Battlefield campaigns have struggled with their identification all through the collection’ historical past. The place Name of Responsibility, Battlefield’s high competitor in first-person shooters, has two storylines operating by the parallel Fashionable Warfare and Black Ops sub-series with recurring characters and overarching plots, Battlefield’s single-player choices have all the time been standalone. Battlefield 6 isn’t any totally different, and the dearth of a canonical Battlefield universe lets down its marketing campaign from the off.
You play as varied members of Dagger 13, an elite squad of marines tasked with bringing down Pax Armata, a personal navy company making an attempt to topple NATO. That is already loosely harking back to various Name of Responsibility video games, however the lack of attachment to or familiarity with squad members Carter, Murphy, Gecko, and Lopez means the makes an attempt at jaw-dropping, emotional twists within the story hit like .45 caliber ammunition towards the facet of a tank.
The roughly 10-hour runtime does not permit sufficient time to type attachments to those characters, regardless of Battlefield Studios clearly wanting you to care. That mentioned, there’s loads of selection when it comes to each locale and mission model, and because of this, the marketing campaign does not overstay its welcome. You go to Gibraltar, Brooklyn, Tajikistan, and even the Pyramids of Giza close to Cairo as you barrel down the street close by in a tank.
Nevertheless, whereas I am not a geopolitical skilled, and in no way certified to speak about what would make logical sense in what’s clearly meant to be a warfare that might occur in actual life, the settings you go to really feel bewilderingly random. There do not look like any thematic ties between the places, particularly Gibraltar… even when it does make for a novel setting, HALO leaping in, touchdown on the high of the rock, and making your method right down to town streets beneath.
Battlefield video games have usually been targeted on warfare at an epic scale — it is within the title, in any case — however the majority of the Battlefield 6 marketing campaign takes place in smaller environments. New York townhouses, Egyptian streets whereas in an enormous tank, even missions which can have an open space shortly funnel you into corridors and tunnels. There’s just one mission that actually appears like a Battlefield recreation at coronary heart: Operation Ember Strike. The eighth mission out of 9, that is when the sport lastly opens up and presents you with a number of choices to finish your goal, which is to destroy three missile websites.
On this mission, a sprawling Tajikistan plain is specified by entrance of you, with enemy troopers littered in all places, and you may method the websites in any order you please, selecting up a wide range of weapons alongside the way in which. You are additionally given a drone to launch from cowl and bomb enemies with, permitting for much more tactical approaches. The issue is, regardless that this mission ends in a really large set piece that’s Battlefield in a nutshell, the following targets return to a way more linear format.
It is protected to say, nonetheless, that Battlefield 6 has retained the core really feel of precisely what works: gunplay. It is all the time been the collection’ largest energy, from sniping with a bolt-action and popping enemies in home windows to utilizing a launcher and taking down a helicopter. The choice to customise your loadout would’ve been appreciated, to get a really feel for a way among the varied attachments and optical sights play in a closed atmosphere earlier than transferring to multiplayer, however weapons have that very same oomph and gritty feeling they all the time have.
On the automobile facet, nonetheless, there are not any alternatives to pilot plane within the marketing campaign, which might’ve gone an extended technique to crafting an excellent set-piece. Tanks, in the meantime, are the identical as they all the time have been: clunky, tough to maneuver, however robust as hell and presumably correct — “presumably,” given I’ve by no means been in a tank in actual life — in how they repel virtually all incoming hearth.
Disregarding operating into the occasional bug on this pre-release construct — lacking ground textures, AI squadmates both reviving you from 20 meters away or operating blindly by crowds of enemy troopers simply to attempt to prevent, or your squad not following you in any respect — the Battlefield 6 marketing campaign lacks a cohesive identification. It has its moments, but it surely does not maintain a lightweight to any remotely respectable Name of Responsibility marketing campaign. Nor does it rank significantly excessive among the many Battlefield video games, which 2010’s Unhealthy Firm 2 nonetheless sits atop, attributable to its unimaginable set-pieces and portrayal of warfare on such a big scale.
Fortunately, early impressions of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer — solely a few matches in, thoughts, as a result of servers not being significantly populated pre-launch — are already extra spectacular. Whereas the multiplayer part has all the time been the draw of those video games, earlier than assessing this recreation in totality, we’ll have to spend a number of days with it post-launch to get a really feel for the way it performs with full servers. So hold your eyes peeled. Till then, Battlefield 6 is hard to advocate based mostly on the marketing campaign alone.
