Barely a minute into your first round of the large-scale multiplayer mode, Conquest, you will know you are back in Battlefield at its absolute best. Fighter jets scorch over head, tanks rumble by, the side of a building is obliterated by a rocket-propelled grenade. While Call of Duty has always focused its online matches on close skirmishes, Battlefield 6 makes you feel part of a vast military offensive, bewildering and ear-shattering, with even the quiet moments punctuated by the pop-pop of distance rifle fire, the shouts of orders and the cries for medics.
It’s well known that EA’s long-running first-person shooter series has hit trouble over the last couple of years, with futuristic instalment Battlefield 2042 widely considered a disappointment. So this time round, the development team (a collective of studios including original creator DICE) has gone back to the excellent Battlefield 4 for inspiration, where the emphasis was on authentic-feeling modern military warfare on large maps with lots of players. As ever, Battlefield 6 gives you the choice of four classes – Assault, Support, Engineer and Recon – each with its own weapons and gadgets, all of which can be upgraded and customised as you level up your soldier and gain experience. It’s a hybrid system taking elements of older Battlefields as well as newer Call of Duty titles, where the Gunsmith system revolutionised weapon personalisation for first-person online shooters.
Brooklyn at war … Battlefield 6. Photograph: Electronic Arts
The best online modes are the big ones, such as Conquest and Breakthrough, which focus on taking swathes of territory from the other team by holding down objective points. There are small and mid-sized modes, too, including King of the Hill and Domination, but to Battlefield veterans they feel like gestures to a different school of thought. From the very beginning – 2002’s seminal Battlefield 1942 – this series has encouraged tactical, thoughtful play, gathering a few comrades and sneaking up on enemy bases, timing attacks with helicopter support, wearing down defences. In a good session there maybe several minutes where you are hiking across the map, or crawling towards a well-defended building. The meat-grinder feel of Call of Duty, with its turbo-charged pace and five-second shootouts, feels a long way away.
Yet, when you’re caught in a battle in this game, it is exhilarating. Whether you’re on the streets of Brooklyn or the sands of Cairo, chunks of exploded masonry fly by, bullets strafe metal, tanks explode in fiery billows of flame and smoke. The visuals and sound design are astonishingly good, capturing the grainy, shaky-cam faux-documentary style of Generation Kill or Warfare, rather than the choreographed action movie carnage of CoD. If you’re lucky enough to get on a good team (and I really recommend playing with at least one or two friends), a real sense of underfire camaraderie develops.
The weak point is the game’s superfluous Campaign mode, a hackneyed techno thriller set in the near future where a private military company is aiming to take control of the world, and only a hardy team of American-controlled spec-ops warriors can stop them. It’s a tired setup – and something of a cop out. By making the baddie a fictitious military corporation, the developers can pretend the story is meaningful and relevant without having to, God forbid, make a political point or implicate a country that may well be a market for the game – or an investor in Electronic Arts. It’s also hard to maintain any interest in a group of Identi-Kit tough guys who constantly spout lines such as: “There ain’t no red tape out here,” and (while staking out an enemy base on sunny Gibraltar): “I don’t know what’s more impressive, the view or the firepower.” When lead character Murphy says to a comrade: “There ain’t nobody I’d rather be in this fight with,” I wished there was an option to defect.
Don’t let that put you off. For the most part, Battlefield 6 is a brilliant return to form, a thrilling, almost operatic shooter experience, which manages to combine deafening combat with tactical subtlety. How it will fit into the modern landscape of hero shooters and battle royale blast-em-ups is anyone’s guess – it deserves a shot, that’s for sure.
Battlefield 6 is out now, £65
