It says something about the state of the FPS today that the hype for Battlefield 6 is mostly down to the old, not the new. Here we are, howling at the moon for decades-old modes, "grounded" character models, classic class setups, and a map from 2011. Series vets are gobbling up this sequel as if we haven't eaten for weeks while patting DICE and its Battlefield Studios cohorts on the back for managing to execute a normal Battlefield game.
DICE's last effort tanked expectations, but that's not why Battlefield 6 is impressive. It's the wider multiplayer culture of 2025—wrung out by years of battle royale banality and meta-pilled ranked modes—that created the conditions for an ordinary Battlefield to be the most exciting FPS of the year.
Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for the return of what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun. That is the pitch of Battlefield 6, and so far, it's a bullseye.
At least, a bullseye where it matters most. I've been playing the final version of Battlefield 6 for over a week now, but the only chunk of it that's fully playable at the moment is the campaign, which is quite bad. My multiplayer experience so far is two big thumbs up, but with a major asterisk: there have been very few actual humans logging in during the pre-release review period (a mix of press and YouTubers), so all of my matches have been 90% bots. Portal, the promising map-maker tool, has also not been made available ahead of launch.
With that in mind, I'm waiting until sometime after launch to publish a final, scored review. In the meantime, I've jotted down some early thoughts on multiplayer bolstered by ~30 combined hours with the open beta and preview events, plus the campaign (which I've yet to finish).
Welcome back, Battlefield
The greatest compliment I can pay to Battlefield 6 is that it's the only game I want to play right now, and it's frustrating that I can't until the full launch on Friday. A full lobby of Battlefield 6 is electric, and bot matches just can't do it justice. Even scaled down from 128 to 64 players, DICE is still the master of making "pretty big" feel 10 times larger.
It's a game where a single 25-minute round can spawn a dozen storylines: Two ace pilots dueling over control of the skies, the slippery engineer who makes tank drivers' lives a living hell, the squad dedicated to locking down a single flag no matter what, the guy who keeps driving the EOD bot around desperate to torch someone (anyone!) to death. Battlefield 6 confidently hands players a sandbox and lets us find our own fun.
The prevailing goal of territory control is the glue that keeps the whole operation on the rails, but the magic of Battlefield is the ability to disappear into the crowd—the freedom to play doctor for folks charging headfirst into the meatgrinder, pick off snipers from a rooftop, or break off from the action altogether to try something weird. Other shooters spend truckloads of money on skyboxes and soundscapes that mimic the atmosphere of a true, large-scale battle. Battlefield 6 doesn't have to pretend.
The best Battlefield guns, ever
If Battlefield 6's best quality is that it's a lot like older Battlefields, the upgrade that justifies the new package is its gunplay. Gone are the moments in Battlefield 2042 where aiming directly at an enemy resulted in bullets landing just behind them—Battlefield 6's guns are loud, frightening machines with lightning-quick ballistics.
Up close, guns behave like hitscan weapons, with distance and drop only coming into play if you're shooting at something a football field away. Combined with some generally excellent sound work, brain-pleasing celebratory "clicks" on kills, and detailed reload animations, it's clear that Battlefield has finally caught up with Call of Duty in the field of satisfying gun-shootin'.
The renewed emphasis on punchy, reactive firefights in close quarters is part of a larger Battlefield 6 aim to out-Call of Duty Activision. EA is trying very hard to bring a new audience into the fold—so hard that some of Battlefield 6's design changes come off as EA bending over backwards to appeal to a type of player who expects a billion guns, hundreds of hours of grind, and smaller maps. Battlefield 6 has Call of Duty's Gunsmith, its gunplay, and its vehicle-less modes.
Some changes are ultimately wins, but with others, Battlefield Studios has stumbled into the same bad habits as Call of Duty. For instance, Battlefield has inherited CoD's "every assault rifle is kind of the same" problem. The weapons screen is a wall of brushed metal distinguished only by stat variations, with the odd gun here and there setting itself apart with its copious attachment options or extremely low recoil. At least it's still fun to tweak them.
Close-quarters modes like Team Deathmatch and Domination (or whatever BF6 calls it) are inherently flawed within the Battlefield framework—why would anyone play engineer in a mode with no vehicles? What role do medics play when you can respawn instantly? The best I can say of these offshoot modes is that they probably won't get in the way of why most people are here: Conquest, Rush, and Breakthrough.
The big maps are where it's at, but they're scarce
If you spent the Battlefield 6 open beta yearning for wider battlefields, you'll be happy to know that Mirak Valley, New Sobek City, and Operation Firestorm deliver. They've got all the pieces that make Battlefield click—urban cover, rolling hills, open skies—and I can't muster a single complaint about them with my brief playtime so far.
My only beef is that there isn't enough peak Battlefield in Battlefield 6. The launch map pool of nine is overstuffed with maps that have drastically fewer vehicles and cramped bottlenecks that guarantee you'll either kill or be killed every 10 seconds. Iberian Offensive, Empire State, Saints Quarter, Siege of Cairo—they're intense, they're something different, but they don't represent what Battlefield is best at, and it's disappointing that they outnumber the maps that do.
Campaign: Maybe don't bother
I'm halfway through the Battlefield 6 campaign, not because it's long or particularly challenging, but because every mission is about as fun as chipping a tooth. I had low expectations for the pillar of Battlefield 6 that reportedly suffered the shakiest development period, but I still hoped for better than this.
Instead of thinking long and hard about how to harness Battlefield's special ingredients—classes, big spaces, destruction, vehicles—into a singleplayer context, Battlefield Studios instead opted to copy Modern Warfare's homework (and still get the answers wrong). The adventures of spec ops unit Dagger13 play out in a gauntlet of linear, placid run-ins with Pax Armata goons broken up by the drywall chatter of battle buddies who will never be Captain Price no matter how hard they try.
It's as if the campaign isn't aware that it exists in Battlefield, a game with tanks, helicopters, and planes that you can actually fly. One early mission has the squad escorting a tank through a town. At no point can you drive or even mount up in the turret—you just run next to it, occasionally hitting it with a repair torch. A few missions later, a helicopter picks up Dagger13 from a crumbling Brooklyn apartment building, only to drop them off 60 seconds later on a bridge via cutscene.
If you're one of maybe 10 people primarily eyeing Battlefield 6 for its campaign, I suggest you turn around and run. I'll have more detailed thoughts in my final review, but in the meantime, our own Lincoln Carpenter took Dagger13 to task in a dedicated campaign piece also published today.
To sum up my Battlefield 6 mood going into launch day:
- Vibrating with anticipation to finally play with humans
- Eager to curate my playlists with community servers
- Not preferring (but not hating) small maps
- Guns feel great
- Crossing my fingers that Closed Weapons won't get short shrift on the main menu
Expect my full Battlefield 6 review next week. See you on the servers.
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