Battlefield 3 Close Quarters review

Close Quarters is the first piece of Battlefield 3 DLC from DICE that offers something genuinely new for the franchise and it involves combat in smaller arenas with no vehicles and a brand new game mode. It features 4 new maps, 10 new weapons, extra dog tags to equip and new assignments to complete - that is once you pay to activate it after the compulsory 2.8GB update whether you want it or not. Conquest Domination is the mode most people seem to be playing where your squad and team must try to control and hold three flags around the maps and of course kill a lot of enemies along the way. You’ll notice that taking flags is is a much faster affair and that’s all in an effort to speed up the action. The chances are someone will happen upon you so you’ve got to cover each other’s backs at all times and make good use of your med-kits. DICE are also making a big thing about their HD destruction and it really is a lot of fun shooting everything in sight. It all explodes around you and there are a couple of Easter Eggs to find in there such as Commander Shepard’s Normandy on the bookcase in Donya Fortress and you may get a nice surprise if you decide to leap to your death from the top of Ziba Tower. This is my favourite of the four maps - it features a good mix of heights, interior and exterior locations with some great fire fights in corridors and vantage points between levels where you can get a bead on blissfully unaware enemies who are busy fighting their own fight in another room!

A new game mode I haven’t seen before but people tell me is similar to a mode in Counter Strike is Gun Master. This is raw shooting where you have to get kills switching between 16 different weapons with pistols, then rifles, machine guns and shotguns until eventually you unlock a knife to get the final kill and win the round. It’s an interesting concept but not one I see becoming as popular as the established modes such as TDM and Conquest.

Whether you feel these four maps are worth the $15 extra is up to you but if you fancy something different from the usual Battlefield 3 experience and you can put up with n00bs who like to spam the flags with C4 then it’s definitely worth a look. It gets 9 out of 10.

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