Battlefield 6 review-in-progress: a forgettable campaign tacked onto an amazing online shooter
By Kirk McKeand
Unlike Call of Duty, which shoots for notoriety through shock value in its campaign, attempting to outdo itself each year, Battlefield 6’s campaign doesn’t hold up a mirror to real contemporary conflict zones or events. The closest it gets is having you fight a private military corporation in New York City, which still bears the mental scars from 9/11 as you sprint through the streets to prevent an assassination attempt on the president.
At one point, the action moves to Egypt – a more familiar setting for modern FPS campaigns – but you play as the Egyptian forces fighting the PMC, a refreshing change for the usual racist, jingoistic, US-centric narratives military shooters offer up. It’s just a shame it’s an otherwise forgettable campaign.
Battlefield 6’s single-player only remembers it’s a Battlefield game halfway through. Sure, you’re always in a squad of four characters – each one representing the multiplayer classes of Engineer, Recon, Support, and Assault – but the first half of the game is tightly scripted and rarely opens up to allow player expression in the same way the best Battlefield campaign, Bad Company 2, did.
Instead of leaning into Battlefield’s strengths, it’s mostly concerned with Call of Duty-style set-pieces. There’s one section where you perform a HALO jump, but instead of making use of the parachuting mechanics that already exist in the game and giving you control, it’s essentially a first-person cutscene. It wants to capture the feeling of Battlefield 3’s fancy (also very scripted) jet mission, but none of these moments match it in terms of spectacle.
Even when it remembers it’s a Battlefield game halfway through and starts to open up – offering up ATV sections, tanks, drones, and sandbox areas to pick your way through – you still feel shackled to the game. Go slightly off the intended path and that dreaded message flashes up, “you are leaving the combat area”, giving you a couple of seconds to find the invisible line you just crossed before you drop dead and get thrown back to the last checkpoint.
It’s a shame it’s not a bit more inventive because as with the multiplayer, it’s the best Battlefield has ever felt to play. Guns are punchy, aiming snaps, and the environmental destruction makes every explosion, every bullet, feel significant. Audio design is the best in the business, with jets blasting your eardrums as they scream overhead and empty shell casings pinging off the floor and echoing in an empty room. But none of this can save it from being a forgettable campaign with an identity crisis.
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Luckily, we’re not here for that. Battlefield 6’s single-player is just a nice little extra attached to a near-flawless multiplayer experience. While I’m not quite ready to slap a score on it (the multiplayer servers aren’t full and maps and modes are limited before launch), I’m ready to stick my neck out and say it’s the best it’s been since Bad Company 2, and I say that as someone with hundreds of hours in Battlefield 3.
From what I’ve played so far, map design is top tier. There are plenty of meat grinder chokepoints in the attack and defend modes for empty headed players to mulch through whilst you find that cheeky alternate route and start stabbing dogtags out of people. Playing Rush mode again and finding those sneaky flanks while everyone learns the game together is an almost religious experience. Swatting a helicopter out of the sky with an unguided rocket is still one of the best feelings in a video game.
With 32 players a side, you feel like a small cog in a larger conflict, but a single soldier using their brain can still turn the tide of an entire battle by switching to the right class for the job and dealing with the tank decimating your forces, or finding that route through the enemy’s defenses, or placing the healing items just right, or blowing a hole in the right wall and opening up a new route for your soldiers to pour in. As a mobile spawn point at all times, you’re constantly calculating when to take fights and when to find a moment for your allies to reinforce you. It’s a shooting game for thinkers and twitchy gunplay skills can only take you so far.
It’s full of those Battlefield moments, too – those moments that remind you how small you are in this conflict, even though you just saved the day minutes ago. You might be running toward an objective, minding your own business, when an ally shoots down an enemy jet, which then proceeds to land on your head, killing you instantly. Falling debris can squash you flat, and entire buildings crumble to dust. Previously flat ground can suddenly become a safe haven following an explosion, the crater providing you prone cover from that distant sniper. Learning to keep your head and adapt even when the ground beneath your feet shifts is a skill you have to pick up, and something that makes this game stand out against every other shooter on the market.
I’m excited to see how it all shakes out when I’m not playing in lobbies half populated with bots, when I can check out the new UGC Portal mode, when I can choose what maps and modes I want to tackle. Until then, I’ve got some recoil patterns to learn.
Find out when you can jump on with our post on the Battlefield 6 release times.