The story of Battlefield 6 so far has been one pleasant surprise after another: Surprise that leaked playtests looked really fun, surprise that Battlefield Studios committed to grounded cosmetics early on, surprise that the open beta was so popular it eclipsed Call of Duty on Steam, surprise that it actually runs well on PC without drama, and surprise that the full game is packing a level editor and server browser, valuable features that we no longer expect from multiplayer FPSes.
EA's latest round of previews, a hands-on opportunity with the yet-unseen singleplayer campaign, was Battlefield 6's first bad surprise.
The three-mission sampling (out of nine total) lacked everything exciting about Battlefield 6's multiplayer half—a linear, flavorless march toward meat puppet shootouts occasionally broken up by an ATV excursion or on-rails turret sequence. BF Studios told me that this campaign is meant to introduce us to the world of Battlefield 6, but so far, what I see are reruns from Call of Duty's exhausted playbook.
The campaign centers around a war between NATO countries and Pax Armata, a private military company contracted by a nonspecific coalition of countries that have recently left NATO. Maybe the full game will elaborate on the world conditions that led to what is essentially a Metal Gear Solid 4-style proxy war, but my impression is that BF Studios created Pax Armata not to imagine what a near-future conflict would look like, but to avoid casting any one nation against the mighty US and Britain-led NATO forces.
Maybe the strongest Modern Warfare influence here is the central squad itself: Carter, Murphy, Gecko, and Lopez. I've always liked how Battlefield campaigns cast characters according to their class roles, and that's still the case here (the leader Carter is Assault, Gecko is Recon, etc), but this squad is far from the nobodies of Bad Company. This is Dagger 13, an elite spec-ops unit of Marine Raiders working directly under the CIA.
They're broody, calculated, and boring—speaking in inscrutable acronyms so often that you have to assume the game doesn't want you to be fully in the loop. The leader, Carter, smacks of Captain Price with his unshakeable confidence, cool head, and operator beard.
With Battlefield taking the series back to anonymized grunts in multiplayer, I hoped its campaign would evoke a bygone era of military shooters inspired by war movies that'd play on repeat in my house growing up—stories about cogs in a larger war machine propelled by duty but fueled by gallows humor. Dagger 13, much like the heroes of whatever's topping the charts of Prime Video these days, are far too serious and elite for such fun.
It at least has spectacle going for it. The demo started with a beachfront counterattack at a NATO stronghold in Gibraltar. Buildings crumbled and jets scrambled as I lobbed grenades at AT bunkers from the nose of an APC. I'm more of a driver than a gunner, but it seems like the Battlefield 6 campaign will be stingy about letting you get behind the wheel of its signature armor. In the same mission, my eyes lit up when a friendly tank came to our rescue in a parking lot, only to discover it too was off limits. We were just there to run next to it and shoot bad guys with RPGs—bummer.
Out of bounds
That was the beginning of the Battlefield 6 campaign all too often telling me no when I'd try to do Battlefield stuff. Can I drive the tank? Nope. Can I flank around this building by jumping over this rail? Nope, it's outside the narrow mission area.
Can I blow a hole in this wall to get a better angle on these bad guys? Nope, unbreakable.
Eventually, I stopped resisting, flipped my brain off, and let the campaign's aggressive artifice take the microphone. Just in time for the second mission to play another Call of Duty hit—the night vision-goggled home infiltration. This one, obviously inspired by Modern Warfare 2019's memorable "Going Dark" level, couldn't muster the same tension. NATO somehow got all the civilians out of New York before Pax Armata showed up, so there was no risk of innocent injury as I burst through doors blasting everything that moved.
That's actually for the best, because the owners of those apartments would have switched sides if they saw what I did after figuring out my sledgehammer could bust drywall. Those small spaces were the most I ever noticed destruction play a role in a mission, which was a letdown, but not one unique to the campaign.
The best level of the trio was easily "Ember Strike," a mini sandbox mission that plays out sort of like a Conquest match, as the battle bunch takes out a bunch of anti-air emplacements at a Pax Armata base in Tajikistan.
This time playing as Recon Gecko, it was a nice change to slow things down and decide how to proceed. It still wasn't terribly tactical—stealth was impossible and there was yet again a dearth of vehicles (just Jeeps and ATVs), but at least I had an unlimited supply of recon drones that drop bombs (that'd be pretty scary in multiplayer).
Maybe the two-thirds of the Battlefield 6 campaign I haven't seen will help it register a heartbeat, but if this is the appetizer, I'm not jumping out of my seat for the entrée. On the bright side, campaigns aren't why I come to Battlefield.
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