After a troubled launch for Battlefield 4 and a muted reception for Battlefield Hardline, it seemed the series was going to want to shake things up for a new installment. The obvious thought was returning to the beloved Bad Company strain of the series, but DICE decided to go in a much different direction.
Battlefield 1 warps all the way back to World War I, a global conflict rarely covered in the shooter genre, and certainly never with the massive budget and branding power of a modern day AAA series like this. The concept managed to light even the jaded world of gaming press and fans on fire, and rallied its supporters to declare social media war on Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, reigniting that old conflict.
In the end, Battlefield 1 will almost certainly not disappoint fans, but it’s hard to know how much it will expand its core playerbase either. All the game’s strengths are still present, from its gorgeous visuals to its sprawling battles, but so are its weaknesses. Battlefield 1 is a brilliant game in many ways, but it can also be an immensely frustrating experience at the same time, particularly in its most popular multiplayer modes.
We’ll start with single player, however. The Battlefield series, outside of Bad Company, has not really been known for its memorable campaigns, but it does something a little interesting in Battlefield 1. With a focus on historical events and battles, the campaign is broken up into six different “war stories,” little vignettes that last about an hour to an hour and a half each, giving players control of a different soldier in a different front of the war for a handful of missions.
For me, the most memorable mission was actually the prologue, where you’re thrust into battle as a Harlem Hellfighter, World War I’s famed black infantry regiment, and as you fight, time slows as you get injured, and ultimately when you’re killed, you jump into the body of a new soldier and fight until you die again. It’s a disorienting, harrowing experience, but serves as a fantastic introduction to the game.
The other missions are divided not only by character and location, but the type of fighting you’ll be doing. You control a British tank driver, an American pilot, an Italian heavy gunner, an Australian “runner” and an Arabian assassin.
The tank driver and pilot storylines are the longest, with four missions each, while the Italian story only has two missions. It’s not really enough time to get to know these characters terribly well, so to create any semblance of emotional weight, someone is almost always going to end up dead, whether it’s you or a member of your squad.
This storytelling vehicle is somewhat effective, and obviously much better than if there was a single imaginary soldier who managed to hop around to all these fronts and take on all these roles. The tank missions are a bit of a slog, while the pilot’s storyline was probably my favorite. His heroics are frankly absurd if you’re trying to believe they have some basis in reality, but the character himself is a bit of a cheat and a liar, and there's a hint what you're playing might be a rather tall tale from an untrustworthy narrator.
Then again, when you’re playing as the Italian heavy gunner, marching up mountains in full plate armor, shrugging off thousands of bullets and putting down dozens of enemies without blinking, that sort of feels equally ridiculous in context. This is sort of a “video gamey” problem where you have to try and base your game in reality, but it’s hard not to make your characters unbelievable super-soldiers either. The best balance of this is probably in the Australian/Arabian missions, where you largely use stealth to sneak around enemies, or put them down in silence. Start a firefight and you will often get demolished, so you’ll have to hide, kill a few folks, run away and repeat. This makes the most sense narratively and from a gameplay perspective, and sometimes the other missions can lack that equilibrium.
As for difficulty, the curve is sort of all over the place, even more so because you can play these missions in any order. In sequences like the armored Italian, it’s almost impossible to die, but occasionally the game gives you a really irritating task, like protecting a fleet of bombers as the pilot, and the mission can take a full half hour by itself as you simply cannot shoot down enemy planes fast enough. Similarly, there’s a boss fight in the desert against an armored train where the game suggests you use mounted anti-armor cannons to chip about 5% of its health at a time, all the while dodging one-hit-kill mortar blasts. It wasn’t until I realized I could just walk up to the thing and wallpaper it with dynamite that I realized this wasn’t this maddeningly frustrating exercise I believed it to be. In general, dying is an irritating experience because the game will set you so far back. You can creep through a fort and kill 24 of 25 enemies in a 20 minute firefight, but if that last one gets you, you’ll have to re-do the entire sequence.
The setting and the format certainly make this one of the more memorable Battlefield campaigns out there, but I doubt anyone will be calling it one of the great shooter story modes of our time either. And of course, it’s not what most fans will be showing up for.
There are loads of multiplayer modes in Battlefield 1. Traditional Conquest, which is the big, vehicle-based mode where enormous teams challenge each other for capture points. You can take away the vehicles for regular domination or team deathmatch. Or you can go even larger for a few modes. One recreates WWI battles by stringing together multiple rounds and objectives, and having massive teams play one another for an incredibly long time. Another is an offense/defense game where one team tries to push forward across territory while defenders can call in airstrikes to shred the advancing hordes.
Analyzing all of these modes individually may not be necessary (and some weren’t available due to matchmaking issues), but combat is similar across the board with many modes being some variant of Conquest, the most popular offering.
How you feel about Battlefield 1 multiplayer probably has a lot to do with how you’ve felt about past installments in the series. When it’s good, it’s great. The visuals and sound design here are like nothing else in the genre (and this goes for single-player content as well). From shifting deserts to bombed-out towns to muddy, barbed wire-laden trenches, these are some of the most compelling environments I’ve seen in the genre, and it’s where the World War I setting really shines. The Frostbite 3 engine does channel Star Wars: Battlefront to a certain extent, but this game is even more beautiful than that one.
I very much liked the unique collection of weapons, from double-barrel SMGs to mini-pistols, and their sound design is top-notch. There’s a weight to them that just doesn’t exist in more modern/futuristic shooters, and it’s refreshing to be able to play a game without thermal scanning or holographic sights or attack drones and the like. It’s a much more simplistic affair, yet it’s still tough to rise to the top of the heap.
But in terms of how these matches play out? Often they can prove immensely frustrating, depending on your role and style of play.
The most prominent problem are tanks, and whether you are in one or out of one. From what I’ve played, anti-vehicle weaponry is anemic, while being in a tank or armored car is a recipe to rack up kill after kill, capture point after capture point. I spent the vast majority of my time playing the assault class, which has access to a variety of vehicle-killing tools from anti-tank grenades, to dynamite, to anti-armor launchers. And yet it’s so insanely hard to ever truly feel like you were able to take on vehicles, as you often get shredded before you get anywhere near them, either by the vehicle itself, or its supporting team members. But even if you do, I hit armored trucks with multiple tank grenades and only got a few tiny damage notifications for my trouble before getting run over. I planted multiple sticks of dynamites on tanks and still didn’t blow them up when I flipped the switch moments before being blasted into bits. For every vehicle I did manage to kill, it felt like there were 20 times where I got demolished in the exchange, and though this is something Battlefield games usually have to deal with, right now the balance seems heavily skewed in favor of the armor.
Infantry vs. infantry combat is a bit better, but in these wide, sprawling maps, the top scorers on each team are the snipers who are squirming around prone on rooftops or high-up cliffs, popping off shots onto those stuck on the ground, who are unable to answer unless they too become snipers. This isn’t as much of a problem on smaller maps, but on the larger ones, it really does feel like you either need to be sniping, or you need to be in a vehicle, because otherwise you’ll just constantly be killed by both.
The vehicles themselves are OK, but I prefer the modern day variants found in other games, to be frank. New additions like horses may be cool in the occasional YouTube video when you watch one get splattered by a tank or chopped up by a plane propeller, but in practice, they’re not terribly useful. Biplanes are fun for dogfights, if you can ever actually get access to one, but like in past Battlefield games, plane combat often feels like it has nearly nothing to do with ground combat or the objectives, and in all the games I played, I never was killed by a plane while on the ground, nor do I remember planes doing anything of significance in any match.
Even after a number of games I had trouble understanding the game’s class leveling system, which was notoriously confusing in the beta as well. It feels like you advance each class painfully slowly, as you have to do so using “class-specific actions.” For assault, where as I said, killing vehicles is often a nightmare, that was very slow. For say, medic, it was much faster, given that you just have to inject the piles of corpses that will always be around you or hand out health packs. It’s a strange system, and one that needs some tweaking.
Fundamentally, Battlefield 1 is a great-looking skin for past Battlefield games. That’s not an insult, as the series has a storied legacy and the game can be very fun. But despite the switch to World War I, the changes feel mostly cosmetic, and though those cosmetics look fantastic, I don’t know if the game has what it takes to convert those who weren’t already fans. Maybe that’s fine, and clearly the game has gotten many people excited, but my only warning is to not go in thinking that this is going to be some dramatic leap forward for the series. It looks great, sounds great and has those “holy crap!” moments the series is known for, but it is fundamentally not all that much different than what’s come before, and that includes some of the inherent faults of the series.
I’ve enjoyed my time with Battlefield 1, but the shooter genre is more competitive than ever, so it’s hard to know if I’ll be playing it over Infinite Warfare, Titanfall 2, Destiny or Overwatch this fall. For every cool moment I have in Battlefield 1, whether it’s bayoneting a soldier or chopping someone in half from horseback, I’ll be blown up by 20 tanks or be headshot by 20 snipers, and often it’s more frustrating than fun. The campaign is mostly great, but again, probably no more than a 6-7 hour experience, and obviously not the worth the price of admission by itself. You will have to love multiplayer to make this game worth it, and if you don’t, well, you’re out of luck.
No one makes more beautiful shooters than DICE, but their gameplay still leaves something to be desired, despite what appeared to be a total refresh with the WWI setting. Fans of the series may look past these faults or even embrace them, but some of them are hard to get past, and can define the entire experience.
Battlefield 1
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4
Developer: DICE
Publisher: EA
Released: October 25th, 2016
Price: $59.99
Score: 8/10
A review code was provided for the purposes of this review.
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