Battlefield 6 is nonsense in the best and worst ways
The Battlefield series, to me, has always thrived when it leans into weaponized stupidity.
EA's flagship multiplayer shooter franchise just works best when it feels like a rollercoaster that careened out of control three loops ago. Ideally, Battlefield is a game about cowardly huddling behind a tank with a vehicle repair torch for an entire match while helicopters explode around you every 30 seconds. Vehicle parts fly by your face on a regular basis, and merely sticking your head out to see what's going on will probably result in an opportunistic sniper ruining your day. When I play Battlefield, personal stats or even winning don't really matter; I'm there to see very expensive looking explosions and die in hilarious ways as often as possible.
The good news for fans of the series is that Battlefield 6 delivers on all of that on the multiplayer side of things. Series developer DICE has gone with a sort of "back to basics" approach after the mixed (to put it generously) reception of Battlefield 2042, rooting the setting in modern day and cutting back on the number of systems and upgrade paths you need to worry about on a moment-to-moment basis. As a result, it's the most fun Battlefield multiplayer has been in one of these games at launch in a long time.
Unfortunately, there's also a single-player campaign, which seems to be another in a long line of vaguely fun but tonally off-putting and stupid-in-the-wrong-way Battlefield campaigns.
Battlefield 6 works when it really needs to work
Starting with the good news, I really like the multiplayer in Battlefield 6. For some context, I have played and enjoyed most of these games since Bad Company on the Xbox 360, with 2016's Battlefield 1 probably being my favorite overall. I'm not even close to being a hardcore, expert-level Battlefield fanatic, but I know enough to get by.
With that in mind, I can feel pretty confident in saying this is closer to what Battlefield fans want than what the last game, 2042, provided at launch. Where that game was convoluted and busy, BF6 is relatively easy to grasp. There are four classic soldier archetypes to choose from, each with a distinct role in combat and proficiency with different weapons. This stands in contrast to 2042, which muddied up the works with a much larger roster of Overwatch-style characters to choose from. Battlefield has always been about feeling like a disposable cog in a larger war machine, so going back to nameless and faceless goobers who die every minute or two is a plus, in my book.
The rest of it is, honestly, pretty self-explanatory if you've ever played one of these games. All the classic modes like Conquest and Breakthrough are here. Rather than really try anything new, DICE just rolled with what has always worked, to this game's benefit. Normally I'd prefer at least one big, experimental new mode like 2042's 128-player matches, but then I remember how cacophonous and un-fun those actually were in practice, and feel good about what's on offer in BF6 instead.
Rather than shake things up in terms of modes or upgrade paths, DICE chose to simply refine the on-the-ground combat mechanics a bit. You have some new moves, like the ability to drag companions behind cover while reviving them, which makes the action feel appropriately desperate and cinematic. Being able to slide, sprint while crouching, and flop down on your back with your gun drawn also all feel pretty cool. And, of course, firing guns feels as good as ever, thanks in part to some truly incredible audio design that makes every shot feel impactful and a little bit terrifying.
Most importantly, BF6 has that distilled chaos that every good Battlefield game has. Sometimes you'll be stalking your way through a small building when someone's rocket blows the entire structure up with you inside of it. Other times, you'll see someone fly a helicopter straight into the side of a mountain because they hopped into the cockpit without knowing how to fly it. Battlefield, at its best, is slapstick comedy with a veneer of Serious War Stuff, and BF6 delivers on that promise to an endearing degree in multiplayer matches.
Unfortunately, the Battlefield 6 campaign feels like a dud
There is also a single-player portion of Battlefield 6, which I got maybe halfway through during the review period before deciding I'd rather do anything else with my time.
To be fair, it's not the worst-playing thing in the world. Every mission feels, in part, like a tutorial for the multiplayer, which is in keeping with some previous Battlefield campaigns. Sometimes you pilot vehicles, sometimes you do various flavors of infantry stuff, and in the handful of missions I played, there were at least three or four extended vehicle turret sequences. Seemingly anything you can do in a multiplayer match is represented to some extent here, and the mostly linear level design is decent enough at creating fun action moments that look very glossy and expensive, but don't have much substance to them beyond that.
Where it really lost me is in anything involving narrative. BF6 is set in a near-future world where NATO has been pushed to the brink of nonexistence, and a private military force known as Pax Armata has spawned to fill in some of the resulting power vacuum. I'm only joking a tiny bit when I say most of the cutscenes, which feature a litany of dull, archetypical gruff military characters barking at each other, feel like paid ads for the concept of NATO. At least in the early goings, you only see things from a pro-NATO perspective, and people are constantly going on about how cool and important NATO is, which is (to put it mildly) the subject of very real debate in real life.
In the parts I played, it's never really articulated why Pax Armata is so scary, other than by virtue of it not being NATO. Look, I'm not naive enough to expect a big, expensive AAA game that was likely made with at least some cooperation from the U.S. armed forces to take any position that questions western geopolitical hegemony. I've played enough military shooters over the years to know what to expect, and that's a game that reflexively sides with America's foreign policy interests whenever possible.
And hey, maybe the parts I didn't play go away from that to some extent. But in a world where I personally do not feel very good about most of the things my tax dollars are used for overseas, militarily speaking, BF6's campaign feels to me like it would've benefited from a different approach. The single-player campaigns in these games have always worked best when they aren't trying to just be Call of Duty competitors, with the irreverent goofball nature of Bad Company or the short-story collection structure of BF1 coming to mind. I just don't really care for the ripped-from-the-headlines aspect of this campaign, and that did a lot to make the prospect of finishing it very unappealing to me.
The good news is you can ignore the campaign and just play online, which is what I imagine many of you were planning to do anyway.
