Image courtesy of popcultcha.com.au

You spawn in and start running down a winding empty city street you see a massive skyscraper in the middle of the map. You suddenly see the very last support holding up the building explode, you look up to see the building start to lean forward then fall over. There is now no skyscraper and there is now rubble everywhere.

You just witnessed something the developers of Battlefield 4 call “Levolution”. Something as small as a switch can change the whole map in DICE’s (Digital Illusion CE) latest installment of their Battlefield series.

This game adds a bunch of new items that DICE knew was going to help the player in their battles to come. They’ve added a load of new weapons such as the Ace-23 which is a Chinese designed assault rifle, and the SRR-61 which is an American designed long range sniper rifle. They’ve also added a lot of new attachments like the laser/light combination and the 2X magnifier to configure regular red dot sights into a 3X optic suitable for medium range. They’ve added lots of new camos to cover your guns and your vehicles and your person that include the Fire started camo that looks like a red type of camo on your person.

DICE has also added a lot of new assignments to unlock new weapons, camos, dog tags. An assignment is like a little mission they give you to do in a game to unlock the item it promised. They also added little care packages called “Battlepacks” which are earned when you level up enough times. There is three different types of battlepacks: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. When you first start to level up you get a bronze battle pack every three levels. Then after level 50 you’ll receive a gold battlepack every time you level up.

This is all just in the multiplayer of the game which is the selling point for most people in the Battlefield Series. The campaign (story mode) is a generic FPS(First Person Shooter) story as in someone is trying to blow up some place in America or just threatening the world in general. This game takes place in China which caused an uproar because people thought they were going to cause the third world war because of it. But like usual FPS stories you are in a special ops team that has to infiltrate some base and take it down. But not every mission is like that. DICE has lots of variety as in they use vehicles in their games unlike Call of Duty (their competitor). They have tank missions driving missions like I said lots of variety.

I played the Xbox 360 version of the game so the graphics were a turned down a bit. Because it was on the Xbox 360 the textures were blotchy and didn’t have very much detail. But they did have a HD pack you can download that will make the game load textures faster and the details look a lot better.

The weapons are fun to use and there is a lot more weapons than before. The multiplayer maps are the biggest they’ve ever been. That’s good for everyone else but for the last gen consoles the multiplayer is limited to only 24 players when the next gen and computers can do 64 players on the map. For the last gen they cut the maps down so they can better suit the 24 players instead of the 64.

Battlefield 4 for me is the coolest Battlefield game in the series so far. I would give it an 8/10 for the Xbox 360 version. If I played the PC or the next gen version I would easily give it a 10. But given that I only had the chance to play the current gen version I can’t give it a higher score because of graphical limitations. Other than that the game is really solid. The controls are easy to get and are easy to use. The multiplayer is a great experience and I think that everyone who likes multiplayer should try.

The current cost of the game is 29.99 at GameStop but it might cost a little more at other stores.