blustrkr's Battlefield 6 Review Xbox Series X|S, 50-100 hours played

We've all been waiting years for a new modern combat Battlefield game, and here it is, complete with a single player campaign and all (but no co-op missions 😔). While not perfect, there's plenty to love and the launch has been much smoother than previous titles. It also looks like with Season 1 releasing tomorrow there's quite a bit more on the way including a new free-to-play mode called Battlefield: RedSec.

Overall I am pleased with how the game runs. The beta was already pretty solid despite hundreds of thousands of people being in the queue at once, and the finished product is no different. I haven't had too many issues on Series X or PC (and I'm on a 2060 Super) aside from green flashes and one crash.

Adding onto this, the great performance comes with some good looking visuals. To me, it looks very similar to 2042's graphics (which I also enjoyed), but a bit less detail in some 3d models and their textures (for example character models). No ray tracing this time around, which definitely contributes to the solid performance. I think leaving the Xbox One and PS4 gens behind, while sad, was a good thing for the game and gave the developers a smaller graphical/performance target to focus on. I suppose the same thing will happen in a few years with the next consoles and I'll be writing this again with future games!



The audio is also sounding great overall, although an update is coming in a few days to overhaul some of the audio. I will say the soundtrack leans heavily on the Battlefield "dundun dun dundun dun" and overall seems pretty Generic Military Shooter™ but that could just be me.



Many online claimed the campaign seemed like a massive oversight, which makes sense since according to rumors it was years behind schedule and ripe with development hell. But I was then surprised when I saw it didn't match with what I heard online at all. While not necessarily revolutionary in any way, the campaign seemed pretty decent to me. It was a very "on-rails" experience when normally I expect a Battlefield campaign to have some more open areas leaning heavily on enemy AI, vehicles, flanking, etc, so that was a bit of a bummer but overall still enjoyable.



Multiplayer is fun, but honestly exhausting sometimes.

The spawn menu is a bit glitchy if you use the joystick with the cursor jumping everywhere, making it a pain to spawn sometimes, especially at the beginning of the match for some reason. I'd definitely stick to the d-pad on that one if you can. For some reason it also scrolls to the bottom of every scroll list in the game.

For some reason, when partied up in the main menu, the squad gets all split up when queueing into a game. Then everyone has to back out and we try again until we all make it into the same match. Even when I'm alone and a match ends, it glitches out and I have to back out to the main menu to restart matchmaking. Not exactly a big help for the vibes.

The unlocks are a hell of a grind sometimes. For example, 30 kills while under the effects of the Adrenaline Pen (which lasts a whole five seconds) took me a long time to get. As a former Destiny player I don't mind a bit of a grind sometimes but this can get awfully repetitive. Luckily DICE addressed this in a patch (and possibly made some of them too easy now).

The maps are small, especially so for a Battlefield game. I have a feeling the passionate....erm....feedback let's say from the community in regards to the big maps in 2042 was probably a bit overwhelming to say the least. The maps were perhaps too big in 2042 though I didn't mind too much and I enjoyed 128 player matches. But, this is a little too small and too far in the opposite direction in Battlefield 6. Perhaps the developers overcompensated here. Despite what some may say, Battlefield maps should be a bit bigger in my opinion. People were unhappy with the 128 player games in 2042, so they reduced it to 64 for Battlefield 6. But because the maps are so small and full of infantry/blood funnels, the player density is the same if not higher. It's like they went with an Operation Metro 24/7 mindset on every map.

I'm guessing this is a huge part of the reason I constantly find groups of enemies appearing out of nowhere from behind and killing me after I just checked all my corners.



I have seen others say the TTK (Time To Kill) is way too high (meaning it takes too many hits to down someone), but I guess I'm in the minority when I say I feel the opposite. I feel like I die instantly constantly, and right when I spawn too. It doesn't matter if I spawn on a captured point instead of a squadmate, someone has already got their scope right on me the moment I spawn. It also seems like people are sprinting and sliding everywhere like ... Yep, Call of Duty (or even Apex). I'm sure Vince Zampella had something to do with this as he has worked on the Call of Duty and Apex/Titanfall series, but the sliding and jumping while still maintaining near 100% accuracy just doesn't belong in a Battlefield game at all.

You get points for "suppressing" enemies, but it doesn't do anything like it did in the old games. I am again in the minority when I think suppression should blur your screen and lower your accuracy substantially. It's practically the whole point of the Support class in Battlefield, classically.

And after all the begging for naval vehicles in 2042, still no naval vehicles in BF6?! And no, the few boats in RedSec don't count. What the heck, DICE?



I guess that's where most of my problems lie with the game. It feels like with each iteration the series is losing its identity in an endless chase of a bigger slice of those sweet Call of Duty profits. Battlefield isn't meant to be this fast and twitchy, in my opinion. I'm not sure we'll ever get something like my personal golden age of Battlefield (Bad Company 1 & 2, Battlefield 3 and 4) ever again. DICE is full of completely different employees for some time now since then, and they seem obsessed with chasing whichever trend CoD is pulling off this year. Battlefield shouldn't do that! What's the point of making different shooters if they all play like CoD? Just to make more money I guess. More likely, the blame in this case lies with EA and not DICE. It's also weird that most people hated 2042 but glaze this game, when it almost seems like a reskinned 2042. If you played 2042 a lot like me you have to notice it too.

Despite these annoyances this is still a good game (and the cream of the crop of new FPS games), especially if you're a fan of the Battlefield series. If you like FPS games with vehicles you should totally get this. Keep in mind my nitpicks are not game breaking in any way, and are coming from someone who grew up with the franchise in an earlier (and in my opinion, better) stage. I'm still going to pump a bunch of hours into this, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of Battlefield!