Battlefield 6 Trip Report (and Campaign Review)

OK, here’s the status report on Battlefield 6. I’ve completed the campaign and, as of this writing, been in two multiplayer matches. Pre-release access to the Battlefield Portal stuff was originally planned for the review period but turned out to be unavailable until launch day, so I don’t have anything to say about that either way. At this time, I’ve only seen the retail version of the game running on a PS5 Pro.

So let’s not call this a full review or anything, but I’ll say this: the multiplayer, much like the beta, seems like the Battlefield game you want it to be. It’s large-scale combat, it’s jets, it’s tanks, it’s you and your friends jumping in a truck and seeing what sort of trouble you can get into. While there’s a ton of nuanced difference in things like classes and loadouts and unlocks and all that, I’ll say that in my limited time with the multiplayer, it’s reminded me of, like, Battlefield 4. It seems better than the BF games that have come between 4 and 6… though obviously this opinion is coming from very limited testing.

The campaign, however… well, read on for more detailed thoughts on that.

This campaign didn’t need to exist. OK, sure, there’s that back-of-box “value” in having a campaign in your game. Call of Duty, after all, built its empire on a three-pronged attack of campaign, competitive multiplayer, and a secret third thing. But Battlefield is a different beast. EA’s long-running franchise has been very up and down over the last decade. But the quality of the campaign has never been a major factor in its success or failure. Here, too, the quality of the campaign probably won’t massively move the needle for Battlefield 6. That’s fortunate for the people behind this one, I guess, because the single-player mode in this game is awful.

The story in Battlefield 6 puts you in the boots of a few different soldiers fighting on the side of NATO against an evil corporation called Pax Armata. Their motives aren’t especially clear, but they’ve brought unrest and political turmoil. It’s your job to stop them. While the missions are connected narratively, the game does a bit of the old Call of Duty thing by putting you into a handful of different playable characters over the course of its four-to-six-hour runtime. I’m typing this mere minutes after rolling credits on it and I couldn’t tell you anything about any of these people. They’re soldiers. You get an “Oscar Mike” or two. There are drones. A dam blows up. A lot of things blow up, really. Most of the structure here is “play a lot of very clumsy first-person shooting and then you will get to watch a building fall down or something.” While the game does try to play the whole “who can you trust” card and invoke the CIA and shadowy figures working to destabilize the world and all that, the entire thing comes off as amateurish, clumsy, and buggy. It’s a real waste of time.

A lot of this, I think, comes down to some pretty simple stuff. The mechanics of Battlefield are meant for large maps and multiplayer combat. Turning large chunks of it into a corridor crawl just plays against the strengths of the gameplay. It’s a world where ammo boxes are conveniently left in train tunnels alongside boxes containing pristine weapons for you to swap to, just in case you want to make a loadout change. By the time you get to the last couple of missions, you’ve seen one or two that take place in larger, more Battlefield-like zones… but the tight focus on objectives and moving forward just doesn’t work. It feels like someone sat down and tried to make a Call of Duty campaign on an engine built for bigger things, and the end result is a failure across the board.

It’s also very rough around the edges. Occasionally I’d aim down sights and the view would snap almost a full 90 degrees, picking up a target that I wasn’t even aware of. Sometimes your squad mates float in the air and then quickly run backwards to get into position for a scripted sequence. Sometimes your squad mates stare at a wall while talking to you. Sometimes the enemies don’t properly activate even though you’re taking out everyone around them. Sometimes a tank just gets caught on a surface and won’t move! Sometimes a cutscene doesn’t trigger and the “run and jump in the grate” objective won’t complete because there’s no open grate to jump through! It’s a mess of a time, and not in the fun “haha, look at these weird bugs” sort of way. The bar for big budget military shooter campaigns is kinda high these days, and Battlefield 6 fails to meet the bar by a wide margin. Hey, at least the frame rate is solid, though the way it pops from smooth frame rate down to 30fps for cutscenes is a little jarring.

I’ll put it to you like this: the coolest thing the campaign does is direct you to uninstall it immediately after you finish it. Seriously, it does!

Now that that’s out of the way… well… remember that the campaign is a pretty small part of this overall package and is easily forgotten in favor of the multiplayer stuff, which seems pretty sharp so far. I’ll have a bit more to say about all that once the game releases and I’ve had more time to play matches with real humans.