Battlefield 6 review – Amazing all-out war | games

forJust one minute into your first round in the massive multiplayer mode, Conquest, you’ll know you’re back in Battlefield at its absolute best. Fighter jets fly overhead, tanks roar, and the side of a building is obliterated by a rocket-propelled grenade. While Call of Duty has always focused its online matches on close-quarters skirmishes, Battlefield 6 makes you feel like you’re part of a large-scale military assault, and it’s bewildering and awe-inspiring, with quiet moments punctuated by the distant crackle of rifle fire, shouts of orders and the screams of medics.

EA’s long-running first-person shooter series has known to have had problems over the past couple of years, with the futuristic entry Battlefield 2042 widely considered a disappointment. So, this time, the development team (a group of studios including original creator DICE) returned to the excellent Battlefield 4 for inspiration, where the focus was on the true feel of modern military warfare on large maps with lots of players. As always, Battlefield 6 gives you a choice of four classes – Assault, Support, Engineer, and Recon – each with their own weapons and tools, all of which can be upgraded and customized as you level up your soldier and gain experience. A hybrid system that takes elements from older Battlefields as well as newer Call of Duty titles, the Gunsmith system revolutionizes weapon customization for online first-person shooters.

The best online modes are the big modes, like Conquest and Breakthrough, which focus on seizing large swaths of territory from the other team by pressing objective points. There are small and medium-sized modes too, including King of the Hill and Dominating, but for Battlefield veterans, they feel like nods to a different school of thought. From the beginning – 2002’s Battlefield 1942 – the series has encouraged tactical and deliberate play, gathering a few comrades and infiltrating enemy bases, timing attacks with helicopter support, and weakening defences. In a good session, there may be several minutes where you can walk across the map, or crawl towards a well-protected building. The meat grinder feel of Call of Duty, with its turbo-charged pacing and five-second shootouts, feels very far away.

However, when you find yourself in battle in this game, it’s exhilarating. Whether you’re on the streets of Brooklyn or the sands of Cairo, exploding construction pieces fly by, bullets collide with metal, and tanks explode in fiery clouds of flame and smoke. The visual and sound design is surprisingly good, capturing the grainy, shaky faux-camera documentary style of Generation Kill or Warfare, rather than the choreographed carnage of CoD action films. If you’re lucky enough to be in a good team (and I really recommend playing with at least one or two friends), a real sense of camaraderie will develop under fire.

The weak point is the game’s unnecessary campaign mode, a cheesy techno thriller set in the near future where a private military corporation aims to take over the world, and only a powerful team of American-controlled special ops warriors can stop them. It’s a tiring setup – and something of a cop out. By making the villain a fictitious military corporation, developers can pretend the story is meaningful and relevant without, heaven forbid, having to make a political point or implicate a country that might be a market for the game — or an investor in Electronic Arts. It’s also difficult to maintain any interest in a group of Identi-Kit tough guys who constantly utter phrases like: “There’s no routine here,” and (while surveilling the enemy base in sunny Gibraltar): “I don’t know what’s more impressive, the view or the firepower.” When main character Murphy says to Rafiq, “There’s no one I’d rather be in this fight with,” I wish there had been an option to defect.

Don’t let that stop you. For the most part, Battlefield 6 is a brilliant return to form, a thrilling, almost operatic shooting experience that manages to combine deafening combat with tactical precision. No one can guess how this game will fit into the modern landscape of hero shooters and blasting battle royales – it’s worth a shot, that’s for sure.