Battlefield 6 delivers a thrilling multiplayer reset and a decent, if derivative single-player. But it still displays nagging doubts about what makes Battlefield special.
After the muddled innovations and watered-down warfare of Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 6 was pitched as a return to what made the series great. And it is that…mostly. Gone are the ponderous 128-player maps that stretched 2042’s action too thin, and the pseudo-futuristic setting with gimmicky hero shooter-like abilities. Back are the rollicking 64-player slugfests, the more grounded quartet of soldier classes, the lowercase modern warfare setting, and even the single-player campaign. All this infused with a fetching burned-orange aesthetic and a renewed emphasis on crumbling, billowing destruction.
Battlefield 6 review
When it’s firing on all cylinders, jets screaming overhead, rockets whizzing past your ear, building facades sloughing off their foundations before your eyes, Battlefield 6 is tremendous – undoubtedly the closest EA has got to the series’ heyday in a decade. Yet hidden beneath this confident surface is a series still wrestling with its identity. There’s a nervous desire to please everyone in Battlefield 6, visible in its oddly heavy catering to small and midsize maps and modes, the weird compromise between fixed classes and free weapon selection, and the peculiar sight of camo-clad soldiers who can knee-slide into battle and perform a 180 spin at the touch of a button.
In all of this and more, you can feel Call of Duty breathing down Battlefield’s neck. Luckily, this doesn’t detract from the experience too much, and even improves it in some areas. But it’s frustrating nonetheless, because Battlefield 6 is unquestionably at its best when it embraces its identity wholesale.
Battlefield 6’s marginally speculative setting pitches NATO forces against Pax Armata, a politically inoffensive pan-national private military company named like a deluxe wristwatch. Its globetrotting conflict transports players to Cairo, New York, Gibraltar, and Tajikistan, along with a slightly incongruous return to Iran in fan-favourite map Operation Firestorm.
Here’s a Battlefield 6 launch trailer.Watch on YouTube
Each location provides multiple themed maps for Battlefield’s centrepiece modes like Conquest, Rush and the newly introduced Escalation – which is basically Conquest with the added ability for teams to claim control points for good. While all wonderful to look at, only three of them use the full spectrum of Battlefield’s arsenal, giving you large expanses of terrain and a sky crisscrossed by both jets and helicopters.
From this trio, I’m primarily partial to Tajikistan’s Mirak Valley, which starts one team in an area that looks like No Man’s Land in World War 1, all scorched earth and blackened trees riven by muddy trenches. Its central area comprises two office buildings in construction, with a giant crane situated between them that players can bring crashing down. While not as map-changing as Battlefield 4’s “Levolution” scenes, it’s quite the sight nonetheless.
Elsewhere, the snowy valley of Liberation Peak isn’t quite as distinctive as Mirak Valley, but it’s still a rock-solid Conquest theatre, its craggy undulations riddled with military bases and deliciously destructible villages. Operation Firestorm, meanwhile, is Operation Firestorm, as fundamentally brilliant as it ever was.
Image 1: The campaign uses the desctruction tech to reasonable effect, though it still falls short of Bad Company 2. 2: You’ve got something stuck in your vest. Don’t worry, I’ll pull it out. 3: As well as looking consistently great, BF6 is also superbly optimised, with nary so much as a hitched frame even on my ancient, decrepit rig. 4: Vehicle wreckage quickly becomes a natural part of BF6’s landscape. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA
All three maps eagerly facilitate Battlefield’s core appeal – that dynamic, open ended warfare that quite literally drops moments of emergent storytelling on you, usually with concussive force. The destruction tech elevates this. The way buildings collapse into rubble is mightily impressive, and blowing out walls to deny objective cover in Rush is every bit as satisfying as it was back in the early 2010s. Practically, it isn’t that much of a leap from Battlefield 3, however. More extensive and granular in its detail, perhaps, but otherwise it doesn’t feel wildly different.
Arguably more important is how BF6 rewards finding your place within the rumbling conflict. Mainly, I was drawn to the engineer role this time around, supporting vehicle assault on control points, taking out pockets of enemy cover with rocket-propelled grenades, sneaking up on enemy tanks and dropping mines beneath their armoured caboose, and sometimes rolling out in armour myself to give enemy positions a good drubbing. That said, medics feel slightly less essential than before, since any player can revive a downed comrade, and even drag them out of the line of fire to help them to their feet in cover.
In any case, those big haymaker maps deliver the goods, and the mid-sized maps mostly do too. These lack the jets and occasionally the helicopters, and are more prone to funnelling you through city streets rather than rolling countryside. New Sobek City is the most open of the mid-table with you battling around and through a cluster of apartment blocks as the Great Pyramids loom in the distance. But I nonetheless have time for the urban warfare of Siege of Cairo and, in particular, Manhattan Bridge, where you battle through New York’s gentrified brick high-rises beneath the vast iron bulk of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Image 1: It goes without saying at this point, but the audio design remains unparalleled. When stuff explodes in BF6, you’ll feel it in your liver. 2: Why play deathmatch when you can play a mode that rains helicopters? 3: Sometimes you’ve just gotta stop fighting and watch what’s going on above you. 4: You can skip this screenshot if you want. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA
At the smaller scale, however, Battlefield 6 starts to feel defanged. Its infantry-only selection brings two bland flavours of deathmatch, rendering much of the game’s toolset redundant, alongside Domination, which is just Conquest without the vehicles, and King of the Hill, where teams compete to hold a single objective that rotates across the map every few minutes. I quite like King of the Hill. The constant switching between establishing and rooting out defensive positions suits Battlefield’s mode of play well. But I’d happily forgo it and all other infantry modes if it meant having more full-fat Battlefield to guzzle.
There are also a few other elements to BF6 that I’m not wholly sold on, such as that new large-scale mode, Escalation. The idea is that, as control points are wiped off the map by teams claiming them, the action is funnelled into fewer areas, thereby intensifying it. But in my experience, the action never escalated all that much, and these matches ultimately panned out as shorter, less satisfying rounds of Conquest.
I also question EA’s decision to let classes select whatever weapon they choose, rather than mandating they use a specific weapon-type. EA has tried to balance this by making each class proficient in certain guns—Engineers with SMGs, Recon players with sniper rifles, etc. But I’m not convinced this will stop BF6 from becoming Assault-rifle City on launch. Even in the review period—during which maps were heavily filled out by bots—I noticed a distinct lack of LMGs among player medics.
Image 1: Movement and aiming is incredibly slick, though sometimes it’s a little too acrobatic. 2: I think that’s a write off. 3: Don’t worry Mr President, I’ll be your human…Shield. I’ll see myself out. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA
Then again, the open-weapon mechanic is less annoying than watching players knee-slide through BF6’s meticulously crafted warzones like schoolkids in a freshly varnished gym-hall. This forms part of BF6’s new “Kinesthetic Combat System”, which enables far more responsive movement. To be clear, this is a big improvement overall—mantling over objects has never been slicker. But it strays into being too arcade-y at times. EA has already toned the knee-sliding down in the runup to launch, but frankly, they should remove it entirely. Even in a game where everyone carries a parachute, it feels incongruous and obnoxious, like if Tom Hanks whipped out a skateboard and did a nosegrind along a tank trap in Saving Private Ryan.
It’s worth noting that the modes that were testable during review don’t represent the full suite of options. Battlefield Portal, which allows players to create their own game modes and customise maps, wasn’t available to test prior to launch, while the highly anticipated Battle Royale mode won’t be available until later in the year. What BF6 does have, of course, is a single-player campaign, which sees you play as NATO special forces unit Dagger 13 as they search for the shadowy leadership behind Pax Armata.
This represents the first proper single-player offering BF6 has had in a long time, after the scattershot efforts of BF1 and BFV, and the absence of single-player in 2042. I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, it does a decent job of using the game’s various locales to create interesting missions. Highlights include a dramatic HALO drop onto the rock of Gibraltar, and a gnarly scramble through New York City as you strive to protect the President (played with admirable sincerity by Benito Martinez) from repeated assassination attempts by drone, by car, and then by massive assault on the shore of the east river.
The campaign delivers lavish first-person cutscenes almost as often as it delivers explosions. They’re a bit annoying, to be honest. | Image credit: Eurogamer / EA
Not every mission is a winner. The level prior to this starts with an inferior rerun of Modern Warfare 2019’s ‘Clean House’—another example of Battlefield 6 aping CoD with dubious results. The obligatory open-world mission also falls weirdly flat, and I actually preferred the campaign when it channelled BF6’s dynamic firefights and explosive destruction through more linear set-pieces. Indeed, the final mission is phenomenal, pulling out all the stops in a way that just about legitimises the whole endeavour. It recalls the older style of cinematic military shooter campaigning, which threw you into a vast, sensorially overloading meat-grinder, and I like to see more of this from both Battlefield and Call of Duty in their single-player offerings.
Battlefield 6 accessibility options
Menu narration toggle, subtitles toggle and various settings. Tinitus SFX and relief frequency sliders. Various colour profiles, camera effect settings. Various hold/toggle settings for controls. Controller vibration toggle and intensity slider. Text-to-speech settings for chat. Menu tutorials, in-game tutorials and reset tutorial toggles. Hint toggles for controls/actions.
The way the campaign ties these missions together is less convincing. It starts with a disconcertingly timely inciting event, namely NATO failing to adequately respond to Pax Armata incursion in eastern Europe. But it quickly devolves into another entry in the adventures of Spec-Ops Man and the Tier 1 Troopers, all falling over one another to be the most patriotic, self-sacrificing psychopaths in military history. It also constantly futzes with timelines and flashbacks and playable characters in a way that makes the story difficult to follow, culminating in a limp ending that presumptuously sets things up for a sequel (or possibly some additional campaign DLC—it wouldn’t be the first time EA has pulled that trick).
Ultimately though, Battlefield 6 clearly understands what makes the series special, even if it occasionally seems reluctant to accept it. Unlike 2042, the fun is easy to find from the outset, and what problems it has are much simpler to fix. It could be more ambitious, and I’d like more of those larger sandboxes to play in, but overall Battlefield 6 is a reliable reset – and, crucially, a very strong foundation for EA to build upon.
A copy of Battlefield 6 was provided for this review by EA.
