This is an interesting review by the Under The Radar Blog of Military.com as writte by Sean Nack... "How much realism do you like in your entertainment? For me, it’s a 'you got peanut butter in my chocolate' situation. There’s a balance to be struck, a form of realistic whimsy. Take, for example, the sandbox. A child can play in the sandbox with an exact replica of a John Deere 75-D excavator (oh yeah, I looked it up), and build a moat for a wizard’s castle. He’s taking a realistic tool into an imaginative environment that allows him the freedom to do whatever he wants.

Battlefield 3 (BF3) works in much the same way. BF3 is a first-person shooter, yes, but it’s an FPS that allows you to hop into a tank, a jet, a RHIB, or an attack helicopter without even attending an operator’s course! So in that sense BF3’s realism takes a distinct nose-dive, but it does so in service of a much broader gameplay experience. Unlike MW3 (with which we are forced to compare BF3, even though trying to draw a parallel between the two is like trying to find common ground between apples and an entire Thanksgiving dinner), there’s more to the game than running and gunning through a collection of tight semi-urban environments. There’s something to be said for that form of gameplay; MW3 is fast-paced, frenetic action that can’t be topped as far as pure, adrenaline-pumping action goes, but BF3 goes much, much deeper."

Read the full review here.