on one of your squad – here you’re vulnerable as soon as you appear back on the field. If your squad mate is getting hammered by enemies next to an objective, it’s smarter to either wait for some downtime or spawn on another member of your team.

5. Experiment with each class

One of the most rewarding things about Battlefield 3 is the way that the entire trajectory of a match can shift after a series of well co-ordinated decisions, and the easiest decision that you can ever make involves changing your class to fit a given situation. If (for example) your squad are comprised of engineers and support troops and they’re getting bombarded by vehicles beside an objective, spawn as Assault infantry in order to drop health packs and revive downed members of your team.

6. Forget about your K/D ratio

Unlike in CoD it doesn’t pay to be obsessed with your kill-to-death ratio in Battlefield 3. There are a great many ways to rack up points here and scoring kills is rarely the most valuable one. So hanging back to score kills as a Recon sniper when you’re supposed to be attacking an objective in Rush, is usually a surefire way to get yourself booted from a proactive squad.

7. If you’ve got the time, reload twice

Standard assault rifles and carbines have thirty rounds in each clip, but if you hit reload again after reloading once, you’ll be given a single extra bullet. It’s inessential but you’ll be surprised by how often that final round delivers the kill shot that you so desperately need.

8. If you manage to place a spawn beacon in a perfect location as a Recon soldier…

…don’t re-spawn as Recon again after perishing or your beacon will explode.

9. Use suppressing fire

When you lay down fire around an enemy’s location – even if they’re in cover – it has a profound effect on their field of vision; if you’re at a safe enough distance it can render them basically immobile. And heavily susceptible to attention from other members of your team, provided (of course) that you’ve spotted the enemy for them first.

10. Don’t be shy about changing your weapon loadouts between spawns

Although it’s cumbersome at first, it should only take a couple of minutes for you to become adept at manoeuvring briskly between Battlefield 3′s loadout menu screens. On maps that switch between indoor and outdoor terrain such as Operation Metro, changing the features of your primary weapon (such as furnishing it with a heat-sensitive scope or adding the torch peripheral) can be helpful in the extreme. Similarly, equipping shotguns on the fly for close quarters skirmishes, and then adding mortars to your loadout when the scope of the battle fluctuates, is a technique that’s capable of giving you the upper hand almost immediately.

Prototype 2 is the sequel to the 2009 platinum hit Prototype. With it’s smash em’ up mentality and bloody fun gameplay, this video gaming news blog recommends that you should definitely check out Prototype 2, which is why we present to you Prototype 2, reviewed and analyzed.

Prototype 2 Reviewed

Presentation/Story

Set 14 months after the first game, Prototype 2 sets you up as James Heller, a distraught widower whose wife and child supposedly died by the hands of Alex Mercer (the protagonist from the first game). Although the opening is powerful and emotional, it takes a turn for the ridiculous for a majority of the rest of the game. Destroying Blackwatch, the enemy organization that developed the “Mercer virus,” becomes Heller’s sole task. Various pieces of information are revealed to you through “consuming” (basically eating) people, which allows you to see their thoughts. While I was intrigued by the way you received information, I was uninterested by the story after the first few missions. Even after the final missions reconnected me with the characters, by that point I honestly didn’t care. Although fun and full of swearing and blood, the story is unfortunately forgettable. The game is technically sound, and aside from aiming at enemies (which can be a pain), I had no issues with gameplay, saving, or movement.

*Also worth a mention is the Radnet pass, which gives you daily and weekly content that is free with a purchase of a new copy. While not necessary, it does add a lot of content to the game and it brings a sense of competition with your friends to beat their multiplayer mission scores.

Core Gameplay

Heller is infected with the Mercer virus, which allows him to turn into a monster of sorts and inflict copious and bloody-disgusting amounts of damage on the city and citizens within. Eating people and thus turning into them; ripping apart enemies with your tendrils; tearing apart other monsters with your claws….these “mutations” become so ridiculous that you often wonder what the developers will throw at you next. Adding to the fun is open-world aspect of the game, which allows you to explore pretty much every area of the map without barriers. Climbing buildings and gliding/flying across the city is simple and got me where I needed fast. While this was initially fun, I became bored quickly by the simplicity and repetitiveness of the game. Prototype 2 is surprisingly easy, and I almost never worried about dying (Because I didn’t). Facing a group of 40 enemies and several monsters was never really a threat since escape was simple and attacks were powerful. The game misfires where InFamous made a direct hit: challenging you in an open-world area to make you remember that not everything can be easily gained, despite its apparent availability.

 Final Thoughts

Despite the uninteresting story and easy gameplay, I had a blast with the game. If you can look past some of the ridiculous Robert Rodriquez-esque story missions and just have fun, then you’ll feel right at home with Prototype 2. That will be all for this once on this video gaming blog. Make sure that once you have been through this game, let us no whether we had reviewed Prototype 2 correctly or not.