Where Battlefield 4 most brilliantly distances Battlefield 3 is in its map design. Counter-kills are an incredibly satisfying way to put down someone who wasn’t careful enough to wait for you to turn your back, and an interesting new tactical layer to what used to be a panic button. Stabbing at someone from the front, however, gives them a brief opportunity to reverse the attack. Stealth attacks from behind, as usual, guarantee a new set of dog tags for your knife-kill collection. Elsewhere, one of the smallest departures is the most significant, at least for knife-fighters. Accounting for bullet drop as a sniper – which involves more mental math now thanks to adjustable zero-targeting ranges – remains one of the most fulfilling things about Battlefield’s skill-based gunplay. More than anything, and despite its new features, Battlefield 4 most closely resembles Battlefield 3, if only for the similar feel of its physical, scary weapons. One of my favorite maps – Golmud Railway, where DICE’s designers take expert advantage of its enormous scale, several scattered control points, and aerial warfare – has a mobile control point in the form of a train. Fighting for control is an entertaining, mobile struggle. Knocking out supports to topple houses and collapse roads isn’t quite as exciting as a skyscraper sinking into a bay, but it’s great for keeping enemies out of troublesome spots or creating a crawl space to hide in. In addition to those major destruction events, DICE has rediscovered a major factor that defines Battlefield’s greatness among other modern military shooters: finally, for the first time since Bad Company 2, teams can tear down most simple structures. Hunting bomb carriers as the sun rises means they’re increasingly vulnerable as the match goes on – the faster they arm control points early on, the easier their lives will be later. Diminished visibility as a typhoon assaults an island might mean changing your favorite red-dot sight for something that sees in the dark. If you're smart about it, you can take advantage of most maps’ effects, though – including some of the less magnificent, more subtle things. Most offensive of all, a flooding town’s rising water levels significantly inhibits mobility – and is especially frustrating if you’re in a fierce tug-of-war for a base-busting bomb in the terrific new Obliteration mode. A toppled tower actually makes it irritating to navigate an underground area, and manually detonating underground explosives from a terminal takes you away from the action in one of the biggest maps.
A smashed satellite at the center of a map becomes a minor inconvenience for vehicles, for example. Often, triggering the event takes minutes of work, and the result is sometimes superfluous, feeling more like DICE’s obligation to include it in every map rather than something that achieves anything of value.
That said, not every instance of awe-inspiring devastation is as excellent as these. Coming out on top because your new strategy adapts to and harnesses the new level design is even more satisfying than the XP and armory unlocks you earn along the way. Even after the magic and surprise is gone, teams always need to be prepared for how they’ll react when a crumbled tower keeps their tanks out of enemy territory. Large-scale destruction like this changes the fundamental layout of an area, forcing combatants to react intelligently and change their strategies and loadouts on the fly. Half a hotel disintegrates, exposing a control point and depriving snipers of a valuable perch. A dam bursts, crushing everything below with metric tonnes of rubble and floods. What we've never seen before in a Battlefield game is the drastic, and often inconsistent way Battlefield 4 forces its two massive 32-player teams to adjust to evolving environmental conditions. What I didn’t anticipate was DICE getting in its own way. Most of the time, Battlefield’s unpredictable, vehicular-based competitive combat is predictably excellent. It retains the defining DNA of Battlefield 1942, re-adopts Battlefield 2’s brilliant Commander mode, and exaggerates the destruction of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, all while embracing the realism, class reorganization, and gorgeous graphics of Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 is a greatest hits album of DICE’s multiplayer first-person shooter legacy.