This is my team. Without them, I am useless. Without me, they are useless.

I was genuinely staggered the other day. I happened to look at the Stats section of my recent favourite game, and was blown away to find that I had clocked up 92 hours of play on it already. Right about now you’re probably expecting me to launch into “arrow to the knee” meme jokes, but no, my 92 hours have not been spent roaming the Skyrim wilds alone, unlike a good 60% of my friends list. My (many) hours have been invested in non-stop multiplayer warfare, battling for supremacy in Battlefield 3’s huge maps.

I’m not entirely sure what exactly it is I like about Battlefield 3. Like many of the other big titles that came out in this year’s silly season, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. It features a new engine, sure, but if you had to review it in 100 words that review would definitely start “It’s like Battlefield Bad Company 2 but…”.

What it does have that I love is teamwork. (Right about here I was going to make a joke about their being no “I” in “team”, but then I realised there is one in “Battlefield” so the joke fell somewhat flat). And I’m not talking about the sort of “teamwork” you’ll find in a Call of Duty “team deathmatch”, I’m talking about people actually helping each other out and turning the tide of the battle in their teams favour. Of course, there are still a number of players who play the game in a “lone wolf” style, but the great thing about Battlefield is that those people don’t do all that well.

Hide on a rooftop with a sniper rifle? Sure, you might get 20 kills and only one or two deaths, but at the end of the game you’ll be beaten by the player who died 15 times for zero kills, but revived and healed thirty different team mates and took several different objectives. Get yourself in a squad of buddies with headsets and you’ll generally do well.

Can’t shoot straight like me? You’ll get a boat load of “suppression assist” points for keeping your enemies heads down while the decent players kill them. Can’t drive a tank? Hide behind it with a repair tool and watch the repair points roll in as the RPG fire does. Can’t fly a jet further than 20 feet without hitting a building? (Me again.) Stop on the ground and laser designate airborne and ground targets for your fellow pilots who make the whole not-flying-into-things bit look easy.

I think it is the supporting roles that I love the most about Battlefield. I don’t have the caffeine and Haribo fuelled twitch reflexes needed for some multiplayer shooters, but in Battlefield I’m never useless because of it.

And at the end of the day, I’d rather score highly on a winning side where I scored no kills, than be on the losing team with a huge kill death ratio.

Goooooooooo team!