Battlefield 3 is cool, right?

I should probably grab it for my Icebox 360 sometime. And yes, that is the only platform I can play it on, sorry Pony Slaystation fans and Pea Sea guys.

Bump.

I've played roughly four-ish hours of the retail version so far, and it's so much smoother and refined when compared to the 3-month old build DICE was using for the beta. Yes, it was that old.

Anyway -- it plays (on 360) basically like Bad Company 2 did back in the day, but the capabilities of consoles ultimately drag it down. The Frostbite 2.0 engine is obviously not as significant as it is for you PC kiddies, because of the worse graphics card, processor, sound card, et cetera; the difference is not as noticeable because of the margin of capability for consoles. One very, very important issue addressed was the hit detection. If you played Bad Company 2, you would consistently and constantly get killed around solid corners by automatic weaponry whether it be from close to long range, and you would often find yourself emptying an entire magazine into Ivan the Medic's face, and he would mow you down with a big 'n' burfin' T88 even though you had an XM8 or a shotgun in your hands. The map design is relatively the same; the jets don't add much of anything in a 24-man server where there will be at most 2 enemy air vehicles, which will promptly 'splode into microscopic bits from the heat-seeking rockets engineers unlock oh so early. Unless you just want to troll infantry all day, jets aren't going to be doing much of anything. Improved destruction is cool and all, but the scale of maps on consoles is not large enough to make said improved demolition mechanics anything worth noting or freaking out over.

Side-note: Recons are still worthless. Spotting is not as significant of a mechanic to the point where an entire class should be devoted to providing reconnaissance; it just means more soldiers lying back and refusing to play the objective. Especially in 24-man servers where the player count is so small, it is critical that you are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible because your individual performance means more on a 24-man server than it does on a 64-man or 32-man server.

In summation, the game is just like a re-skinned version of Bad Company 2 with a few new "oh that's kinda cool" twists thrown into the mix. I still love the Battlefield franchise to death, but the amount of hype over the announcements of new/improved mechanics was only warranted for the PC side of things. Yes, yes, I know, the Battlefield series started on PC and is intended to be played on it, but that doesn't mean console users are any less irked by it.