The only thing missing are The Numbers. Everything else, from the gameplay to the barbarous interrogations, are straight from the Black Ops playbook. It’s easy to understand the motivation: no amount of innovation is going to garner over a billion dollars in revenue. For that, a developer needs to not only understand what has worked before, but ape it so completely that every last dollar can be wrung from its bloodied carcass. Infinity Ward and Treyarch have divided the spoils amongst themselves for the last five years, but blood in the water has now drawn EA Dice to the yearly feasting.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say you spend maybe a quarter of Battlefield 3 actually doing anything; the rest of the time, you’re just a passive onlooker. Having so ably reconstructed emotive scenes from Hollywood and history, the problem isn’t so much that Dice lack the cinematic nous to make their storybook entertaining, but that the game fundamentally fails as an interactive entertainment. That lie is now three generations well-worn. As before and ever since, we journey from embattled market square to fixed gun placements, through elaborate scripted sequences and the final push for a departing Osprey. Missions that adhere firmly to the established rhythms of the genre reveal not a single surprise; no tangible evidence of human spirit. Battlefield 3 was seemingly conceived in cynicism, all the better to sell to a desperately undemanding consumer.

I suppose we should be thankful there isn’t a snow level.

Don’t confuse all that with bad entertainment. Battlefield 3 is a thrill ride, after all. How could it not be? The formula endures because it works, and all Dice had to do was make it pretty and let it run amok. On both counts, they succeed. The Frostbite 2 engine has much to do with that, a technical marvel that owes its glory to a refreshing philosophy of targeting the PC first, before scaling down for consoles. The result is robust and far less of a compromise than id’s Rage, allowing these familiar gameplay elements to be fused with quite breathtaking visuals. Fluid animation and a subtle, naturalistic lighting model come together to create the occasional moment of photo realism, as with a bustling Iraqi town that seems destined to replace ARMA2 as the media’s choice for embedded reporting.

Such realism extends to much of Battlefield, but not to the skies. Since its origins in Battlefield 1942, EA’s flagship series has become synonymous with dog fighting and aerial bombardment, and while Modern Warfare made effective – even haunting – use of a camera mounted aboard an AC-130 Gunship, Battlefield 3 goes right for the homoerotic jugular with a true Top Gun bang-a-round. You’re whisked away from the Iranian frontline only to be dumped onto the deck of a full-sized aircraft carrier, led out to the waiting rear-navigator seat of a gleaming fighter jet. You may not actually fly the thing, but whatever twist of fate cast you as Goose in this flyboy fantasy, you’ll still grin like an idiot as you roar into the sky on a wave of Bruckheimer nostalgia. Hell, at one point you even hit the brakes and fly right by. If only Cheap Trick were featured on the soundtrack.

As you’d expect, the plot is there to facilitate the set pieces, and not the other way around. How it contorts itself into explaining away your presence in a F/A-18 and an armoured patrol south of Tehran necessitates the many-characters approach favoured by Call of Duty, together with the cutscene investigations of one Agent Aaron Pierce, who unravel the story of how the Iranian PLR came to be on American soil with a suitcase nuke. His increasingly urgent tone is where those Numbers would have fit in, and the plot is inarguably a none-too subtle marriage of everything Infinity Ward. That being the case, it’s considerably more involving than the comparatively neutered Medal of Honor, even if a sloppy resolution ultimately lacks the narrative twists of Treyarch’s Black Ops.

What the game also lacks is a clear sense of danger; the inevitable result of linear gameplay that by now resembles murky backwash. In Operation Guillotine, you descend a muddy embankment towards an apartment complex, amidst thunderous explosions that light up the night sky. While the graphics engine effortlessly renders the gunfire and mayhem in perfect clarity, all you can think is how lucky you are. A decade ago you were storming the beaches of Omaha and praying you’d make it to the other side. Nowadays, you just stroll through sound and fury that doesn’t begin to hint at danger. It’s all just a fancy light show. Did journalists really extol such a dire level as ‘exhilarating’, ‘tense’, and ‘fist pumping’ in their enamoured previews? What perils await when an all-expenses junket comes your way.

Adjectives such as those would seem far better suited to a later level, where you touchdown in Parisian streets that offer a bright and breezy viewpoint so often forgotten in favour of repeat excursions to Iraq. For the first time, the action feels urgent, with you and two Russian fighters hammering your way through barricaded streets in a desperate race to intercept a runaway bomb. Equally, a nighttime soiree to evac a terror suspect allows for a tense cat-and-mouse game through a broken down shopping mall and its moonlit food court. Both have their roots in Modern Warfare (and are less impactful for that), but the few times the game dares to relinquish control are when it comes alive, if only briefly. All it needs then is the spirit of adventure that empowered Infinity Ward to create this whole genre in the first place.

Perhaps a final, grandstanding assault on a hilltop villa offers the best glimpse at what might have been. The setup is boilerplate stuff – parachuting in to fight your way up a steep canyon road beset by RPG fire – but when you get to the top and start picking the house apart, room by glass-panelled room, it becomes obvious: what we really need is a SWAT or Rainbow Six to take advantage of all this technology. The dynamism and pace that sees you split into teams and simultaneously take down different floors would far better serve a fresh look at the tactical genre than it does another chapter in this tiresome race to the bottom.

The problem isn’t just that there’s a formula at work – heaven knows I’ve got my comfort games too – but that it comes so hopelessly tied to a forward-narrative that wholly removes the player from the equation. There’s always this relentless march to the next trigger event; press E to repel, press Space to perform the only action available to you. You can’t control your squad, or invent solutions. Dare to set your own pace, and you’ll be punished by the game flashing up warnings about leaving the play area. A sort of cognitive dissonance is required to enjoy a game that does its best to function as anything but. Does the player occasionally pressing a highlighted button really constitute progressive interaction?

One of the arguments against games as an art form is that the medium is too tied to our own experience to allow for the vision of a single auteur. That may well be true. Yet in failing almost entirely as unique, malleable experiences, the likes of Battlefield and Call of Duty can at least claim to be the only games that conform to the commonly-accepted tenets of art. By that measure, one can only hope the wider industry continue to fail.