Battlefield Hardline might be racing around the corner like that guy on that bike up there, but we still have time to learn slightly more about it before it busts onto hard drives the world over on March 17th. EA and Visceral have had a blowout of sorts on the Hardline site, revealing all the maps and all the modes we can expect to shoot each other in upon release. Let's have a little look at them, shall we?
Hardline's modes don't contain too many surprises, comprising Battlefield favourites Conquest and Team Deathmatch, along with the cash-hungry Blood Money mode, the Payday-ish Heist, and the exciting-sounding Hotwire mode. (Exciting-sound because it's basically Need for Speed with rocket launchers.)
But wait: there's more. Rescue is "a cop-centric mode that lets you step into the boots of a SWAT operative tasked with saving innocent lives from the hands of criminals. Lead your team carefully into dangerous environments and get the hostages back to safety. Be careful though, because there are no second chances in this mode". Crosshair, meanwhile, is the criminal flipside of the above, putting you in the shoes of a bunch of wrong'uns trying to murder a witness before he can testify against them. EA/Visceral describe the previous as the game's two 'competitive' modes, but it's not clear what that means in this context. Surely all these modes are competitive?
Those maps are a little more self-explanatory, comprising a bank premises, city streets, a Breaking Bad-style desert town (seriously, it's a dead ringer), a palatial mansion, swampland and a couple of drug dens. Basically: all the places cops and robbers tend to hang out. There are no libraries, is what I'm saying.
Hardline is heading back into beta soon, ahead of its release in mid-March.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.
