Battlefield 2042 - Review

There are few game series that will require me to play each entry, Battlefield however is not one of those games, I have sunk hundreds, upon hundreds of hours into the series since 1942, even that bizarre web browser game. While Battlefield 2042 was always going to be a game I would play, I was worried that the lack of a single player campaign, especially since the shorter stories from the recent games were so well done, would hurt it. Having put time into the release, there is a lot of good to see and a little bit of bad.

Battlefield 2042 is best described as three games in one, owing to their push of three distinct modes and you will really need to consider that going in, because some modes are great, while others can be a little dry, but let’s start with the classic Battlefield multiplayer, All-out Warfare. This is the meat and potatoes mode of the series, it is the one that started it all and any long-time fan will tell you is what makes Battlefield, well Battlefield. Out of the gate the game offers two modes within it, the iconic Conquest and the more recent addition Breakthrough and both modes are a blast to enjoy. If you have no idea what I am talking about, here is a quick breakdown of each, Conquest is basically capture the points on the map, whereas Breakthrough has one team attempting to push forward to gain ground, while the other team attempts to hold the line. While the modes maybe returning from entries past, there are a number of changes to the formula that make them feel fresh and will take a little to get used to. The main change is that your capture point is now broken up into a number of objectives in each zone, so while you might have a single capture point in one zone, another may have two or three and you need to have all under your control, to capture the entire zone.

While the modes themselves haven’t changed, it is the character classes that change up the game, now known as Specialists, these new character classes can do some amazing things, if you get the right loadout. Rather than you picking a medic class or a recon class, like in games before, you are basically looking to get a singular perk for each character, Mackay for example has his grappling gun to zip up high, where as Sundance will pack a wingsuit, allowing you to ‘fly’ around the maps. Once you have your Specialist selected, it is then on you to discover the loadout that works for you, I myself spent a lot of my time as Boris, whose special gift is a turret, that was great for placing down behind me and then loading up as a sniper class, to take down enemies from a distance, without the need to worry about who might be sneaking up behind me. As you play, with any Specialist or mode, you will level up and start to unlock weapons and other gear you can use to adapt your play style, you might even get something that makes you want to change to a new Specialist.

While the All-out Warfare is going to be where many players go, the other two modes are going to split the player base and for very different reasons, Hazard Zone is a more tactical experience and Portal is a different beast all together but let’s talk Hazard Zone. The main thing with Hazard Zone is that it uses smaller player counts, on select portions of the existing maps and tasks each team of four players to obtain hard drives from crashed satellites, pretty simple stuff. The catch is that when you first start into the mode, you will have no money in which to buy things, but the game will provide you one basic gun, side arm and gadget and the more you play, the more cash you can earn to start buying better gear, the downside is though, once you have completed that round, you lose that gear and have to buy it again. Cash or Dark Market Credits as they call it, can be earnt in a number of ways, successfully extract a drive or two and you get cash, kill enemies and you get cash, you get the point.

While the Conquest and Breakthrough modes do make use of teamwork, you can run around solo for a while, if you so choose, but here, heading out on your own will see you dead and unlike the other mode, if your team doesn’t have any medical supplies, they can’t revive you. When I was playing it, the squad I was with was evenly matched, we all died rather quickly, but once we started to get kills and a few extractions, we had the cash to start going in with medkits and redeploy beacons and started gaining some ground. The problem is for all the wins we had, we had loses and one particular match, we barrelled across the map into another squad and were wiped out, that round lasted for less than 30 seconds. The issue with that was that we got no cash, as we didn’t achieve anything and as I had spent my piggy bank a round before, I had nothing to buy anything of use, so we went into the next round, underprepared compared to other teams on winning streaks.

Hazard Zone is very likely to get its followers, there a lot of potential for the metagame there to draw folks in, do you stay in the round until the second extraction attempt, in order to try and get the most drives, or do you ignore the drives and just hunt down other teams. Regardless of the path you choose, if you are not good, or refuse to work as a team, you won’t earn cash and therefore you won’t be able to put forth a decent attempt at getting ahead. For my time with it, I can simply say that it is not for me, the mode is ok, but there is too much riding on your skill and if you are like me and a fair-weather player of Battlefield, you will spend more time loading into games, then playing them.

The third mode that players can get their hands on is the Portal mode, which does not require a special gun that lets you traverse the map, but instead lets you customise the rules of engagement like never before. This isn’t just about letting you decide where players spawn, no you can do things like change the speed at which projectile weapons move, lock folks into vehicles if they get in to them and even make it so the enemy team moves 30% slower than you. Beyond that, you can opt to remove all of the guns, bar one, or allow for only frag shells for the SPAS-12 shotgun, if you really want chaos and then, if that isn’t enough you can go into the logic editor and really get creative. We were first given the chance to experience a community created mode called VIP Fiesta, which was a team deathmatch style event, where each team had a VIP, kill 15 off them and your team won. The catch was that the mode was limited to one map, with one team being modern 2042 soldiers and the other being 1942 soldiers, complete with the gear from the game. After that the team at Ripple Effect, formally DICE LA, gave us an example of what is possible, the first mode they created was just standard free for all, which was just pure chaos, but then they added a few logic rules and it became rockets only, but you could only have one rocket at a time and to reload you had to jump five times.

I know that doesn’t sound all that exciting and if I am being honest, it was kinda of boring after the first few minutes, but the point was that it didn’t take hours of coding to make the change, it didn’t require testing of configurations or components, just a few basic IF statements and things were on their way. What was even better was that after that, we got to play Conquest and Rush modes in it, on the maps from the three games being included day one, so Battle of the Bulge from 1942 and my favourite map Caspian Border from Battlefield 3. This wasn’t us running around, pretending we were in those games, this was us playing as the teams from them, with the gear, on the maps, just now recreated for the latest version of Frostbite. I really can’t describe how incredible it was to run around those classic maps and relive the old school Battlefield experience and even that VIP Fiesta mode was great fun.

Of course, if you are looking for the story of the 2042 experience, that is going to be played out across the games seven new maps, each themed to a different part of the conflict that has erupted post the world going to hell in a hand basket. The problem with the story and I use that term loosely here, is that each time you load in, the side you load in with tells the exact same tale, it is the same reason you are going in and fighting, this is something that Titanfall, the original game, suffered with and it seems the team at DICE haven’t found any other way of telling the tale. This is of course not saying the maps are bad, apart from Discarded, which I really don’t like, they are fantastic, Orbital is the one was in the beta, but Kaleidoscope and Hourglass were new and amazing. Something you have to understand about the maps is that they are massive, even the smallest of them is still larger than most of the maps you may have played on before. It isn’t just that the maps are bigger, they are also taller, which allows for a lot more vertical gameplay – not counting those who live in the planes and helicopters and running away from a fight up high won’t end in your death, as you can just parachute off to the ground below and keep the fight going.

Sadly though, the size does work against them, because if you can’t spawn in the action and instead have to spawn back at the base and if you can’t get into a vehicle, then you are going to be running on foot for quite a while and as some maps are open at points, you can be easily picked off. The other issue with the maps is the weather and this isn’t an issue that breaks the experience, but just changes up the game in ways you may not like, the big one is of course the tornado, a massive funnel of wind and whatever it has picked up, that moves randomly across the map. I encountered a few of them playing the game and the two best or worst examples I can give were when I spawned in near the base on Hourglass and spawned in under the overpass, which protected me from the effects of the tornado, but left me stuck there, unless I wanted to get thrown around. The second instance was when I jumped into a car as it went by me, only for the guy driving it to head straight into the tornado on the map, they then bailed out and left me to go flying into a building and die. Weather isn’t bad, but as you have no control over it, it can be a pain, unlike the old levelution system.

Taking a look at the games presentation things are a mix of incredible and frustrating, the incredible is just how amazing everything looks, with maps that have incredible scale and then the sheer number of players in a starting zone. The maps all have their own unique flavour, so if you are playing on one map, you won’t easily think it is another, for example while I don’t like Discarded, the visual design to it, is so unique that you won’t think its anything else. The map is made up of a lot of varying shades of browns, from mud to rust and then when the tornado kicks in, that just causes those colours to blend. Hourglass is another map that has a distinct colour pallet, with its tan colour, thanks to the sand everywhere, but head into the city portion of the map and you will get bright colours from the giant led panels decorating each building. Orbital and Kaleidoscope are the greenest maps, but one is a tropical island setting and the other is a modern city centre and mixing them up is not something you could do.

The frustrating comes in the form of the games audio, mostly around the Specialists, but there are a few other areas that need to be tweaked but let’s start with the Specialists. When a round is over, you will have to hear the best players characters proclaim their victory and it is usually the same lines each time, so if someone is the best at something and they use Angel all the time, get ready to hear that winning statement a lot. It isn’t just in those final moments of the match, when your character goes down, you can call in for aid, letting other players know you are down and need assistance, that feature works great, but no matter which person I used, the lines were usually the same few, on repeat, until I either died or got revived. The other sound issues are related to core gameplay, some of the guns in the game sound weak, even though they are not and considering you can load into Portal and hear the classic and powerful sounding guns, the standout even more. The final issue to be aware of is that the footsteps sounds are really loud, but at the same time uneven, so when you here them, they could be next to you, or a fair distance away and there is no easy way to distinguish which one it is.

For all its issues, lack of an actual story campaign, a mode that is not really Battlefield and characters that sound like they are on repeat, there is an awe-inspiring amount of content and that is before you dive into Portal. The new maps are massive and the scale of combat on them, can simply be overwhelming, but the downside is there can also be a lot of nothing happening. Portal is going to be the mode to keep an eye on though, given the freedom players have to create game modes or combinations in the infinite, it should keep things fresh for a long time to come and that is before they add in more content to it. If you are a long time Battlefield fan, 2042 offers plenty to enjoy, newcomers though may find themselves feeling like they have been throw in the deep end and while time and practice can fix that, being that this is a multiplayer only experience, it is going to be a brutal learning curve.