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For better or for worse, the modern FPS lives and dies by the merits of its multiplayer. In the eyes of publishers, this is essential for keeping the grinding gears of profitability well-oiled. A campaign is likely played once, while the bulgy combo of modes, battle passes, skins, and seasonal updates could keep fickle players hooked for years. All that to say, the Battlefield 6 campaign is very much of its time: functional, anemic, uninventive, and only really there because it has to be—a box ticked.
You play as a rotating squad of slightly unhinged and suitably stoic marines that form a crack killing unit dubbed Dagger 1-3. Set in the near future, the campaign centers on a private military company called Pax Armata led by a gabby Scotsman that, through the usual believability-testing string of double-crossings and political machinations, has grown large enough to destabilize NATO.
You’ll dart to Cairo, then Brooklyn, with stops in Gibraltar and Tajikistan on a world-hopping killing spree framed as flashbacks as the group confronts their CIA handler, all while smearing the terrain with the bullet-riddled bodies of a host of nameless gun-toting goons. As modern FPS campaigns go, it’s precisely what you’d expect. All the staples are there: a save-the-hostage extraction mission, a sniper level, a mess around in a tank, sleek tech, and a classic conspiracy twist crescendo involving, you guessed it, shadowy CIA-sanctioned maneuvering.
Battlefield’s perennial rival, Call of Duty, pumped out an equally formulaic campaign in last year’s Black Ops 6. But among the cliches and hackneyed story beats, there was a singular gem: a hallucinogenic visit to a biolab that felt more than a little inspired by Remedy’s Control and Alan Wake. By conspicuous contrast, there are no gems here. Battlefield 6 plays it safe.
In keeping with a trend among modern FPS games to steer away from stories that could be perceived, god forbid, as too close to the bone of current geopolitics, it leans more into tangled spy-thriller intrigue, scaled up to instill the sense of saving the world rather than anything based on history or sharp, incinerating commentary. Battlefield 6’s campaign is entertainment that won’t ruffle any feathers and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than that. In a franchise beholden to gun-toting power fantasies, the timidity on display here sticks out like a sore thumb.
There are some blundering attempts at eliciting an emotive response in the player. However, these occur in a sort of cinematic singularity, utterly unsympathetic to all the dead bodies in your wake outside of the coreographed story beats.
Thank goodness for all the shooting
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
Image credit: Tom Bardwell for VideoGamer
To give Battlefield Studios (as EA now calls the cohort of DICE, Criterion, et al.) its due, the campaign is easy on the eye, paced to get you into the action quickly, and very respectful of your time, taking no more than 6-8 hours to wrap up. Performance matches this, hitting a solid 100 FPS with DLSS on my well-worn RTX 3070.
The shooting is fun and that’s what really matters, right? Guiding your mouse across the screen, aiming down a sight, and clicking on a head at just the right moment feels glorious; more clicks, more heads, more of that visceral thrill and the accompanying audible snap that does funny things to your brain. The difficulty doesn’t so much come from the smarts of enemies, but from their numbers. There is a range of guns and gadgets that spice up proceedings, however. One stand-out piece of kit allowed you to tag enemies with a drone before dropping a bomb on your unsuspecting target. It’s satisfying stuff.
In my eyes, Battlefield is the more disheveled, chaotic counterpart to the more polished, linear Call of Duty. Battlefield 6 thankfully keeps the tradition going. It feels like one frantic moment after another stitched together across nine levels. One of my favorite parts involves an all-out assault on a Pax Armada facility. It’s pure mayhem. Booming explosions, chittery radio comms, the welter of jets keening overhead, rounds whizzing by; it’s a sensory cannonade. You won’t ever be bored if your sensibilities align with Battlefield 6’s big-action, Hollywood, popcorn wiles.
The bottom line is that this isn’t Titanfall, a MachineGames game, or, for the old heads out there, Half-Life. You’ll breezily play the Battlefield 6 campaign once and shelve it for good, turning your attention to multiplayer. The campaign is a glorified on-ramp. If you’re not going to touch multiplayer, you can sputter and justify as much as you’d like, but the Battlefield 6 campaign alone simply isn’t worth the $70 (£59.99) price point.
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