“Battlefield” has been around for over two decades. Still, even its most diehard fans would probably argue that it’s been a bit of a non-factor in the first-person shooter conversation for much of the second half of that timespan, after the disappointing “Battlefield V” in 2018 and “Battlefield 2042” in 2021, a game so broken in its early days that many fans gave up.
Like a soldier bursting through a slo-mo explosion in an action movie after the audience thought him dead, here’s “Battlefield 6,” an ambitiously designed and remarkably well-executed shooter. The map variety, the incredible sound design, the stunning graphics, the tight campaign—this is the best “Battlefield” in almost ten years, a reminder of what this series does so well and why it still matters in its third decade.
In the ‘00s and early ‘10s, EA’s “Battlefield” was one of the most critically and commercially successful franchises on the market, really pushing the envelope in terms of immersive combat experiences. I can vividly remember being stunned at the malleable environments of early “Battlefield” games. For those unfamiliar, cover mechanics in shooters are typically pretty ridiculous in terms of real-life physics. Let’s just say that hiding behind a wooden box to avoid machine-gun fire probably wouldn’t work.
And so “Battlefield” created a world in which grenades, tank fire, and other weapons impacted everything. Want to take cover in a house? It might come down around you. By the end of most matches, the buildings were reduced to rubble. The games also prioritized teamwork over the lone wolf approach, revolutionizing the idea of co-op-based combat as players served different roles like a sniper-toting Recon expert or a much-needed Medic. 2005’s “Battlefield 2” and 2011’s “Battlefield 3” were two of the best games of their subgenre, and 2016’s “Battlefield 1” really worked too. But then the annual juggernaut that is “Call of Duty” took over, and it felt like “Battlefield” was lost.
“Battlefield 6” returns to everything fans love about these games, updating the foundational elements of the series to 2025 graphics, mechanics, and sound design. From the minute that I jumped into the multiplayer portion of the game pre-launch, it just felt different than the consistently frustrating “2042.” I’m a big proponent of map design being an essential aspect of whether or not an FPS works, and the layouts here are fantastic, varying tight corridors with sniper-friendly open landscapes. And, again, nowhere feels safe. Walls come down—heck, an entire cement patio collapsed on me once—and a sense of true danger elevates the tension in a way that’s just not true with “CoD,” even as much as I liked what the last installment in that series did well, too.
As usual, there’s remarkable customization and depth of play, both in loadouts for your specific gameplay and modes that can go big like Conquest or small like Close-Quarters Battle. There are still a few glitches—I shot a guy and he hung in the air like he was being raptured just today—but nothing that can’t be patched out quickly. It’s also important to praise the physics and the sound design in the multiplayer portion of the game. Guns feel responsive, shots connect, and explosions resonate. One can’t undervalue how smoothly “Battlefield 6” looks and sounds, two key elements to making it immersive.
The same is mostly true of the campaign, which runs about 5 hours and unfolds relatively linearly in terms of storytelling; a few missions can be completed with a bit of choice in the order of objectives, but it’s not big into player control. There aren’t multiple endings or open worlds to explore. You play Gunnery Sergeant Dylan Murphy, an American Marine on the edge of what is essentially an ideologically driven world war. If you were thinking Apple TV+ delaying “The Savant” because of sensitivity to its timeliness was appropriate, you should get a load of this, a game that feels like it’s predicting that opposing factions will be literally murdering each other in major U.S. cities in just a few years. (Unlike a lot of horrifying visions of the future, the writers of “Battlefield 6” don’t even leave the late 2020s, so you’ve only got a few years, chaos warriors.)
Murphy is at a NATO base in Georgia before it’s about to be transferred to a private organization known as Pax Armata. Suddenly, the base is under attack by a rival faction, leading you and your marine colleagues to find out what exactly is going on while dodging gunfire. The relatively short game allows for a sort of crash course in the multiplayer section, in that you’ll ride tanks and other vehicles that also appear there. It gives you the sense of how “Battlefield 6” plays and works as a good tutorial for the gameplay, setting,s and tone of what most people buy this game for, shooting other actual gamers.
After a truly promising start, the campaign of “Battlefield 6” gets a little goofy. Crashing helicopters, dull tank missions, and waves of enemies who like to stand next to explosive barrels hamper what could have been a great bit of storytelling. The bones are there in the saga of a villain who turns out to be a former British soldier, someone who feels betrayed by the systems set up by the powers that be, and is essentially starting a worldwide revolution.
But every time that “Battlefield 6” leans into commentary, it jumps back to excess instead. To be fair, some of the most chaotic sequences feel truly dangerous as soldiers storm bases that are crumbling under tank or helicopter fire. Again, the sound design impresses, working with the explosive visuals to replicate the “just run for safety” fear of combat. That the AI enemies you find in this landscape are basically just waiting to be shot is disappointing, but it’s common in the campaigns of FPS shooters.
And it’s worth noting that the overriding aesthetic of chaos that drives the campaign feels of a piece with the multiplayer portion as well. The story of “Battlefield 6” depicts a world at constant war, envisioning a not-very-distant future where battles are fought in previously safe locations. That sense of danger continues into the multiplayer as you battle to win matches in places like Brooklyn and Cairo. “Battlefield” has returned with what could be called a callous look at how power brokers are pushing us to self-destruction. And while other installments have looked to the past or the future, the series found its voice again by getting close to home.
The publisher provided a review copy of this title.
