Battlefield 6 feels better to play than the series ever has

Battlefield 6 just feels better than other Battlefield games. Every shot you fire kicks your weapon back, the bullet whips across the environment and thuds into its target, splintering wood and kicking up dust on impact. Vehicles drift hard around tight corners and have a real sense of speed and precision. Bodies jostle for space, stomp along tarmac, and thump onto the ground when you dive prone through a window, smashing the glass, before twisting and coiling like a snake to find your target. It’s not hyperactive like Call of Duty, but it’s immediate and responsive without losing its identity as the more tactical multiplayer shooter. 

DICE is calling it the Kinesthetic Combat System, which are fancy words for a full rework of the gunplay and movement to make both feel more physical. You really feel grounded to the world, whether you’re jumping from rooftops and combat rolling as you land, or diving prone to return fire at an enemy who got the drop on you. Time to kill is balanced just right so good reactions can save you in a pinch and combat is about more than just who saw who first. 

There’s also a new drag mechanic on revives. Unless you’re using the defibrillators, you begin dragging teammates whenever you go for a revive, and you can freely move them as you prepare the medical syringe. It feels unbelievably cool to pull someone out of the fire, dragging them out of a deadly choke point under smoke cover as bullets whizz around you. As always with DICE, sound design is industry-leading — when you’re suppressed by enemy fire and explosions are rocking buildings all around you, it’s awe-inspiring and chaotic. When you get a kill, the sound cue is endorphin-pleasing, like a whip cracking a 50.cal casing out of the sky. 

Weapon recoil is positioned just right, too. You can’t just spray and hope for the best over mid to long ranges — you need to fire in deliberate bursts, or mount your weapon on cover, be it waist-high from crouched, the floor from prone, or the corner of a wall from any position. 

The preview event let me play three of the nine maps available at launch: Egypt, Gibraltar and the streets of New York. Each offered a completely different combat experience, showing a mix of wide-open spaces where vehicles and snipers dominate to tight urban sprawls where boots on the ground scurry through every hallway and every building is reduced to rubble by match end. 

Destruction is back to classic Battlefield. Bits of debris can and will kill you. Almost every wall can be blasted open. Destruction in Battlefield 6 is consistent and predictable, so you won’t waste explosive ammo on indestructible walls. DICE has also extended this to ceilings and floors, so you can C4 a ceiling and take out an entire floor of enemies now, or use the sledgehammer from above to poke a hole in the floor and shoot down on unsuspecting breachers. Of course, you can always go in quiet and stabby if you want to collect enemy dogtags. 

Battlefield 2042’s hero characters are gone, replaced by more classic Battlefield roles – Recon, Medic, Engineer, and Assault – but now any class has access to every weapon type. The community in general hates this idea of an open armory, and I did too, but each class has access to passive perks that make them more efficient with certain weapon types. Rock a sniper rifle as anyone but Recon and you’ll have way more scope sway. Use an LMG as anyone other than a Medic and the recoil is unbearable. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. 

Each class also has access to certain abilities, such as UAV drones for snipers, but there are also unlockable extras you get through skilled play. For example, later unlocks allow snipers to block revives if they kill someone with a headshot. Engineers get extra rockets and can debuff enemy vehicle repairs. There’s more nuance to each class because of these upgrades. 

Every time there’s a new Battlefield I convince myself this is the one. It’s a series that has so much potential – the thinking person’s Call of Duty – but it’s had an identity crisis and struggled to recapture the magic of its glory days in recent iterations. Well, I’m here again, putting clown makeup on and taking to the podium to announce that Battlefield is back. But for real this time. It’s the best it’s ever felt to play, map design reminds me of some of the classics, destruction is how it should be, and classes are back. The developers even told me they won’t put stupid, aesthetic-ruining skins in Battlefield 6. DICE would have to do something seriously wrong at this point to mess things up, and it feels as if there’s an open goal to dominate as the best FPS game of 2025.