Review: Battlefield: Hardline (single-player)

Apparently Miami is gaming’s latest hotspot; both Hotline Miami 2 and Battlefield: Hardline feature Florida’s most famous city. It’s ironic that in my review for Hotline Miami 2, I lamented triple-A gaming and even referenced Michael Bay, since Battlefield: Hardline’s campaign sits firmly in both those camps. Purely spectacle over substance (unless we’re talking the illicit kind), Hardline is popcorn gaming. Thankfully, like the Hollywood blockbusters that inspire it, Hardline excites and entertains. It does so in a wholly shallow, predictable and familiar way but sometimes, some mindless action is just what the doctor ordered.

Players take the role of Nick Mendoza in Hardline’s campaign. A newly-minted detective with Miami PD, he’s looking to clean up the mean streets and take a different path than his no-good father. We’ve seen this character before dozens of times before in games, films, books; you name it. Mendoza is supposed to have conviction and we’re supposed to believe in him and his motivations, but only when it suits Hardline‘s plot. If the scene calls for him to act against character for the gameplay to make sense, then he will. It’s jarring and makes him seem totally wishy-washy. He’s also bland. So, so bland.

For a main character, he just doesn’t have a large enough presence. Typically, shooters handle protagonists in one of two ways: as a cipher for the player (think Gordon Freeman) or as a character in their own right (Duke Nukem). Mendoza sits somewhere in between. Sure, he speaks and reacts and is certainly a character first and foremost, but he’s kind of just there. I never felt really connected to him in any meaningful way and I never bought into his ‘mission’. Visceral works hard to connect the player to Mendoza and actor Nicholas Gonzalez does his best with the material he’s given, but the character falls flat. For a high-octane, police drama a nothingy main character is a real problem. Luckily, the supporting cast is pretty great.

Ex-army hacker Boomer and cocaine dealer Tyson Latchford are standouts and Captain Julian Dawes (played by the always brilliant Benito Martinez) steals every scene he’s in. While the cast fires on all cylinders, Hardline’s script and story are a dog’s breakfast. Hard-hitting dialogue like “How do you know where he is?” and “He told me (brooding stare),” occurs far too frequently, and often at pivotal moments in the narrative. I get the sense that Visceral tried to create moments that gamers would remember and quote, but none of them land with the intended impact. Mostly, they’re lame, which is a shame; when Visceral takes its hand off the wheel and lets its scenes breathe, there are sparks of greatness. The same can’t be said of the plot unfortunately.

I knew each and every beat of the plot, twist and shocking reveal long before Hardline got around to showing me. Not because I’d been told, mind you, just because it’s all so blindingly obvious. That familiar feeling I was talking about earlier when it comes to the plot. It’s 100% “been there, done that”. Take the scripts from Heat, Bad Boys, L.A. Confidential, Training Day and any other hard-boiled cop drama you can think of, put them in a blender and you have Battlefield: Hardline. While this is largely true of most fiction in a specific genre, Hardline’s sin is that nothing it does, plot-wise, is at all original or unexpected. Like a good police detective; it does things by the book. The plot does veer wildly off the rails at around the mid-way point though, in true Hollywood blockbuster fashion. At that point nothing the characters say or do makes sense in the context of the first half, but they do so with such conviction that you’re forced to go with it. Either that or never learn how drug dealer ‘A’ was double crossed by corrupt cop ‘B’ who you thought was good but was actually bad the whole time. Suspenseful stuff.

The plot is pretty terrible; entertaining, but terrible. Thankfully, the gameplay is excellent. Hardline slaps a police uniform over the urban camo of previous Battlefields, resulting in some unexpectedly brilliant gameplay changes. First and foremost is that Hardline is totally stealth-based. Being a police officer means that Mendoza can sneak up on enemies, flash his badge and order them to surrender. Arresting up to three perps (yeah, I know the lingo) at a time exponentially increases the difficulty as you’ll have to keep a watchful eye on each baddie to make sure they don’t go for their gun. If you’re spotted while in the middle of an arrest you’ll soon have a swarm of goons flocking to your locations and standard FPS shootouts ensue. Additionally, if a goon spots a downed buddy he’ll investigate the area and if you can’t take him out quickly enough, will alert everyone else in the area. Sometimes reinforcements will arrived, triggered by a ringing alarm, unless you’ve been sneaky enough to disable it.

The problem with the stealth components of Hardline’s campaign aren’t because of the stealth, they’re because of the rest of its gameplay. Standard shootouts — when compared to tension of sneaking — are a snore fest despite their over-the-top, explosive nature. They’re also frequently forced. The half a dozen or so moments when my only objective was “Survive” were torturous. It was in these moments that I remembered that while Hardline is wearing a shiny police uniform it’s still a military shooter at heart. In the latter half of the game action is favoured over the earlier stealth which is a shame. There are some spectacular set-pieces late in the game, but as the focus shifted, my enjoyment waned. While there are a handful of missions that feature vehicular gameplay, the less said about them, the better. Mercifully they’re short and infrequent.

Let’s face it, most players aren’t interested in Hardline for its campaign. It serves its purpose in introducing new players to Battlefield elements, weapons and loadouts in preparation of multiplayer, but it’s the B-story of the piece. Multiplayer is the real meat and due to minimal server population pre-launch I’m not yet ready to pass judgment on the multiplayer component. Check back next week for a review of the multiplayer modes and a final score.

Battlefield: Hardline’s campaign suffers from a shallow and wholly unoriginal plot, incongruous gameplay elements and some truly awful dialogue, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying my time with it. The stealth is a welcome addition to the franchise even if it is disregarded in favour of traditional shooting in the third act. As I said in the beginning, sometimes some mindless action is just what the doctor ordered and if that mood takes you I can’t recommend Hardline enough. If a sequel beefs up the police elements and downplays the over-the-top Hollywood cliches, Visceral will have something very special on its hands. There’s lots of potential here and that’s always a good thing.

Battlefield: Hardline’s campaign was reviewed using a promotional code on Xbox One, as provided by the publisher. A final verdict and overall score will be issued to the game next week once enough time has been spent with the multiplayer component.