After a rough couple of releases in the last 10 years, Battlefield is back with a solid campaign and a fun multiplayer. This review will be separated into a campaign and multiplayer sections as they play very differently and deserve to be judged on their own merit. The battle royal mode “REDSEC” will not be covered.

Campaign

Story 

The plot features a military organization known as Pax Armata that has gained significant power and has begun to attack nations allied with NATO. Players take the role of Marine Raiders who are tasked with stopping various attacks launched by this enemy. I found the story enjoyable. The cast of characters you spend time with through the campaign are written well and players will find themselves attached to this crew of elite soldiers. The story will make players feel heroic as fighting to protect the innocent is a desire every man is drawn to and here you fight an enemy that is willing to commit major terrorist attacks to achieve their goals.

I do however have some gripes with the story despite enjoying it overall. The first point of contention is that the twist that happens near the end of the game was not executed well. The way it happened felt very forced and could have been written in a more convincing manner. I also didn’t like that the ending was left open ended as I worried that they will take a page from recent Call of Duty (COD) games and make the story of the campaign suffer to have a story to tell in the post launch multiplayer content.

Gameplay

Most of the missions of the campaign are enjoyable as they were filled with a good variety of engagements from stealth, sniping, and large scale battles. There were no shortage of epic moments throughout the campaign as you were tasked with objectives such as to jump out of a plane as a paratrooper directly into a heated battle or storm a beach with an aquatic tank.

There is also the squad system to speak about which is a menu that allows you to give orders to your teammates to do things such as spot all the enemies or use a grenade launcher to blow up an entrenched enemy. It was a useful system, but it could get a bit exhausting to constantly pull up the menu. My main issues with the gameplay come from how the player is taking fire from multiple lines of sight, not just in front of them, which can lead to frustration from not being able to engage multiple enemies at a time. This is further compounded by the lack of readability the player has in knowing where the enemy is as they can easily blend into the environment.
However, overall it was a solid experience and it made me upset that the campaign was criticised by gaming journalists for being mediocre.

Multiplayer

Gameplay

What a breath of fresh air Battlefield 6’s multiplayer is for longtime fans of the series. I am actually having fun playing with my friends or with my dad. Weapons feel good to use as they are extremely deadly and have good audio feedback. This however carries a double edge sword, which is the frustration that can come from not being able to react to an enemy shooting at you before you die. This can feel especially brutal in game modes or maps that encourage “meat grinder” gameplay (a term used in first person shooters when it feels like you are just mindlessly dying and respawning in quick succession).

This brings us to the maps which are a mixed bag due to how congested they can feel. On many maps there are no true routes to flank to have engagements in multiple areas as all the players are funneled towards the middle of the map. On a brighter note vehicle gameplay can feel really good, especially tanks as they are quite powerful, however it can also feel like there is too much counterplay and leads to deaths it feels were not preventable. For example, being approached by a full squad of engineers with seven rockets each to use on you. 

On to the classes — The Assault class is front line warrior and is full of adrenaline filled gameplay as you are quite offensive with shotguns, grenade launchers, and flashbangs. Support being able to revive full teams of downed allies will make players feel like they are in an action movie as they are dodging so many bullets to get everyone back and running. Engineers will feel good being a menace to enemy tanks while repairing your team’s own. Finally Recon sits comfortably in the edges of a map while enjoying the great audio feedback that comes from special sound effects made specifically for headshots from sniper rifles.

Classes feel like they have their distinct roles but I am confused by some of the balancing choices. It can feel awkward to use LMGs as a support as you are the person that is supposed to heal and revive your team but are asked to use a weapon that is designed to be used in an entrenched position. C4s being on recon also feels awkward because it has been a staple of the engineer class for years now, and giving such an up close and personal tool to someone who is supposed to be in your backline is silly. 

As a final note and warning, this game is meant to be played in a group. The beauty of the Battlefield series comes from working with your friends to execute cool plays and brilliant tactics such as flanking the enemy and capturing their home base, holding down a chokepoint with everyone reviving and taking turns firing, or that squad that destroys the whole lobby with a tank. These are the “only in Battlefield” moments that we fans speak so fondly of and they can only come from playing as a squad. So please take this into consideration before buying the game.

Graphics

Games on the DICE engine are always very impressive and Battlefield 6 isn’t any different. You get to see the beauty of multiple places such as the clay houses of Gibraltar which are covered with beautiful flowers or the snow covered and breathtaking mountains of Tajikistan. While not all of the game is this colorful, it certainly isn’t the cliche “grey shooter” that you would see in the early 2010s. 

Despite all this praise, the major problem from a visual perspective is the game’s UI which is similar to the Netflix UI where the viewer has to navigate the menu horizontally. This menu design is really frustrating as you have to sift through many menu tiles to actually find what you are going to play. It’s certainly not as offensive as modern Call of Duty UI, but I yearn for the days when vertical UIs were the norm. This is because they presented so much information in a compact manner on the screen at once rather than having to go through what feels like a slideshow. Let’s please leave this design trend in the past as quickly as possible.

Sound Design

One of the most important factors in if a FPS feels good to play is if its guns sound powerful, and I am glad to report that Battlefield 6 nails this. They are loud, ring in your ears, and fulfill the power fantasy that every gun nerd dreams of. Given the large-scale nature of Battlefield, the thundering noise made by constant explosions and crumbling buildings creates quite the immersive experience.

The music is also very impressive as DICE was able to create a remix of the classic Battlefield theme that mixes the Industrial and Orchestra genres to create an intensily aggressive piece that will pump up the player. The voice cast of the campaign was solid and I believe is one of its stronger offerings. They were able to deliver the energy needed for the player to feel like they are playing as soldiers in tense situations but also could provide the necessary emotion needed for the dramatic moments. Surprisingly, for a lot of voice actors, this was their first voice acting job which is quite surprising with how well they did. This is very reminiscent of Red Dead Redemption where Rob Wiethoff did a spectacular job voicing the protagonist John Marston despite never having done any voice acting. 

Monetization

Oh boy, here comes the fun part. Despite Battlefield 6 being a full priced $70 game, it is already filled with an abundance of microtransactions. You are constantly being haggled to buy cosmetics or upgrade to the premium version of the game for $30 every time you open up the game which can make it feel like a mobile game instead of a premium product. 

There is also a battle pass to purchase which has weapons locked behind it. Thankfully everyone can unlock these, but only after a signifigant grind. I really wish they had taken a page out of Modern Warfare (2019) where new weapons were unlocked through simple challenges instead of trying to make me play gamemodes I’m not interested in playing or have me playing all day. Thankfully it seems there will be some way to unlock the weapons if you aren’t able to unlock them during the season they release. 

Another horrible decision is that once the season ends, you aren’t allowed to progress the battle pass anymore, which is very anti-consumer. In general all these cosmetics have me quite worried as I feel that not even a couple of months in, we are already being pushed from the grounded setting we were heavily promised in the marketing for this game. It feels like a betrayal and there is nothing we can do about it given we already paid for the game. At the very least all post launch gameplay content will be free.

Faith Perspective

While I would love to get political due to agreeing with a lot of positions promoted by the story of the game, CGR is not the place for such a discussion. I will however ask that you pray for peace. A global conflict such as the one presented in the campaign is not a convenient idea made to tell a story but a very real possibility in the distant future as warned by Pope Francis. 

The tension between the world’s superpowers continues to grow everyday and the situation may even become nuclear and the oracle perceiving Mutually Assured Destruction will finally be fulfilled. But even if such a war does not happen, there are regions across the world such as Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa where brutal wars are taking place today. 

Video games use war as a set piece for first person shooters, but real wars are self-evidently quite horrifying and are, as Pope Francis said, “always a failure” due to the loss of life regardless of who was right or wrong. I thus encourage you to pray the Rosary every day and ask Our Lady of Fatima for peace.

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