Battlefield 6 is upon us, ushering in what could be the entry fans have been waiting for. With multiplayer, the return of Portal, and a campaign, this will be the full shebang at launch. However, during our review process, unpopulated servers meant we only encountered bot-filled lobbies, which isn’t quite how we want to experience the multiplayer.
Instead, our review in progress will focus on the campaign, which is a globe-trotting action extravaganza that’ll span roughly six hours. Across nine full missions, you’ll take down baddies, blow up plenty of vehicles, and maybe even raise hell in a tank.
The campaign for better and for worse, is your usual collection of military fantasy, where your rough and tumble squad must face insurmountable odds to take down a global threat. That threat is Pax Armata, an enormous private militia hellbent on taking down the bureaucratic world.
With some well-directed cutscenes, the Battlefield 6 campaign does take itself a little too seriously. It’s playing with ideas of global treason and political espionage, with a little too much name-dropping and political mumbo jumbo.
We enjoyed some aspects of the narrative, like a mysterious beef between your squad captain and the Scottish monologuing villain Kincaid. However, it was easy to get lost as characters engaged in some smarmy prattle about their theories and where the last mission went all wrong.
And, from a structural perspective, it dons a back-and-forth approach, as we weave from a present-day hold up with a high political figure to the main Dagger 1-3 squad, and the various missions that led up to this event, switching characters in the process. It feels a little stilted, and eventually, we sort of clocked out. Just tell us where we’re going and what to shoot.
Thankfully, that part of the campaign is actually pretty good. The game spans the globe, from the tight alleys of Cairo to the townhouse-laden streets of Brooklyn. We liked that each mission had its own little flair, whether those were sniping missions, stealthy segments, or all-out action, and missions never dragged on too long either.
There isn’t much mechanically there, and it lacks that sense of place that you’d maybe even get from a previous Battlefield campaign, like Bad Company 2. Its missions do feel like window dressing then, but at least in that regard, they’ve done their job. We enjoyed destroying the front face of a Brooklyn townhouse, and we felt cool as we lined up our shot nestled in the mountains of Tajikistan.
Gunfights across its campaign highlight just how pin-perfect the shooting feels here. Movement is tight, guns feel snappy, and it looks fantastic in the process. We loved sliding into cover with the double tap of Circle, as we slapped another mag into our rifle and began popping headshots while dipping in and out of cover. The guns in particular have a real oomph to them thanks to DualSense controller haptics and adaptive triggers, and the bombastic whip and crack of its sound design.
We played the game on the PS5 Pro using the Balanced mode, which aims for a higher frame rate whilst focusing on higher fidelity. We found this mode to be quite nice, with brilliant-looking vistas, manic destruction, and a nice level of fidelity on character models.
It wasn’t all perfect, however, as transitions between gameplay and first-person cinematics were quite buggy. Our character could be awkwardly dragged across an area to catch up with a scene, and sometimes, even interactions with certain items or doors needed to proceed could be a bit finicky.
The game also utilises a mixture of in-game first-person cutscenes and pre-rendered cinematics, the latter of which were of starkly lower quality and frame rate. They stood out like a sore thumb.
Additionally, the campaign is speckled with small technical quirks. None of which really took us out of the game, but maybe the tracking on a character during movement wasn’t quite right, or you fired your remote controller missiles a little too quickly after the last one, so you had to try again. It’s all to say that the campaign doesn’t quite have the technical polish you’d find in something like Call of Duty.
Conclusion
Battlefield 6 isn’t worth buying for its campaign alone — although we suspect no one’s really doing that anyway. For us, it’s a nice starter while we’re waiting for the main meal. It showcases how great the gunplay feels and how nice the game looks as a whole. But it’s not breaking any boundaries from a narrative, mechanical, or immersive perspective. Did we enjoy our time with it? Yes, in a turn your brain off kind of way. Will we remember it by the time we’re deep in the trenches of the multiplayer? Probably not.
But, as mentioned, this is only a part of the Battlefield 6 experience. Once servers go live with real players, and we get some serious sessions out in the field, we’ll update our review and score the game accordingly.
