Subject: "Battlefield 6 Campaign is Meh"
I have always been a bit of a sucker for FPS games. Thereās just something so mind-numbingly enjoyable about mowing through waves and waves of enemies. Not a single thought. Just gun people down and, bam, dopamine rush. Itās a guilty pleasure of mine and I can put in hours and hours just trying out new weapons and stuff like that.
Battlefield 6 is no exception. It launched last year with a lot of hype. People were shaping it up to be the Call of Duty killer it was supposed to be and I think it delivered on that promise more or less. Maybe it is like comparing apples to oranges but Black Ops 7 genuinely did have less hype compared to Battlefield 6. This review isnāt here to focus on multiplayer though, I want to talk about the campaign.
Gameplay
This is the gameās strongest suit. Itās nothing really special if I had to be honest with you. The gunplay is similar to MW2019 and has been pretty much perfected. Guns have that satisfying sway and weight to them. You also get your Tac-Reloads and all the other goodies we have come to expect from a game about Modern Warfare. The guns have a lot of attention to detail from what I have heard at least.
Movement is fine. Everything is just fine. There isnāt much really special here in my opinion. Itās just your bog standard FPS game. I donāt think Battlefield 6 needed to do anything extraordinary to change my opinion on things like this. It just needed to be a step up from 2042 in terms of gunplay and movement. I know that is a pretty low bar to set but EA still made the gunplay feel good.
Difficulty selection is kind of a joke. I donāt really know when FPS games started including revives but the only difference between the lowest difficult and the highest difficulty is how many revives you get and how ābullet-spongyā some of the enemy are. I also thought that the Tank controls felt too sticky and I think you can fix it in settings but I didnāt really bother with it.
Story
Ok. The story isnāt terribly great. Most of the gameās missions are just flashbacks that are slowly building up to what is happening in the present. The cutscenes that take place in the present run parallel to the flashbacks and show up after each mission is complete, building up the story. I think what the writers were intending was to build suspense but it just made the plot feel less cohesive.
By the end, the plot feels really confusing. The game does a really bad attempt at trying to end with a betrayal but it just feels like I donāt really know who is backstabbing who. If you play the last 2 missions in-game, you will find out exactly what I'm talking about. There is one character, that is sooo confusing, you canāt even tell if heās working for the good guy or the bad guy. The game doesnāt even try to paint him in a grey-area. Just confusion.
It might be cope, but to me atleast, Battlefield games have always been about the action and combat. Some of the games have had good stories, like Battlefield 1, but most of them are meh. BF6 squarely falls into this category. It doesnāt really do anything special in my opinion even though I wish it did but it does its job more or less.
Graphics & Art Direction
It looks stunning. The game looks simply fantastic. It does focus more on realism than an artstyle but man does it look amazing. I would say it does the full work of Unreal Engine all while being half as intensive on my poor laptop. There are also lots of small attention to detail that have been added like people leaving footprints and more.
The game doesnāt have forced Ray-Tracing which is another blessing for my GPU. I was able to play at a crisp 60-80 FPS on High Settings for the most part. I didnāt have Frame-Generation or any of those things turned on. As far as FPS games are concerned, performance is fine. The settings have lots of options that you can tweak at least on PC and Iām sure one can fine-tune it as per their own hardware demands.
Sound design is fine. Thereās spatial audio which is a plus. I didnāt really focus on the music much because there isnāt really much of an emphasis on it in the campaign. Therefore I canāt really say much about it. Itās not some rythm game or something where music plays a pivotal part so Iām just gonna leave this here.
Some Thoughts...
I donāt think the game has any moments that make it worth replaying. It is a pretty āsafeā game in my opinion. It doesnāt try shock you with extreme cutscenes or make you take radical decisions. It just feels like a movie that you sit through and watch for like 6 hours. Itās not terribly long. Itās not very involving. You just mostly go with the flow.
There is a lot more potential with this game. Anybody playing can tell that multiplayer was the big focus for EA. I saw some people mention that the campaign is just one long tutorial for the multiplayer and I kinda agree with them. I guess itās better than having no campaign at all like Battlefield 2042. Some people also mention that the campaign is worse than CoD MWIII which I think is a bit of a stretch.
I would highly advise against buying the game for the campaign alone. It was mostly just meant to complement your purchase. After the gargantuan flop 2042 was, I think this is a great step up. I didnāt really experience any awful bugs in the campaign like BF4 had which was a plus I suppose. Canāt wait to see what EA has in plans for the next few games, although I donāt think they are going to anytime soon.