Battlefield 3™
Skip · Shooter · 2020
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $3.99.
- Length
- 6.1h
- Value
- $0.65/hr
- Reviews
- 72% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Battlefield 3™ is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage. Windows only.
Enjoy total freedom to fight the way you want. Explore 29 massive multiplayer maps and use loads of vehicles, weapons, and gadgets to help you turn up the heat. Every second of battle gets you closer to unlocking tons of extras and moving up in the Ranks. So get in the action.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.99. That was February 2024. 44 discounts in the 6 years on record. They run about 85 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today's $3.99 at 90 percent off still sits 101 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
Take the discount away and it is a 29. With it, 31.
It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 62 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Battlefield 4™ ($3.99, scores 60) beats it on value, while it beats Battlefield™ 2042 ($5.99, scores 1).
Critics scored it 89, but players land 17 points lower at 72 percent. The reviews were kinder than the room.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 11 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 36 percent of the 3,820 reviews written there were positive, against 72 percent overall, and those are 23 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (boost); the score docks it lightly for that.
The main story runs 6.1 hours. Doing everything runs 62, 10 times as long.
The drop-off
10% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
90 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Clicked Play on Steam expecting Battlefield 3. Instead, I got the EA app. Clicked Play there? Website. Clicked Play on the website? Back to the EA app. Apparently Battlefield 3 comes with a free bonus game called "EA Launcher Simulator." And when you finally manage to get past the launcher loop, there's always the chance you'll get kicked or run into another issue before you can actually play. It's honestly...
Can't even get the game to start. Piece of crap. Shouldn't be allowed to sell something that doesn't work.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Battlefield 3™ scores 31/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1238820/battlefield-3The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.