Battlefield Hardline: Where Good Cops (and Games) Die.

The Battlefield series has, for the most part, stuck to its roots of giant war-based combat which has served it well over the past 13 years that it has existed. This put it in direct competition with Call of Duty although they favoured a longer development and release cycle with their games usually having a 2+ year cycle with various expansions and DLCs peppered in between. For many it served as the more refined version of Call of Duty, favouring tactics and skill rather than fast action and twitch reflexes. Battlefield Hardline marks DICE’s first departure from the Battlefield formula and whilst parts of what made the series great can be seen in here the game unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired.

Miami has gone to hell, the streets flooded with drugs and gang warfare escalating to all new heights. You are Nicholas Mendoza, newly minted detective in the Miami PD who’s looking to clean up Miami through good, honest police work. However it doesn’t take long for things to start going awry with your first bust turning into a bloodbath and questions to start arising around your methods. Indeed the more you try stop the plague that’s spreading through Miami the more you seem to be drawn into it, with your fellow cops being the ones dragging you in.

Unlike it’s predecessors that used the Frostbite 3 engine Battlefield Hardline doesn’t feel like a massive step up graphically, indeed it actually feels like it’s gone backwards in some respects. Whilst we still have the wide open environments that are a signature of the Battlefield franchise they just don’t feel as visually impressive as they used to, even with the enormous amount of grunt that my new rig can provide. Looking over my screenshots from previous reviews confirms this, showing that the engine is capable of quite a bit more than what Hardline seems to make use of. It makes even less sense when you find out that this isn’t Visceral’s first experience with the Frostbite engine either so I can only assume that the reduction in fidelity was done for optimization reasons.

Hardline plays much like Battlefield 4 did before it, retaining many of the core mechanics whilst adding in a few new tricks that tie into the police theme. You’ll still be running and gunning quite often, although in slightly smaller environments than you’d be used to, and the stealth mechanic that appeared in Battlefield 4 makes a return in Hardline. However now instead of getting points to level up your character by killing people you instead only level up by taking people down non-lethally or arresting them, something you can accomplish by telling them to “freeze” and then tackling them to the ground. There’s also bonus objectives like warrant suspects (who give quadruple score for arrests), cases for you to investigate by finding evidence and completing additional objectives. The multiplayer introduces a bunch of new modes which are mostly variants of the standard game styles we all know and love although it seems everyone is really still only interested in the big, 32 on 32 conquest maps.

The FPS combat in hardline feels a little unpolished as all the guns in their own categories feel pretty much the same as one another. Indeed once you get a few levels under your belt and unlock a couple guns there’s really no need to switch to anything else and the game rarely pits you against enemies with new and interesting guns, meaning you’ll have to level up or complete case missions in order to add in some variety. Couple this with the absolutely dumb as rocks AI and you’ve got a FPS experience that’s highly forgettable, even in the scenes which feel like they’re supposed to be action packed but just end up feeling bland.

This is only exacerbated by the repetition that’s introduced by the arrest mechanic which you’re required to use if you want to level up your character. Sure it’s pretty fun to work out the best way to approach a section so you can arrest everyone in it, but after you’ve done that a dozen times it starts to lose its luster. Thankfully you don’t have to do that for long as I was able to reach max rank somewhere around episode 7 or so but even the freedom granted by being able to run and gun everything past then didn’t add any life back into Hardline’s combat. This is what made it incredibly easy to put the game down at the end of each “episode” as playing more than one in a night was a recipe for frustration and boredom.

The story is somewhat serviceable in comparison to the rest of the game,  with most of the characters being given enough screentime and background to be believable even if the situations you find them in are wholly unbelievable. I couldn’t find myself empathizing with any of the characters though, even the main protagonist, as they didn’t really feel relatable until right near the end. Even then it felt like too little too late, even if I had enough information to understand the decisions they were making. The ending might not scream sequel but it’s definitely hinting at it, raising its eyebrows suggestively and giving you a sly wink as you walk out the door.

I’ve only spent a brief few hours with the multiplayer (for issues I’ll dig into below) but the horror that is Battelog has made yet another return for Hardline and the issues surrounding it still remain. For the most part it seems like the community has little interest in the new game modes as servers that cater towards them are barren wastelands, devoid of players wanting to play them. Instead the vast majority have huddled around the safe place of Battlefield’s large scale warfare maps, something that feels quite at odds with the game’s more intimate setting and direction. Suffice to say it pretty much plays how you’d expect it to with the key difference coming from you being able to generate cash to buy new weapons and perks, rather than having to unlock them by levelling a class. It takes the edge of the levelling curve but doesn’t do much else.

The icing on this rather unappealing cake comes in the form of bugs, glitches and good old fashioned crashes that seem to be a mainstay of all Battlefield releases. I had the single player crash on me multiple times, often when I wasn’t doing anything particular of note at all. Battlelog simply refused to recognise that I had Origin installed until I reinstalled it, something I seem to have to do with every Battlefield release. Then when I did try to play some multi games the game would often just up and exit without any notification of what happened, sometimes in the middle of the game and others when I was spending the mandatory 5 minute wait while the game reloaded itself again. I honestly cannot understand why, after 2 previous releases that suffered the exact same issues, that DICE and Visceral couldn’t work out these issues before release and it’s not something I’d expect from a veteran AAA developer.

Battlefield Hardline is an unfortunate fall from grace for the series, trashing the things that made them great and failing to add in anything that could justify taking such a huge risk. The gameplay is bland and uninteresting, failing to capture the player’s attention even for the short duration of the episodes in the single player game. The changes to the multiplayer are completely out of line with what the community wants, as shown by the fact that the only playable servers are those that emulate the previous title’s play style. Topping it all off is the instability and lack of polish on the core game itself, with crashes and bugs plaguing the already beleaguered experience. I honestly can’t recommend this game even for the die hard fans of the series as it just falls so short of the standard that its predecessors set.

Rating: 5/10

Battlefield Hardline is available on PC, Xbox360, XboxOne, PlayStation3 and PlayStation4 right now for $59.95, $89.95, $109.95,  $89.95 and $109.95 respectively. Game was played on the PC with approximately 9 hours of total play time.