Battlefield 6 wants the world. In an effort to become a digital destination, the first-person shooter offers a variety of experiences. Single-player campaign returns, multiplayer once again runs the gamut between large-scale conflict and confined skirmish, Portal wants to usurp Halo's Forge and Fortnite's Creative, and a battle royale is on the way. Battlefield 6 wants to be one of the movers and shakers of the live-service market – a bona fide competitor to the perennially popular monolith that is modern Call of Duty.
It's a strategy eerily similar to Battlefield 2042's, but the key difference is that the game is actually very good this time – or at least what I've been able to play of it. Publisher Electronic Arts and developer Battlefield Studios (a conglomerate of Criterion, DICE, Motive, and Ripple Effect) admirably set up an environment in which I could play many of Battlefield 6's myriad modes pre-release. Still, it's impossible to prepare anything other than an imperfect facsimile of a live-service game expected to draw millions of players upon launch.
The essence of BF6 is quite clear, though, and it's exactly what the series needs to get back on track, even if it feels a little safe.
Come For The Multiplayer, Stay For The Multiplayer
Battlefield Is Back
Battlefield's signature multiplayer, with longstanding modes like Conquest, Breakthrough, and Rush, is far and away the highlight of BF6, which likely won't come as a surprise to series fans. The combined arms approach, often mixing infantry, armor, and aircraft, has long been a recipe for fortuitous chaos – for the so-called Battlefield Moments, if you will.
But the chaos has to be organized to a degree, and the return of classes is a major boon to Battlefield 6 feeling like it has its hand on the scale in a way that's not overbearing. The Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon classes give you four distinct, but wide avenues to support your team, and their class-specific gadgets flourish as a part of the larger sandbox. You're given objectives and four loosely defined roles, and being able to mix-and-match weapons, attachments, and gadgets to forge your own approach is as satisfying as it was in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, which BF6 is a clear descendant of.
Unfortunately, I can't speak much about Battlefield 6's competitive balance. Simply by virtue of playing pre-release, I, along with the others who had access, went up against a lot of bots (I was sporting an obscenely high K/D ratio which appears to have been wiped ahead of launch). This did, however, afford me a lot of time to ponder BF6's map design.
Battlefield 6's maps are, generally, very good, and I think the nine launch maps have struck a decent balance with regard to their size. The interplay of classes and their various roles really shine in the streets and alleys of Siege of Cairo and Manhattan Bridge, but there's also the regular doses of unadulterated vehicle-dominated combat on maps like Mirak Valley and New Sobek City. It also helps that my beloved, and still excellent, Operation Firestorm returns from BF3 with a new coat of paint.
Empire State and Saints Quarter are likely to be divisive, if only because they are the two maps without vehicles.
Broadly speaking, Battlefield 6 does a great job not only crafting interesting objective locations, but also making sure the space between is fun to navigate. This was a massive detriment to BF2042, which filled the space between objectives with wide-open expanses. Breakthrough and Rush are more structured, but this accomplishment helps Conquest and Escalation (a riff on Conquest that locks your home flag if you control the majority of objectives for long enough) have an organic push and pull as individual squads focus on disparate attacks and defenses.
My only complaint about the maps is that, despite them being quite fun, they feel a bit manufactured. The impression is that they were created to be good multiplayer shooter maps above all else, including simply being interesting locations in their own right. This is oddly highlighted best by comparing them to some of the campaign's nearby locales, which feel gravely obvious for a multiplayer map adaptation.
Why not have a map set atop the Rock of Gibraltar (or a remake of Battlefield 2142's Camp Gibraltar), instead of being confined to Old Town in Saints Quarter? Why do we have two maps in Brooklyn neighborhoods, but not one in and around Prospect Park? Instead of the nameless, Tajikistani mountain village on Liberation Peak, wouldn't it be more interesting to have one based on the region's hydroelectric dam featured in the campaign? Is New York not the perfect opportunity for Operation Metro 2.0 in the subway?
Despite the inkling that the maps could be more fascinating, they work, and it's refreshing to have a Battlefield that feels a lot like the series' classics. Battlefield 6 multiplayer is best when it's a big, cacophonous... well, battlefield. The experience is torpedoed when you wade into the smaller game modes. Objective-based ones like King of the Hill or Domination occasionally hit their stride, but Team Deathmatch, for instance, feels almost pointless.
The classes, vehicles, and maps work so well together in building up these varied matches that organically sprout unpredictable scenarios, so when you take away all the interesting stuff for the more generic, smaller game modes, you're left with just running, pointing, and shooting. Battlefield has always had this problem, and it's easily avoided by simply not playing these modes. However, it is indicative of how BF6 aims to be a game for everyone.
Single-Player Campaign Returns, But Should It Have?
A Story For No One, About No One
Most of my narrative critique of Battlefield 6's campaign is going to come off very negative, so I should preface it with this: the single-player aspect is entertaining in a sort of mindless way, and even does some interesting stuff with the series' hallmark gameplay mechanics. It's almost like the Platonic ideal of a shooter campaign. Each mission provides variety; you get to drive some vehicles, blow a lot of stuff up, and the set pieces are pretty spectacular.
The campaign plays cleverly with the squad mechanics, too. At its most basic, you get a command wheel to order your squad to mark enemies, throw grenades, etc. There are also some unexpected novelties with the classes, like a mission where you're an Engineer, and you have to escort a vehicle through hostile territory. I wasn't expecting actually to use a repair tool in the Battlefield 6 campaign, but it does a pretty good job of integrating a slate of gadgets you would normally only put through their paces in multiplayer.
The campaign's subject matter, however, is so inoffensive that it feels like it doesn't really say anything at all. Its frame story tries to inject an air of mystery, but the twists are so obvious that you can guess them early on. It centers on a private military corporation known as Pax Armata securing a great deal of geopolitical leverage as NATO member states begin to bow out of the alliance, resulting in the PMC effectively going to war with the United States of America. "Pax Armata" is Latin for "armed peace," and even aside from the incredibly on-the-nose moniker, the organization doesn't say anything of substance beyond a desire to shake up the world order.
Similarly, the campaign manages to say very little about the institutions of its main characters. Much like how Battlefield 6 at large feels like it's trying to appeal to everyone, the story is going out of its way to not make any bold statements on the military-industrial complex. I won't pretend that the Battlefield 3 and 4 campaigns were Pulitzer-worthy, but those fictional conflicts involve more plausible eventualities for the featured sovereign nations – Iraq, Iran, Russia, China, etc. – and are thus more interesting. Battlefield 6's story wants you to believe the world hangs in the balance, but it doesn't ever make a compelling case for why it does.
BF6 Looks Great, Feels Great, & Has Legs
Performance, Sound Design, & A Live-Service Future
Even with my many qualms regarding its storytelling, Battlefield 6 is very promising as a product. It runs exceptionally well on PlayStation 5, and even its default Balanced graphics mode is so smooth that the campaign's 30 FPS-locked cutscenes are jarring. Performance mode is the only alternative on console, and the trade-off appears to be less dazzling lighting – shadows are noticeably more jagged, and BF6's sublime atmosphere is a little less so. Still, you do crucially get higher frame rates.
Playing Battlefield 6 is a sensory delight; most notable is the exceptional sound design. The soundscape in a multiplayer match is relentless, and the surround sound feels authentic. Each gun's report, the beeping noises of the helicopter you're piloting, the mechanical churning of a tank shell reloading, a rocket whizzing by, the groaning of a building that's collapsing – every bit of noise is incredibly well realized.
The presentation is accompanied by movement that is chunky but not burdensome, and gunplay that is tactile and rewards mastery. Crouch-running, sliding, and diving into prone give you dynamic ways to move and avoid incoming fire, and dragging teammates while you revive them remains the single most transformative addition from Battlefield 6. Guns fill every possible niche, and it's immediately obvious when you fire one if you're outside its effective range. Unload from the hip inside a building, but make sure you exercise some trigger discipline on distant, moving targets.
It's a good sign that, having played BF6 in this stunted, pre-release state, I'm more excited for it to release than I was before. The main attraction, the multiplayer, is firing on all cylinders, and barring some unforeseen network catastrophe, I think it has a chance of cultivating a significant player base as it moves into the planned post-launch support.
Access to Portal was sadly nixed from the review period, and the battle royale mode has yet to make a splash publicly, but Battlefield 6 has a strong foundation. I feel pretty confident knowing that, even with the possibility of not becoming an all-in-one live-service phenomenon, the classic Battlefield multiplayer experience is better than it has been in years.
EA and Battlefield Studios have put a long road ahead of Battlefield 6, but it's starting off on the right foot. It feels good to play, and it is clearly designed to accommodate the series' principal game modes best. Battlefield 6 isn't genre-defining, and it doesn't need to be. Nine years after Battlefield 1, the series is finally releasing another game I've instantly latched onto, and I'm eagerly awaiting the many hours of Conquest ahead.
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