Battlefield Hardline's single-player sees you framed for a drug bust gone bad

Can Battlefield Hardline's sudden delay to 2015 engooden a game whose beta wasn't terribly well received? Ignore the fact that I just murdered the English language there with the word 'engooden' and focus on these details about the game's story mode, which until now has been shrouded in mystery. Admittedly a mystery no one really cared too much about, like the premise of The Leftovers or what happened to Walt in Lost, but a mystery all the same. Hardline's single-player tells the story of two framed cops who bust out of prison to clear their names (by shooting lots of people, as is the custom). Actors from The Shield, Sons of Anarchy and, er, Nash Bridges are on-board to do the voices. Cheech Marin isn't one of them, disappointingly.

As revealed at Comic-Con, and relayed by Polygon , writer/producer Wendy Calhoun (Nashville, Justified etc) is on-board as a narrative consultant. She explained that "We start off with the narrative of two cops who are good cops, and one really wants to prove himself. Eventually the tables turn on them, and they are set up by another group and become criminals themselves. They've got to fight their way out of prison, and turn the tables on the people who put them there." So we'll get to see both sides of the ancient schism 'tween cop and robber, and there'll also (probably) be a level where you have to bust out of jail. Do also note that their appears to be a lot of table-flipping going on in Hardline.

A story-focused video at Comic-Con set the scene, which doesn't appear to have been leaked to YouTube yet. It involved a drug bust out in the desert, one that inevitably goes wrong, seeing the game's undercover cop hero Nick framed and sent to the big house. The big house being prison, if you're not as down with prison lingo as I am. Mark Rolston (The Shield), Eugene Byrd (Bones), Benito Martinez (Sons of Anarchy), Kelly Hu (Nash Bridges/Batman: Arkham Origins) are some of the actors that will be supplying their voices to the game.

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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.