If you happen to’ve seen any advertising for Battlefield 6, you already know that it takes the struggle to New York Metropolis. Proper from its preliminary announcement over the summer season, Battlefield Studios put a significant emphasis on a marketing campaign mission and multiplayer map that might have gamers inflicting destruction within the streets of Brooklyn. The announcement was met with only a trace of trepidation. Would the army shooter collection be capable to deal with a terrorist assault on iconic NYC landmarks sensitively sufficient, particularly throughout a time when American politicians are doing every part of their energy to color main US cities as warzones?
It’s most likely unsurprising to listen to that Battlefield 6 doesn’t precisely deal with a loaded picture with grace, however the Brooklyn-based missions in its marketing campaign are nearly too ridiculous to get upset over.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for Battlefield 6 follow.]
Battlefield 6’s story begins after a political assassination spurs a divide inside NATO. Some unnamed international locations defect from the alliance because of this, and all hell breaks free. A non-public army group known as PAX Armata rises within the chaos with the objective of violently policing the world. (Or one thing like that. PAX’s motives are deliberately laborious to pin down.) Nonetheless aligned with NATO, America deploys its troops world wide to struggle PAX on a number of fronts, together with Gibraltar and Egypt.
That takes us to the fifth mission of the marketing campaign, No Sleep. In defiance of PAX’s threats, NATO decides to carry a summit in New York Metropolis simply as tensions are at their highest. PAX is bound to crash the social gathering, so the troops are known as in to search out the place the group is hiding out in Brooklyn and cease their presumed assault. Issues go south rapidly in essentially the most over-the-top method potential.
The mission begins with you tearing up fancy townhouses in Brooklyn Heights as you seek for a secret terrorist base within the metropolis’s least intimidating nook. The city is seemingly evacuated, so that you’re by no means in peril of coming throughout a civilian, however you do discover armor-clad terrorists hiding out in slim loos and immaculately designed bedrooms. It’s a very good excuse to set some fights in tight areas with numerous verticality, however it’s all a bit goofy when you’ve ever had a babysitting gig in Brooklyn.
This entire chunk of the story is a little bit of a foolish tour round city for Brooklynites. It turns the borough’s most peaceable areas into struggle zones. Prospect Park is stuffed with drones! Army vans are weaving round Grand Military Plaza! The lovable carousel in Dumbo is on hearth! It’s mainly my mom’s imaginative and prescient of the place I reside, knowledgeable fully by the one information story she hears a few freak homicide each few months, come to life. Brooklyn Bridge Park could as properly be worldwide waters!
All of this culminates in a sequence that’s so patently absurd that I may solely snicker at it. Your squad finally finds PAX underground, as they’re loading up a subway automobile with bombs and sending it into town. After a chase sequence, the squad makes a tough name: “By no means once more,” one in every of my teammates says, invoking September 11. “Which means not on our watch, received it?”
Smash minimize to the crew capturing a rocket on the Manhattan Bridge to cease the prepare automobile from reaching town.
Look, I’m not going to fake that I discover any of this offensive as a New Yorker. My knee-jerk intuition is to chide Battlefield 6 for rehashing 9/11 panic for an inexpensive set-piece and enjoying into the harmful narrative that large cities are lawless hellscapes that have to be protected by the army. It’s unhealthy timing. However doing so can be ignoring the context of Battlefield’s difficult story, the place a sect of accelerationists are particularly frightening the chaos. It’s a manufactured disaster the place Brooklyn turns into a political pawn for power-hungry factions.
It will even be ignoring that it’s all so silly that you would be able to hardly dissect it with a straight face. I imply, you’re gunning down troopers in a park playground whereas ducking for canopy behind the jungle health club. Battlefield 6 does have some political heft to sift via (regardless of its builders’ insistence that it doesn’t), however it’s finally a foolish amalgamation of shooter marketing campaign clichés set in locations that Battlefield Studios thought would make for good multiplayer maps. All I can actually do is snicker as I watch million-dollar townhouses become Swiss cheese. You do you, Battlefield.
