Quite often I surprise myself when I go back to previous reviews. I’d forgotten just how much I had enjoyed Battlefield 1 when it came out, seemingly loving the new Operations mode which kept me coming back for a while (although no longer than what I did for the review it seems). I hadn’t really been following the development for Battlefield V but on the surface it’d seem that, if you liked its predecessor, you’d like the enhancements that were coming along with this latest instalment. However this time around it felt like more of the same as there was nothing particularly innovative or novel about this latest Battlefield that grabbed me. That coupled with some rather egregious launch day issues made for a very middle of the road experience, neither completely terrible nor something I’d recommend you’d seek out and play.
Much like its predecessor Battlefield V retains the same story vignette style for its campaigns, although there was far fewer of them this time around. They all follow pivotal stories of World War II but they are all, of course, entirely fictional which seems to annoy the history buffs to no end. They’re incredibly simple in their construction, taking place in the multiplayer maps and almost entirely consisting of running from one base to another, completing some rudimentary objective before moving onto the next. It seems that DICE is taking a kind of softly-softly approach to killing off the single player experience, rather than take the direct (and more controversial) route of just killing it off completely.
The Frostbite 3 engine is looking as good as it ever has although it is starting to show its age in some places. Mostly this comes up when you’re in tight environments or up close to things where the numerous visual tricks that the engine uses start to come into stark relief. The Battlefield games have always been at their best in giant environments where you can enjoy the wide vistas before a sniper takes you out from the other side of the map. Performance is still workable although it seems that DirectX 12 support is still a little patchy, glitching out hard on me and causing a few crashes even after installing the latest drivers. I’ll touch more on that later though as there’s definitely some larger issues at play here with the usual DICE jankiness turned up a couple notches in this release.
At its core Battlefield V feels the same as it has for quite a while now, retaining its penchant for large battles on in huge spaces with all the trimmings you’d expect from a large war simulator. The classes are the same, sticking to the same 4 tropes that were defined so long ago. There’s supposedly some improved versions of other game modes but, in all honesty, I never really got around to playing them. No I spent the majority of my time in the game playing with friends in the one game mode that they never get wrong: conquest. In that regard the Battlefield experience I had felt pretty much the same as it always did, for better and for worse.
Combat remains much the same, favouring a slower paced strategic type of engagement rather than say Call of Duty’s flurry of bullets and respawns. That still brings with it all the less desirable aspects of course, like snipers being able to one shot you from places you can’t see them and one shot kill headshots from guns that really have no right to be that effective (like the Medic’s MP5 which netted me far more kills with that then even I felt was fair). The large scale battles in conquest do retain their larger than life feeling though, something which precious few games have been able to achieve. Surprisingly though even with many players taking advantage of the insane 11 day head start (my mate being one of them, dumping some 52 hours into the game before its official release) I didn’t feel as disadvantaged as I previously did. Indeed unlike previous games where a maxed out tank player could ruin the game for an entire team this time around things felt an awful lot more balanced. Either that or I’ve improved dramatically over the last few years but I doubt the countless hours I’ve spent in COD have really helped me that much in Battlefield…
The single player missions are a relatively short affair with most of them being over in an hour so. If you’re so inclined there’s a bunch of hidden collectibles strewn about the place which, if you complete the associated challenges for the mission, will give you an unique melee weapon for use in multiplayer. Honestly given how basic they are I really wasn’t inclined to search blindly around the giant maps looking for them, especially when the combat wasn’t exactly fun or enjoyable. You see most of the missions are meant to be tackled stealthy, but they don’t equip you with many tools for doing so outside of throwing shells to distract people or highlighting them with your binoculars. The AI is so extrucingatly dumb that DICE counteracted that by making them all top tier marksman, able to hit you with a pistol with sniper like accuracy. Of course you can counter this by alerting them and then running behind a door, which they’ll all then happily run towards allowing you to mow them all down.
Honestly I’m starting to get on board with the idea of not having a single player campaign at all if they’re going to be this basic. I can understand the idea of wanting to provide glimpses into various parts of the setting but I’m not particularly interest in that as a subject and, from what I’ve seen, the things depicted in there aren’t exactly what the history buffs enjoy either. Honestly I’d prefer a shorter campaign, maybe say 3~4 hours or so, that was a polished end to end experience. Heck that used to be what most of these games delivered (although I admit many derided them for the short length) so maybe their return to their roots simply hasn’t gone far enough.
I’d probably be a little more generous if Battlefield V wasn’t so unpolished on release, both for the single and multiplayer experience. Every new release of Battlefield seems to bring with the same old bugs, chief of which is a physics engine which gets routinely confused on how to simulate the most rudimentary of things. I had one instance in the single player campaign where someone spawned inside a vehicle, immediately died then started to vibrate violently as they bounced between the outside and inside of the vehicle. I had the bomb on a couple maps spawn in the ground (in an area that wasn’t destructible either, see below screenshot), preventing the team from picking it up and forcing the game into a neverending stalemate. This is somewhat par for the course with Battlefield games but, honestly DICE, it’s time for you to either develop Frostbite 4 to address these problems or find a new engine entirely.
All of this culminates into an experience that isn’t so much different from those of Battlefield games past which, depending on what you’re looking for in this game, can be a good or a bad thing. For me personally the Battlefield games have always had a pretty limited lifetime for me; the lack of repetitive hits to my dopamine centers that other competitive shooters provide meaning I’ll go and seek out my fix elsewhere after I’ve had my fill of Battlefield. For others though, those who play Battlefield as their goto hobby, it’s going to mean that they’ve got more of the same experience that they want.
For me though? Battlefield V feels like it was off the mark a bit, getting just enough things wrong to make it feel a bit more middle of the road than it otherwise has. Many of the things that make the series great are still there: the massive environments with huge battles, a deep progression system that will keep players engaged for ages and new game modes which, whilst I didn’t particularly engage with them, shows that DICE at least wants to try some new things. But for every one of those positives there’s a handful of negatives as well, enough so that after 12 hours in the game I think I’ve had my fill. Sure, part of that is because Black Ops 4 has managed to get its hooks into me again, but even then I’ve played this Battlefield for longer than its predecessor and I liked that one far more. I know there’s precious few people who read these reviews to figure out what game to play but if you’ve been sitting on the fence for this one, waiting patiently for my opinion on it, I’d probably say give it a miss for now.
Maybe pick it up just before Christmas so you can own all the noobs when they get their copy 😉
Rating: 7.5/10
Battlefield V is available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One right now for $59. Game was played on the PC with a total of 12 hours play time and 26% of the achievements unlocked.
