Finished the three 'War Stories'. Thoughts?

I don't know how modern gamers who've grown up with campaigns like this view them, but as someone playing shooters going on about 24 years now, man these are bad and unfinished, and I feel I'm not exaggerating.

The Norwiegan campaign probably plays the best of the three, but it's still very dull. Like stealth in other BF1 games, if you just stay high up and skirt the sides of the maps, you win without having to take down more than a handful of soldiers. The "defend Astrid" section was embarrassing. The enemy attacked in two waves of three over about two minutes. There was just downtime where I was staring at Astrid going through a desk with no danger to either of us. The section where you have to run between fires was just me sprinting towards light and throwing knives with no consequences (it's basically a retread of Bad Company 2's same mission but a million times more boring). I blew up trucks later on by standing a mile away and popping MP40 rounds into the barrels next to them, leaving a whole town unexplored. The final cutscene is so ripping for emotion for a character whose name I only put here because I had to look up her name as she drops a grenade next to explosive barrels piled up on the outside of a submarine. I guess it was her chance to use explosive barrels in her video game campaign.

The French/Colonial campaign is probably the worst of the the three in terms of gameplay and story. It feels unfinished in both regards. Again, more story whiplash as you go from arrival, to sandbag-filling, to front line in under a minute. The friendly AI is beyond stupid. I can feel the game straining to activate their pathfinding. They're always a mile behind me. I originally thought it was to add difficulty to the game by making me fight alone more, but it's mostly because they get hung up on each other and geometry. I'm not saying I need them to carry their weight, but these grandiose war moments the game end up looking pretty pathetic when it's me just moving leisurely through major defenses.The stealth sections were easy to either sneak through or just murder everyone (and in one case I just sprinted through the whole thing.

The British one is decently-written, but really dull in terms of gameplay and again you get like 45 minutes with the characters so you go from the prison to frontlines (meet two allied soldiers that you'll never see again after two minutes) to assaulting several German bases on your own, to a holdout section, to it being over. The dialogue is funny but bizarre compared to the serious tones of the other campaigns, with this Ritchie-meets-Scorsese dialogue and the commander finding a British national song in a German radio tower. The large, open section was laughably easy where I captured the airfield with no issue. Then I got into a Stuka, killed 3 other planes that didn't fight back, bombed two radio towers, infiltrated the bunker and drove back to the commander in just a few minutes. The holdout was easy as I spent most of the time on the cannon.

That's not to even mention the enemy AI. It seems like their routines can never be interrupted, so they'll either never find cover, or only ever focus on finding cover and nothing else, so you're either popping them in the open while they try to shoot at you, or popping them in the open while they're running around not shooting at you. There's this air that DICE wanted to tell "true stories you don't know." Instead, they're three stories that never happened, where the Tiralleur missions almost discredit those soldiers as unprofessional and undisciplined. People are going to walk away thinking Germany almost had a nuke but were stopped by a lone resistance member (they were never close for various reasons), Tiralleurs disobeyed orders to hold an objective so they could abandon it to attack a gun emplacement and fortress with like eight guys, and the British hired prisoners because they somehow didn't have bombs that could blow up stationary planes.

I just wish they'd skip it next time, and devote effort to the multiplayer. I think the MP is the best it's been in a long time, and taking some resources out of the half-baked single-player could have helped even more.