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The boys and I are a fickle bunch. We drop games like Unreal Engine 5 drops frames, constantly on the hunt for the next winner to pique our jaded interest and keep us coming back. It serves as a useful litmus test of a multiplayer game’s quality and longevity. We haven’t stopped playing Battlefield 6 since launch, nor do we plan to for the foreseeable future; incessant calls of “BF6 later?” clog up our group chat like the world’s most backed-up sink.
I’ve tried to pinpoint exactly what’s so alluring about what, on the surface, is a very safe bet. At first glance, Battlefield 6 multiplayer doesn’t push the FPS boat out in any meaningful way and sits alongside a frankly drab campaign. I’ve decided there’s a bit of nostalgia in there; friends mention Battlefield 3 in hushed, reverential tones, and there’s plenty of that DNA present here. However, standing on its own two feet, Battlefield 6 gives you a modern, competent sandbox full of force and vim. It then gets out of its own way to let you do with it as you see fit – a rare thing these days.
Love is a battlefield
Shooters are so often about moments of glory and skill on the part of the individual player. While BF6 certainly isn’t immune to this trend of indulgent individualism, the sheer scale and intensity of its broad conflict zones make space for communal, shared triumph that tell these organic, tension-filled micro-stories.
The enemy is well-entrenched on an objective. Barricades loom, a tank prowls the perimeter, and a sniper is perched on a building across the street. Locked down. Unbreachable. But through the magic of unorchestrated cooperation, a recon trooper picks off the sniper, an engineer’s mine sends a tank’s mangled parts flying, and a trio flanks a slippery corner-guarding shotgunner high on his leaderboard-topping stats.
There’s hope: a breach, an opening. A few more spawn in on that plucky trio, peeking gingerly around corners, picking off the enemy as best they can. A support valiantly dives into a smoke cloud, weathering spitting bullets to revive a small mass of bodies. Then a few more make it through, and before long, the objective turns blue.
A byproduct of this communality is that Battlefield 6 is uncharacteristically accessible, a thorny issue the FPS genre so often struggles with. Whether you’re a veteran or a green novice, there’s always a way to make an impact and contribute in a small but meaningful way. Post-match XP hauls are a reminder of this, rewarding you for utilitarian actions, revives, and objective captures, along with your skill at clicking on heads. One player can hog the kills, but it’s the group that wins the battle.
The spread of modes and maps runs the usual gamut of tight, kill-heavy deathmatches to classic sprawling Battlefield™ modes like the 64-player-strong Conquest and Breakthrough that rid themselves of oppressive CoD-like lanes for the freedom to kill and die in a dizzying array of ways.
Scale and chaos are the only guarantees here; unpredictability is king. Jets scream overhead, walls crumble to reveal four SMGs aimed at your dome, and you’ll be grateful when you stay alive for more than a couple of minutes. It’s a spectacle that keeps delivering regardless of whether it’s your first game of the night or the fifth – cacophonous, unrelenting, and profoundly fun to play.
Battlefield Studios has expertly brought this sandbox to life, arguably like never before. Care and detail are evident in the granularity of the sound design, pleasingly detailed and richly detailed animations, and the ever-morphing environment.
Where Battlefield 6 excels is in gunplay at all distances. Close-quarters fights are loud, snappy, and delightfully scrappy. Conversely, long-range firefights feel like long-distance chess where repositioning, reaction times, and a shrewd judgment of drop are keys to coming out on top.
In both cases, aiming is fair and never feels like it’s cheating you out of damage or kills. The gunplay feels weighty and raw; there’s a genuine sense that you’re wielding a literal, actual killing machine. It also helps that the TTK (time to kill), essential to the core gameplay loop, is calibrated just right.
A few forgettable blemishes
There are a few flaws, balancing issues, and bugs. Assault rifles play a tad weak and samey. I’ve had respawns drop me a kaleidoscopic vortex of light. The Engineer class flops into thumb-twiddling territory when there isn’t a tank or wall to blow up; more large-scale maps wouldn’t have gone amiss, and I’m pretty sure the notorious drone glitch isn’t by design. It’s minor stuff compared to what is otherwise a polished experience. They’ll be ironed out in time.
More grueling is the attachment meta-progression. The loadout grind is a bit of a drag, and even when the post-game summary pings a new unlock (which is regularly to give the system its due, keeping your brain’s reward centers nice and sated), the excitement quickly subsides because most feel quite superficial and dry. The challenges are perfunctory more than anything, giving you by-the-numbers ancillary goals that range from frustrating to straight-up boring, pulling your focus away from claiming and defending objectives. Rank progression crawls at a snail’s pace, too, with many guns and gadgets off-limits unless you’re willing or have stacks of time to spend playing.
After the disappointing Battlefield 2042 that tanked hard amid a feeling that EA’s FPS baby might not be long for this world, Battlefield is back to its best. Battlefield 6 is a triumphant return that more than stacks up to the past while weaving in some choice refinements, especially to gunplay. Strangely, the most enjoyable multiplayer FPS in quite a while is anchored in design choices, modes, and maps from more than a decade ago. This isn’t innovation, but a return to what works. However, amid the sea of battle royales and Call of Duty dominance, it’s rather telling that Battlefield 6 feels like a breath of galvanic fresh air.
Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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