I played Battlefield 6 for over 20 hours, and its multiplayer rivals CoD — but skip the solo mode

After a brief visit to the future in Battlefield 2042, the latest title in the long-running shooter franchise moves the series to a more modern era. The good news is that Battlefield 6 is a major improvement over its lackluster predecessor, but fans of the slower-paced Battlefield 5 and Battlefield 1 might find the latest warzone to be too chaotic.

Battlefield 6 is a return to basics for the series, with a focus on traditional classes and destructible environments that should have longtime players breathing a sigh of relief. While the multiplayer is at its best, the single-player portion of the package is poor.

Battlefield 6: The Basics

• What is it? Battlefield 6 is the 10th mainline game in the long-running EA shooter franchise. It takes place a couple of years in the future for a modern-ish setting. Built primarily for multiplayer, it does feature a short single-player campaign.
• Who is it for? Fans of previous Battlefield titles should enjoy this one. It’s also a rival to Activision’s Call of Duty, but with larger, more destructive environments.
• What’s the price? The standard edition of Battlefield 6 is $69. There is also a $99 Phantom Edition, which features extra weapon and character skins alongside some additional digital goodies.
• What other games has the developer made? A collection of studios make up “Battlefield Studios”, including DICE (behind previous Battlefield titles), Criterion Games (notable for Burnout and Need for Speed), and Motive, which recently developed the Dead Space remake.
• What games is this similar to? Battlefield 6 is most similar to the equally long-running Call of Duty franchise, but offers a larger scale and vehicle combat

Snipe away

Like previous Battlefield titles, Battlefield 6 is an online multiplayer shooter that drops up to 64 players into its various maps. Unlike Battlefield 2042, there’s no 128-player option this time.

If you didn’t like 2042, Battlefield 6 is a massive improvement. The gunplay is snappy, and enemy soldiers go down pretty quickly, sometimes too fast for my liking.

After 2042 eliminated classes in favor of specialists, BF6 reintroduced them in the form of Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon. They’re fairly self-explanatory, but they do return Battlefield to a more squad-focused game, even if you don’t play with friends.

I’m a longtime FPS player, and Battlefield 6 is the first multiplayer title where I willingly picked the sniper (dubbed Recon) class. I tried out all of the classes, but I kept returning to Recon because it actually feels fun to play.

There are no 360 noscopes here — at least not from me — but sniping feels incredibly quick. Despite that, I felt like I had time to track targets. Now, I’ll never claim to be good at sniping, but I felt functional, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever claimed about the sniper class in any other shooter.

At times, the pacing is a little too fast and more in the vein of Call of Duty, which moves at hyperspeed. I want Battlefield to move a tad slower. It can feel like you’re rushing from place to place without a moment to consider strategy. However, movement speed is fine even with slides and hops like COD, and the time to get your first kill or die and respawn feels appropriate.

Maps are more appropriately constrained compared to the overwhelmingly vast arenas of its predecessor, and even in some of the emptier bot-filled matches I played in the run-up to launch, I rarely felt like I was running around aimlessly looking for other players.

There are six modes at launch, with two focused on capturing positions and flags in Conquest and Breakthrough. Rush is the traditional plant and defuse bomb scenario seen in everything from Counter-Strike to Valorant and Overwatch. The smaller-scale Domination and King of the Hill (capped at 16 players) are about capturing and holding flags for points.

Despite the bombastic nature of Battlefield, I found myself preferring the smaller Domination and King of the Hill modes. As an FPS player, I do prefer slightly more reined-in options where strategy and tactics play a bigger role.

If you prefer chaos, the bigger Conquest and Breakthrough modes are fun, but the best large-scale offering is Escalation, where the game starts with multiple points for your team to try and control, but as the match goes on, there are fewer and fewer capture points, which consolidates the battle into smaller areas.

New modes and maps are coming as a part of “Season 1” that arrives soon after the game goes live, but I think Battlefield players will be plenty happy with the options out of the box.

A forlorn solo journey

Battlefield 2042 did not feature a single-player campaign, and the one included with BF6 doesn’t really justify bringing it back. I suspect most people won’t play Battlefield 6 for the campaign, but Battlefield Studios included one, and it’s not good.

For starters, it’s very short, around four to six hours. Second, the story is all over the map, literally and figuratively, including one mission that puts you in a tank for seemingly no other reason than you get to drive a tank.

It feels like whole chunks of the story are missing as you bounce around from Brooklyn to Cairo to Tajikistan. There are some interesting ideas buried in the plot, which sees a private military company amass enough power and weapons to take on NATO in an attempt to break up the alliance. And the CIA is involved, because of course it is.

I would love to play a game that explores the role of PMCs in global conflict and the potential fragility of international alliances in the modern world. But…

Battlefield 6 only hints at that story and instead focuses on a four-person elite special forces Dagger team and their strange revenge mission while the world falls apart around them. Again, an interesting idea, but with such a short campaign, we only get snippets of its potential.

As for the missions themselves, they’re rote, linear, and at times entirely skippable. One mission that finds you stuck in the subway tunnels of Brooklyn can be sprinted through without ever really firing your weapon. At one point, I ran past scores of enemies via a side tunnel to get to the end of the level while my AI teammates cleaned things up.

In the final mission, a supposedly bombastic set piece, I ended up sprinting through bombs and enemy soldiers without ever feeling in danger.

The one nice thing I can say about the campaign is that you don’t have to install it when you download the game. So, you can skip it without it taking up your precious hard drive space. Install it, faff about a bit, and then delete it.

It’s not just grey and browns

Battlefield comes in five separate downloads if you have the digital copy. Fortunately, you can choose what to install, including HD texture packs. For example, if you’re multiplayer only, you can install the base game, multiplayer pack, and the HD textures.

I reviewed Battlefield 6 on a standard PS5. There are options to prioritize performance over graphics in the settings, such as the new “Ultra” preset, which is meant for maximum visual fidelity. I left it on balance for my playthrough, as I believe that’s how most people will play.

In both multiplayer and the campaign, I thought the graphics were great. In maps, I never felt lost, and even in the chaos of explosions and debris falling everywhere, I never lost track of my objective.

Outside of the game, the menu is…it’s less neon than before, though your mileage may vary with all the grays. Like many modern menus, it’s more reminiscent of a smart TV display with squares and tiles everywhere. The new menus take fewer clicks than the 2042 ones, but all in all, I would prefer a simplified list.

Maybe EA could hire this guy.

Battlefield 6 review: Verdict

Battlefield 2042 wasn’t a total disaster, but it’s clear that with Battlefield 6, the development team has listened to fan feedback. The return to the traditional class system and more constrained maps make for a better experience.

There’s a good core experience here, even with the COD-ification of the series. And yes, the single-player campaign is next to worthless, but you don’t need to play it.

Multiplayer is where Battlefield 6 shines, from the large-scale vehicle-friendly maps to modes focused on smaller teams and tight corridors..

The important thing is that it feels fun. Often, the lifestyle-ization of these types of games wipes away the fun, but BF6 brings that back.

Battlefield 6 won’t blow you away, but it doesn’t need to; it needs to get the franchise back on track and be fun to play. The game does that.