A poor installment for the Battlefield series.
Being currently one of the worst reviewed games on Steam is it really that bad? No, it’s not. However, players have sent the message that receiving a bad unfinished product is disgraceful with EA regularly being anti consumer.
The game is a massive disappointment with new add ons that just don’t work and then taking out core foundations of what make Battlefield. Personally my performance was quite decent as I was playing on ultra settings hitting 60-70fps regularly with some drops in frames. But I’m still taking poor performance into consideration for the review.
Battlefield 2042
What can 2042 offer that no other Battlefield has? Honestly not much that works well. In fact they took out the campaign ‘to concentrate at what Battlefield does best’. Missing a key feature, but nobody would mind if the multiplayer was great. So, how did they use their newly founded free time since they didn’t have a campaign? Not optimally. A lot of normal features are simply missing and some of the new ideas just don’t fit. The new wingsuit is great fun ands makes traversal fun and quick on these large maps. The grapplehook is a great gimmick even though it doesn’t flow as well as the recent Halo Infinite grapple as its quite stiff in comparison.
The hovercraft is fun to use, but I cant tell whether it has a lot of health or whether the Rocket launcher is useless against it. It has added in the ‘robot dogs’ and sentry guns, which pain me. Not to sound salty because I’ve been a victim of them so many times, but they just don’t work well especially in game modes like Rush where on the final objective you can have a point on top of a skyscraper. On top of the skyscraper you’ll always find sentry guns, tanks, hovercrafts and about twenty enemies waiting a the only way up for the attacking team is elevators or aircraft.
The game is graphically stunning, one thing Dice always do right. Yet sometimes things can look out of place like fires look poor compared to before and when helicopters crash it usually looks dreadful. Bugs. Lots and lots of bugs, but what else would you except from a Battlefield game at launch? It even has simple features missing like a scoreboard. Gunplay is still fantastic with the exception of bloom. If you don’t know what bloom is, it will give a random spread to your bullets at times. Essentially rewarding unskilled players for nothing and punishing good players for having good aim.
Adding in specialists was again a bad add on. Specialists have pretty much made picking classes pointless and it’s a shame. When I played other Battlefields as an engineer, I’d make sure vehicles were tended. When I was a medic I would make sure to revive or heal others. Now you can just do it all and it takes what was great teamworking capabilities out of the game. Now every class can use any gun, which seems like a decent addition, but when everyone uses the PP-29 submachine gun it gets boring. I would say every second death I have is due to it. It’s extremely overpowered, being the only reason it’s used so much. It should have been noticed before launch, but DICE will patch it soon
One of the biggest problems I have with 2042 is the lackluster maps. They have no character and very few buildings for the great destruction its predecessors offered. The destruction is so inferior to the old Battlefields. That’s not the biggest fault. Not one map in my opinion is memorable. A lot of them are more open and concentrate more on vehicular combat than before. Dice took out naval combat surprisingly. The hovercraft can do naval combat, but it also can climb up skyscrapers so I don’t think its a proper replacement.
The gimmick of tornadoes and sandstorms looked amazing in trailers. And they’re pretty cool in game to look at, but they don’t work into the gameplay as nicely as imagined. Nonetheless this was a creative and great decision to make as it can improve with further updates.
Portal
Finally something positive. Seeing the old Battlefields with the graphics of 2042 is a joy to see. It feels the same as the old games, except much prettier to look at. They’ve brought modes like rush back from Battlefield 3 and Bad Company 2. Honestly I enjoyed playing them more than 2042. The only problem I had was that I couldn’t customize my loadout, but even my friends who were playing had the same problem, so at least everyone was on an even playing field. It keeps everything from the original game gameplay wise and mechanics wise, so it was implemented with care and it shows. There’s not much to say about Portal if you liked the old Battlefield games this is a must play mode.
Hazard
Hazard is what would happen if Escape from Tarkov and Battlefield had a baby. You’re objective is to grab as much data as you can and escape alive. You work in a squad of four against other squads competing for data also. This is where the specialists come in. The specialists work well in Hazard as there’s only four on each team and can make a team far more versatile. Hazard is quite fun particularly when working as a coordinated team.
Hazard falls short on reasons to play unfortunately. You’re rewarded with points after retrieving the data to buy better guns for the next game, but when you already have conquest, rush and portal it doesn’t offer anything better than them. Hazard feels like another attempt at a battle royale by DICE. Even though it’s technically not the same, fundamentally it plays the same for the most part, except you can be extracted rather than killing everyone in the game.
Final Verdict
With all the negatives said, I still enjoyed Battlefield. But the fact I know the potential of what it could of been is depressing. The game at its core is a fun shooter you will enjoy and with updates the game is only bound to get better as DICE have already announced two big updates. However with how the game is right now I can’t recommend it. With future updates and fixes I can easily see myself recommending this game.
