Battlefield campaigns have struggled with their identity throughout the series’ history. Where Call of Duty, Battlefield’s top competitor in first-person shooters, has two storylines running through the parallel Modern Warfare and Black Ops sub-series with recurring characters and overarching plots, Battlefield’s single-player offerings have always been standalone. Battlefield 6 is no different, and the lack of a canonical Battlefield universe lets down its campaign from the off.
You play as various members of Dagger 13, an elite squad of marines tasked with bringing down Pax Armata, a private military corporation trying to topple NATO. This is already loosely reminiscent of a number of Call of Duty games, but the lack of attachment to or familiarity with squad members Carter, Murphy, Gecko, and Lopez means the attempts at jaw-dropping, emotional twists in the story hit like .45 caliber ammunition against the side of a tank.
The roughly 10-hour runtime doesn’t allow enough time to form attachments to these characters, despite Battlefield Studios clearly wanting you to care. That said, there is plenty of variety in terms of both locale and mission style, and as a result, the campaign doesn’t overstay its welcome. You visit Gibraltar, Brooklyn, Tajikistan, and even the Pyramids of Giza near Cairo as you barrel down the road nearby in a tank.
However, while I’m not a geopolitical expert, and by no means qualified to talk about what would make logical sense in what is clearly intended to be a war that could happen in real life, the settings you visit feel bewilderingly random. There don’t appear to be any thematic ties between the locations, especially Gibraltar… even if it does make for a novel setting, HALO jumping in, landing at the top of the rock, and making your way down to the city streets below.
Battlefield games have typically been focused on war at an epic scale — it’s in the name, after all — but the majority of the Battlefield 6 campaign takes place in smaller environments. New York townhouses, Egyptian streets while in a huge tank, even missions which may have an open area quickly funnel you into corridors and tunnels. There’s only one mission that truly feels like a Battlefield game at heart: Operation Ember Strike. The eighth mission out of nine, this is when the game finally opens up and presents you with multiple options to complete your objective, which is to destroy three missile sites.
In this mission, a sprawling Tajikistan plain is laid out in front of you, with enemy soldiers littered everywhere, and you can approach the sites in any order you please, picking up a variety of weapons along the way. You’re also given a drone to launch from cover and bomb enemies with, allowing for even more tactical approaches. The problem is, even though this mission ends in a truly massive set piece that is Battlefield in a nutshell, the subsequent objectives return to a much more linear format.
It’s safe to say, however, that Battlefield 6 has retained the core feel of exactly what works: gunplay. It’s always been the series’ biggest strength, from sniping with a bolt-action and popping enemies in windows to using a launcher and taking down a helicopter. The option to customize your loadout would’ve been appreciated, to get a feel for how some of the various attachments and optical sights play in a closed environment before moving to multiplayer, but weapons have that same oomph and gritty feeling they always have.
On the vehicle side, however, there aren’t any opportunities to pilot aircraft in the campaign, which would’ve gone a long way to crafting a brilliant set-piece. Tanks, meanwhile, are the same as they always have been: clunky, tricky to maneuver, but tough as hell and presumably accurate — “presumably,” given I’ve never been in a tank in real life — in how they repel almost all incoming fire.
Disregarding running into the occasional bug in this pre-release build — missing floor textures, AI squadmates either reviving you from 20 meters away or running blindly through crowds of enemy soldiers just to try to save you, or your squad not following you at all — the Battlefield 6 campaign lacks a cohesive identity. It has its moments, but it doesn’t hold a light to any remotely decent Call of Duty campaign. Nor does it rank particularly high among the Battlefield games, which 2010’s Bad Company 2 still sits atop, due to its incredible set-pieces and portrayal of war on such a large scale.
Thankfully, early impressions of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer — only a couple of matches in, mind, due to the servers not being particularly populated pre-launch — are already more impressive. While the multiplayer component has always been the draw of these games, before assessing this game in totality, we’ll need to spend a few days with it post-launch to get a feel for how it plays with full servers. So keep your eyes peeled. Until then, Battlefield 6 is tough to recommend based on the campaign alone.
