Tweet
I want to see the skyscraper fall down, but I just keep missing it. One moment it's there, a gleaming, glass and chrome monument to capitalism right at the centre of Battlefield 4's Siege of Shanghai map. Then, inevitably, I get bored, killed, distracted, wander off in order to capture a flag, or - if I'm feeling particularly brave - commandeer a tank, and when I get back to check in on the towering building, well, the skyscraper's already gone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a complete failure: I caught the dust cloud once. A huge, billowing mass of debris and particles that seemed bigger than the skyscraper itself, and also intensely evocative of real-life disaster footage. But the actual moment it falls keeps eluding me. Once, I was manning a gun turret in helicopter, circling the colossal structure as it (I think) slowly started to tilt, wrenched itself off its foundations and collapsed into the waters below. Sadly, the turret I was manning was on the wrong side of chopper.
It's pretty frustrating, really. I want to see the Siege of Shanghai's centrepiece, a terrifically huge, destructible structure, fulfil its gimmicky raison d'etre. But of course, my repeated failure to see it happen also brilliantly sums up what Battlefield does so well: its jaw-dropping blend of scale and spectacle. In how many other games can an entire skyscraper fall over and yet somehow I miss it, every single time?
Read more…
More...