It's a great year for Battlefield 6 multiplayer, but the campaign's a misfire

The tank section is a sacred piece of shooter campaign tradition. It's the height of virtual military bombast: an opportunity to leverage every ounce of visual tech, sound design, and available production budget into a singular sequence of rolling, thundering excess hammered home by HEAT shells and mechanized heft.

In a way, it's an achievement that the Battlefield 6 campaign finds a way to make its tank level boring.

2025 is Battlefield 6's year to lose. Call of Duty fatigue is real, and a back-to-back Black Ops release doesn't seem like it'll cure the malaise—even if Activision is leaving Tactical Beavis behind. After drawing record beta numbers, it could finally be time for Battlefield 6 to lead combined arms multiplayer to a long-denied supremacy.

You can probably skip the campaign, though.

The cardinal sin of Battlefield 6's story mode is that it's frankly not very fun when I find myself in a firefight. It's not a problem with the shooting itself. Guns feel as good in the campaign as they do in multiplayer. The issue is what I'm shooting at.

Danger close

In July, Ars Technica reporting based on the claims of current and former EA developers described a troubled BF6 production, and that's a trouble that shows in the campaign. The footsoldiers of sinister private military force Pax Armata feel like a coalition of clumsy multiplayer bots—so much so that I can't help but wonder how much their scripting overlaps with the charmingly pitiful bots that'll fill BF6's underpopulated multiplayer matches.

They seem to operate with a crude individual logic that only accounts for their own immediate safety; if they perform any kind of coordinated action, it feels accidental. If I'm not pointing a gun at them, they'll charge until they can get an angle on me, even if it means being isolated from their buddies. Instead of a tense push and pull between two forces, shootouts devolve into a messy tangle of lone wolves wandering in unpredictable directions.

Worse, both my squadmates and enemy soldiers are wildly inconsistent. In some fights, my comrades will ignore enemies marching boldly through their sightlines to empty a shotgun into my flank; in others, they'll wipe out a wave of mercs before I've realized they've arrived.

Pax troops, meanwhile, will flip unpredictably between failing to notice that I've sprinted up behind them and drilling rounds into me as soon as I expose a tender body part from cover. As a result, if I'm forced into cover at the start of a firefight by a Pax soldier who inexplicably entered Kill Mode, it's frustratingly common for my squadmates to have cleaned up by the time my health has recovered.

And for a series that loves to boast about it, destruction is a conspicuous rarity in the campaign. I might be given a sledgehammer, but it brings down far fewer walls than you'd hope.

It's a small world war

As for storytelling, Battlefield 6 doesn't spin a compelling conflict.

A good shooter campaign is like a thought experiment in constructing the Platonic ideal of a military: Where actual armed forces are mired in moral and material complication, the shooter campaign sells a fantasy of the military as a marvel of disparate branches, command structures, and strategic assets operating in magnificent unison towards goals that are always justified and sacrifices that are always noble.

It's a tidy fantasy, but it's an effective one: A capable military FPS campaign can conjure a sense of the collective driving weight of an arrayed military apparatus, with the player serving as the point of its spear. But in Battlefield 6, the forces of the United States feel like they mostly consist of four people with guns who crash a lot of humvees.

The campaign follows Dagger 13, a MARSOC squad that's also got CIA connections because—if I'm understanding the logic correctly—being two kinds of special ops is cooler than just one. Its members, four individuals who are very tactical and very little else, are arch-protagonists, by which I mean the world and its battles against the unchecked aggression of Pax Armata militants only seem to move when Dagger 13 happens to be around.

While following the squad's exploits, I rarely hear from any kind of command. I don't get much sense of larger strategic objectives, or how the globe is responding to an evolving international crisis. Dagger 13 finds itself at the major flashpoints of the conflict simply because the plot forgot anyone else exists.

Dagger 13's missions follow a general pattern: They fight their way to where they believe they'll find intel on the schemes of Pax Armata's commander, Kincaid (imagine the Joker if he was Big Boss and also Scottish). After arriving and discovering that Kincaid is one step ahead, they're forced to either flee an ambush or race to interrupt his plans. This will involve either a helicopter or a humvee, which will crash. The cycle repeats.

You can imagine my excitement when that cycle was interrupted by a tank sequence, that most beloved of diversions. And you can imagine my disappointment when that tank sequence turned into me lazily firing shells at an underpass where enemy armor and my tank convoy comrades were busy driving circles around each other.

For a worldwide conflict, the Battlefield 6 campaign feels very, very small—and when it tries to go bigger, it can't quite bear the weight. It might be telling, then, that when the campaign's finished, there's an option to uninstall it directly from the main menu. EA seems to agree: Your attention's better spent in multiplayer anyway.