Battlefield 6: Campaign - Review

The last time that a Battlefield game got a single player campaign, which told one single story was back in 2015 with Hardline and before then it was 2013 with Battlefield 4, so it has been a while. For those keeping score, Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V had War Stories, more focused tales, rather than grander narratives. So, the wait has been long, but has it been worth it?

The game gives you control over a number of characters, though you will most play as Dylan Murphy. Murphy is your gateway into the adventure, as he and his squad are getting ready for a briefing about the hand over of their base to the group Pax Armata. This is a private military group that has sprung up, seemingly overnight and with one goal, chaos. While a military from a country will work to some objective for that country, Pax Aramata does what it wants, when it wants. Murphy joins a team known as Dagger 13, who are sent around the world to try and fight back against Pax Armata and their seemingly endless wave of chaos. For obvious reasons, I won’t say any more on the characters or story points, as it something you really need to experience for yourself. I will however say that this is one of the best campaigns that Battlefield has delivered, only just after Bad Company 2. I do have an issue with the story and that is how its told, via flashbacks, because it often removes tension from events that happen. This is just a personal thing and not something that everyone will have issues with.

As far as gameplay is concerned, there is a lot of good to be found here and some not so good, but the latter is very small in number. A lot of the good comes down to just how well the game uses its existing tools to make a single player campaign work. A prime example of this was in one mission, I was taking cover behind some crates, I was reloading and waiting for a chance to pop back out. But as Battlefield is all about destruction, my cover was quickly blown apart by an enemy soldier. That was an experience I had quite a number of times, whenever I thought I was safe, I was rapidly persuaded that I was not. While I could easily say that the game was against me, it was not, as I was able to use that exact premise against the enemy. In one mission, I was trying to make my way through some city streets and there was a sniper up high that I just could not reach, so my solution was to bring the building down with my grenade launcher. Extreme yes, but it worked.

Now while the game has you play as Murphy most of the time, you do get to play as other members of Dagger 13 occasionally. Haz is one and Gecko is the other and what was nice about them, was that they have the classes that you find in the multiplayer. Murphy is an Engineer, which means rockets and wrenches, Haz is Assault and Gecko is Recon. For Gecko, she is often put into an overwatch position and told to take aim at folks across the map and it was always so much fun to do that. But as a Recon specialist, she also has tools to get the job done, like a drone. While you don’t get to choose the tools you take into a mission, you can pick things up along the way, which does give you some customisation freedom. The only real downside for the gameplay is that while it takes advantage of the class system from multiplayer, it does not offer the same variety in the missions. Something else that was annoying me, but didn’t impact the gameplay, was the ability to issue orders to your squad. I never took advantage of that mechanic, but the game kept trying to tell me about it, squad commands are the fetch of the Battlefield campaign.

Perhaps those commands would have been something I used if there was more variety in the missions but there simply wasn’t. This is not a negative aspect of the game, as the missions are incredible, but when you’re using aspects from the multiplayer, using all would be the best decision to make. There are only a handful of times that you get to drive on land and never do you get to fly anything. I am not expecting Murphy to have been a one-man army character, where they can do everything, but given the numerous characters in Daggar 13, it would have been nice to see someone given that mission. The other issue I have with the gameplay are those Battlefield moments; you know things that can only happen in Battlefield. When they do happen here, you are almost always locked into a cutscene to watch them unfold. There were a few times when something amazing was happening, but I had no control over my viewpoint, even though it was in game, so I had to just watch whatever the game was showing me and it was annoying. There are sometimes when things just go chaotic, case in point, at one time I managed to snipe the pilot of a helicopter and it came down in a ball of flames. The second time that I tried the same, I was not as successful, but when the copter did come down, in damn near landed on top of me. I will also mention that the developers have clearly never used bolt cutters on a padlock, because once you see how they think they work, you will laugh at them.

That honestly gives me a good segue into the presentation of the game, because it is equal parts amazing and weird. The amazing is just how great everything looks, from ruined fields or city streets with cars on fire, everything looked great. Of course, one of the biggest selling points for the series is that destruction and seeing a building come down never gets old, being the cause of it is also a delight. The game does offer a mix of rendered in-engine cutscenes and real-time ones and the only way I could tell they were different, was on my ultrawide display the rendered cutscenes had borders. The amount of attention given to the expressions of the characters is amazing and is setting a new level of quality that I expect going forward.

It is not just the faces; the places also benefit from the upgraded engine powering the game. One mission has you traverse a pretty large map and while you can’t go backwards once you have pushed ahead, there are no loads to be seen. You can even see across the map and while not see all the details, nothing pops up later in that space. One of the missions takes place in Brooklyn, a place that is also featured in the multiplayer. With the streets mostly devoid of civilians, all I needed to see was some snow and I would have thought I was playing The Division yet again. Even the more sparsely populated locations look great, there really isn’t a lot to say about the games visual, except. The games liberal use of explosions and smoke does mean it can be quite easy to get turned around in the levels. Now while they will do their best to keep you focused on moving forward, it is still far too easy to get lost at times, more so on the city street-based maps.

Thankfully, the game has some great audio queues to help you keep focused. The games audio work is great, sure the guns, tanks and grenades sound good, but for me it was the voice work that stood out. Now the voice work in the cutscenes is great, with each character giving a lot of life to their actions, but it is in the game where it shines. When the action kicks into high gear and it does that a lot, your squad mates will call out when dangerous foes hit the field of battle. It was quite common for me to hear something like ‘Sniper,10 o’clock, up high’, which would then let me target that new threat. If I was focused on a shotgunner or other heavy, and the squad were dealing with that sniper, they would also let me know if they had it done.

The games sound effects were also great, as I said before and with a nice pair of headphones on I was really able to hear them. There was a sequence of events that had me firing a lot of tiny rockets and the whir of their tiny engines as they sped across the sky, it was great. If I had one complaint about the audio, it was simply that the music when present, was often drowned out by the other sounds happening. I mean it does make sense to focus on the bullets flying at you, but the Battlefield music is iconic, so hearing it more is ok.

The campaign for Battlefield 6 is one of the best campaigns the series has produced, falling just below Bad Company 2. The story is interesting, the characters even more so and while the flashback presentation is not my preferred, it does work well enough. The biggest issue for the game is that it uses a lot of the multiplayer aspects, but just not all of them, so it feels incomplete. If you have been waiting for a proper campaign for the series, then your waiting has been rewarded with this one.

If you want to see what we thought about the games multiplayer, you can find out here.

The Score

9.5

Review code provided by Electronic Arts

The Pros

The campaign uses a lot of elements from multiplayer, making it feel like its really part of the world

The level of detail in the characters and locations is amazing

The Cons

While a lot of elements carry over from multiplayer, not all do and that feels weird

The game far to often leaves those Battlefield moments to cutscenes, which removes some of their impact