Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is a game featured on Backseat Gaming and Top 5 Friday.

Game Information
Battlefield 3 is a 2011 first-person shooter game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. A direct sequel to 2005's Battlefield 2 and the eleventh installment in the Battlefield franchise, players to take on the personas of several military roles: a U.S. Marine, an F/A-18F Super Hornet weapon systems officer, an M1A2 Abrams tank operator, and a Spetsnaz GRU operative.

The campaign is set during the fictional War of 2014, and most missions occur as flashbacks on part of the interrogation of Staff Sergeant Henry Blackburn and do not occur in the order of events. The campaign follows four different player characters, primarily Staff Sergeant Henry "Black" Blackburn, a member of the U.S. Marine Corps 1st Recon Battalion.

Gameplay
Battlefield 3 features the combined arms battles across single-player, co-op, and multiplayer. It reintroduces several elements absent from the Bad Company games, including fighter jets, the prone position, and 64-player battles on PC. To accommodate the lower player count on consoles, the ground area is limited for Xbox 360 and PS3, though fly space remains the same. The game features maps set in Paris, Iran, Sulaymaniyah, New York City, Wake Island, Oman, Kuwait, and other parts of the Persian Gulf.

Multiplayer matches see players take on one of four roles: Assault (focusing on assault rifles and healing teammates), Support (focusing on light machine guns and supplying ammunition), Engineer (focusing on supporting and destroying vehicles) and Recon (focusing on sniping and spotting enemies). Several game modes are present, including Conquest, Rush, Squad Deathmatch, Squad Rush, and Team Deathmatch. More game modes are available through the purchase of extra DLC packs. The PC version is by default launched via a web browser from the Battlelog web site. A server browser is present in console versions of the game, however.

Reception
Battlefield 3 received positive reviews. It garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release and sold 5 million units within the first week of availability. A scene in which the player is prompted to kill a rat that is attacking their character was criticized by PETA.