Imagine, if you will, that you own a cat. It’s a ginger cat, and it’s great. It shows love and affection; it cuddles up with you at night. You’ve got a great thing going. You really love your cat with all of your heart. Yet occasionally, there you are, relaxing and enjoying something on TV, maybe with a nice, refreshing drink and some snacks. All of a sudden, the cat that you love so dearly bites your exposed leg, causing your lovely snacks to fly all over the couch and carpet. You brush it off and tidy up, surely the lovable furball didn’t mean it? Five minutes later, the cat is sitting on the sideboard, watching you intently, when suddenly BAM! Your furry friend has smacked your drink off the sideboard and all over the floor. You scold the cat, telling him that he is bad and that he has done wrong. You hope that he’ll do better now that you have offered him some constructive feedback on his actions. Yet even after this string of bad behaviour, of course, you still love him.
Later that night, you wander downstairs to get a drink of water to quench your thirst. You can see the distinctive outline of your furry friend near the kitchen door. Curious, you turn on the light and… absolute horror! Your cat is sitting on the doormat with what can only be described as a proud expression on his face. At his paws is a dead mouse, the largest one you’ve ever seen. Your cat eyes you as if to say, “Look what I’ve brought you! You wanted this, right?”. After a long sigh, you grab a plastic bag and dispose of the mouse. Standing over your cat with an exasperated look on your face, all you can utter is “I love you, man. But WHY do you have to be like this?”
Being a Battlefield fan over the last decade has been exactly like owning that cat. You love it, you want it to do better, but sometimes it just won’t listen or behave. The last game, Battlefield 2042, didn’t just bring home a dead mouse; it left it to rot on the carpet. I almost gave up on the series entirely. But I’m glad I gave it one last chance, because Battlefield 6 is the best the series has been in a long, long time.
Battlefield 6 is a very safe game. Everything about it is essentially a response to the ire of the series’ players over the last few years. Players have been furiously pointing at Battlefield 3 and 4 for over a decade, exclaiming, “This! This is what we want more of!”. It took a while, but EA and Battlefield Studios have finally listened. That’s not to say that everything is sunshine and rainbows, however, and it only feels right to begin with the weakest part of Battlefield 6… its campaign.
Outside of the Bad Company series (and to an extent, Battlefield 1’s mini War Stories), the Battlefield series has never excelled when it comes to a narrative single-player experience, and Battlefield 6 is no exception to this rule. If I had to describe the campaign experience in two words, they would be bland and uninspired. It isn’t a good experience, nor is it objectively terrible. The narrative takes place two years in the future, in 2027/28. NATO has started to crumble for what can only be described as ‘reasons’. As a result, a private military company named Pax Armata begins to fill the void that NATO has already started to leave. The campaign begins with NATO pulling out of a base in Georgia, only to be surprised and attacked by Pax for, once again, what can only be described as “reasons”.
For the life of me, I could not tell you what is going on in this campaign. It is all over the place from a narrative perspective; it features characters with absolutely no personality or reason to care about them, and a villain who barely appears and is ultimately snuffed out with little fanfare. I was completely switched off for the duration, and nothing made me perk up and pay attention to what was happening on screen. It feels to me that the campaign for Battlefield 6 was very much rushed, just to have something to add to the package before launch. Considering the ultimate closure of Ridgeline Games (headed by former Halo director Marcus Lehto), which was supposed to be heading up all of the Battlefield series’ narrative and single-player, it only adds fuel to the speculative fire.
As well as this, the campaign poses very little challenge and features some of the most brain-dead AI enemies I’ve ever seen. Most setpieces in the campaign boil down to enemies funnelling themselves towards you with little to no strategy or self-preservation. It was all too easy to post up in a spot where you could get a sightline on the enemies as they aimlessly walked into your line of fire. The whole experience is monotonous, mundane, and just a genuinely unfun time.
But let’s face it, nobody who is picking up a Battlefield game is picking it up for a single-player experience. The star of the show when it comes to Battlefield is the multiplayer suite. Battlefield has a signature gameplay style that no other first-person shooter can emulate, and the multiplayer in Battlefield 6 is a return to the glory days of the series and an immeasurable amount of fun.
After both Battlefield V and Battlefield 2042 started to stray from the formula that made the series great (the veiled attempt to turn the series into a hero shooter with 2042 still gives me nightmares), Battlefield 6 finally returns to the roots of what made older games in the series so great. The old favourites, such as Conquest, Breakthrough, and Rush, are back, and a new mode, Escalation, makes its debut. Escalation is a surprisingly good time; it echoes classic Conquest, but as the round progresses, capture points will disappear, funnelling players closer together. As well as this, more vehicles and hardware will become available. What starts out as a slow-paced affair turns hectic and intense by the end of the round.
These modes are available on nine (in reality, eight) maps at launch to play on. These maps can be roughly split into three categories. On one end, we have gigantic all-out-warfare experiences on three maps where the entire sandbox is on show with tanks, helicopters, jets, and more at the player’s disposal. Then there are medium-sized maps that are more infantry-centric but still feature vehicles such as tanks and, occasionally, helicopters. Finally, there is Empire State, which is an infantry-only experience with no vehicles and a tight, small design. There is one more map named Saints’ Quarter, but I have never played it because it is exclusive to modes such as team deathmatch and domination, which are not modes that a lot of the Battlefield community enjoys (hence my claim of there being eight maps rather than nine).
Most of these maps are a vast improvement over the empty, desolate, and uninspired map design of Battlefield 2042, and they play and flow really well. Siege of Cairo, in particular, I think might become a classic Battlefield map given some time, as it evokes the likes of maps such as Strike at Karkand and Grand Bazaar from older titles in the series. The only outlier is New Sobek City, which is an absolute cluster of a map that feels like something a first-time map designer came up with in an afternoon. It is horrifically unbalanced, features unfair sightlines that favour one team, has too much verticality and areas that people should not be able to get into, and has absolutely no flow or strategy whatsoever. Whenever this map appears, I will more often than not leave the game and find another one; it’s that atrocious.
But what are maps without a sandbox of weapons and gadgets to use within them? Battlefield 6’s sandbox is serviceable, and there is definite room for improvement. Obviously, because the game is going down a live service route, there are going to be new things added down the line, but the offerings at launch, while good, are sparse. This is compounded by the progression system in the game. At the time of writing, the grind to unlock new weapons, attachments, and gadgets is painfully slow. At over 70 hours of playtime, there are certain gadgets I am nowhere near unlocking, and I have not seen any other players using them either. This is due to the unlock requirements through challenges being almost impossible to obtain for a regular player, and they were clearly not thought through properly (however, the developers have stated that these issues are set to be addressed and tuned).
Despite this caveat with the sandbox, Battlefield 6 nails the most important thing that it needed to, and that’s that it’s an absolute blast to play. I have had so much fun in my time with the multiplayer, with each game being completely different every time. Each round is a story, where everything you do, no matter how small, contributes to your team. Whether you’re gunning in a helicopter with a co-pilot, pushing the front line as the assault class, running as a support and keeping your team on their feet by downed players into cover to revive them, hunting vehicles as an engineer, or flying a drone to gather intel as a recon, there is always something for you to do that doesn’t exclusively rely on you being amazing at shooting your gun. Even when I’m not playing, all I want to do is play more, and see what the next round will bring.
But what is a Battlefield game without excellent graphical fidelity and sound design? Battlefield 6 is no exception to this tried and tested trope. Games in the series always look and sound absolutely incredible; the maps ooze atmosphere and have amazing attention to detail. The sound design deserves incredible props. I don’t know what wizardry it took to make this game feel like you’re actually on the ground as jets whizz by overhead, explosions thump the ground next to you, and weapons sound weighty and menacing, but the sound design team absolutely deserve a raise.
I would also be remiss to not mention the Portal mode within the game. Portal has a lot of potential to do amazing things with Battlefield 6, and there are already some amazing things on display. Portal is, at its most basic, a map editor. Players are able to go in and place objects and other items, modify and change maps, and make new experiences. But that is ultimately just scratching the surface. There is also potential to create scripts and insert code into these experiences to make them truly amazing. There have already been some incredible 1:1 remakes of maps from other game series within Portal, including a functional version of Counter-Strike’s de_dust2. The sky is truly the limit for this mode, and I am excited to see what players do with it
Finally, there is one thing I absolutely need to commend Battlefield 6 on, and that is the fact that it is a (mostly) polished experience that launched with very few technical issues. Long-time Battlefield fans like myself will know that these games historically are riddled with bugs and server issues on their first day. It has happened with every Battlefield release except for Battlefield 1, but now Battlefield 6 can join that exclusive club as well. This game had close to 700,000 concurrent players at launch on Steam alone. That’s not accounting for consoles or other clients, such as the EA App, too. And yet, the game was playable with no queues, no server disconnects, and no game-breaking bugs. I know that I shouldn’t be handing out trophies to a functioning multiplayer video game actually working at launch in 2025, but this is the unfortunate state of the games industry these days, where you are conditioned to expect something to be broken. So if I can place a game on a pedestal for doing the bare minimum, and for not frustrating me out of the gate, then my God, I am going to do it!
