Gone are the glory days...
It’s hard to overstate the levels of hype surrounding Battlefield 6. Rewind to six months ago though, and things were pretty quiet. The previous entry in the series, Battlefield 2042, was an unmitigated disaster. Widely disliked by even the most hardcore franchise fans, 2042 featured a suite of unpopular design decisions that polluted the tried-and-true Battlefield formula.
That soon changed though, when two gangbuster open beta weekends shifted public sentiment significantly. Now, people were demanding the game be released right away, or offering the “compromise” of a couple more beta weekends to tide them over.
The hype has been off the charts and, with the biggest competitor to the series looking to have an off year, success is all but a given. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though, as Battlefield 6 has carried with it the burden of meeting monetisation goals — and in doing so, has carried across some decidedly questionable design choices.
The UX afterthought
Right out of the gate Battlefield 6 is off to a rough start. To say that the UI is poor would be an understatement – the card-based menu system pulled directly from its competitor is both out of place and clumsily implemented.
Specific game modes are hidden deeper down the menu and even around a carousel, as the developers clearly only want to funnel players into whatever the featured game mode of the hour is. Sorting out your party is harder than it should be, and the flat UI experience is unpleasant to navigate.
Things only get worse when you’re attempting to customise your weapons or class loadout. You’re forced to move through seemingly nonsensical layers of menus before you can finally get to the customisation screen – which also happens to be eerily similar to that of the other big FPS name out there at the moment. The whole user experience of Battlefield 6 leaves much to be desired, chock full of unintuitive design choices that will likely make more sense once the monetisation hits.
The places you’ll go…
Once you’ve conquered that first enemy and stumbled your way into a match – whether intentionally or by sheer luck – you’ll find yourself on one of the nine maps available for Battlefield 6 at launch. These are spread across four locales from the campaign — Tajikistan, Gibraltar, Egypt and New York — as well as one classic map returning from Battlefield 3: Operation Firestorm.
Depending on what game mode you’ve been plonked into, these maps will feature a blend of infantry, mechanised, and aerial warfare options to suit your preferred flavour. Some smaller, urban maps like those set in New York or Cairo may only feature tanks and helicopters, while bigger ones like Firestorm and Tajikistan’s Mirak Valley offer the full complement of vehicles – and plenty of them too.
It must be said though that map design on the whole is rather bland. The smaller maps are a mess of oddly designed pathways, chokepoints, and poorly laid out objectives. Most of the bigger maps don’t play terribly well either, and certainly don’t feel as grand in scale as Caspian Border or Siege of Shanghai.
Instead, they feel like they’re a bunch of smaller maps stitched together. Rather than being large and full of dangerous open areas, they’re covered by a rolling landscape that pushes players together into chokepoints and hot zones. On paper this sounds great, but in practice it makes each map feel restrictive and tight.
This all comes together to cause a lot of friction in the gameplay. It’s telling that the best map at launch, the one that stands head and shoulders over the rest from a gameplay perspective, is Operation Firestorm – though even it has lost some of its flair in the name of modernisation.
… and the people you’ll shoot
None of the friction in the UI or the map design matters though once you’re stuck in the thick of it. Bullets whizz overhead, rockets scream past and blow gaping holes in walls and grenades fall on objectives like volatile raindrops. It’s pure chaos, and it’s where Battlefield really shines.
Each time you arrive at an objective things looks a little different. Building walls crumble under a barrage of rounds. The piece of cover you were laying behind two minutes ago is now just rubble. You’re fighting building to building, tooth and nail for every inch of ground. It’s thrilling.
This moment-to-moment gameplay is where Battlefield 6 is strongest, but once you’re given a chance to breathe the cracks begin to appear. In the brief multiplayer sessions organised through the review period, I experienced my fair share of wonky hit reg.
Horizontal inaccuracy was particularly devious and even the slightest bit of momentum could turn your one hit kill shotgun round into a supple seven damage caress. Having said that, the time to kill is in a good spot overall – perhaps with the exception of the Assault Rifles, which still have no real niche. They’re simply outcompeted at every engagement range.
Class warfare
Classes have long been a staple of the Battlefield series. Historically they’ve defined your role on the ground, and limited what weapons and gadgets were available to you. Battlefield 2042 controversially removed this franchise staple, instead opting for a more monetisable model a la its chief competitor.
The good news is that classes are back in Battlefield 6, as they should be. The two major tenets of the franchise are its large scaled mechanized conquest mode and class-based warfare, so it’s glaring mistake to have ever removed those.
The bad news is that Battlefield Studios is introducing the concept of Open Weapons – the default for all playlists, this mode allows every class to equip every weapon rather than the traditional subset. “That’s great!” you may say, betraying your unfamiliarity with the average gamer.
It’s an indelible fact that when given a choice, most players will gravitate to the strongest weapon. This is naturally unavoidable, but when certain classes only have certain weapons available, you’re forced to choose between utility and offensive capability.
Not so when Open Weapons is on the table. Everyone can run around with whatever shotgun or SMG is the most powerful patch-to-patch without any need to make thoughtful decisions or trade-offs. Be prepared to run into everybody using the same weapon 90% of the time in what will undoubtedly make for a scintillating variety of gameplay experienced post-launch.
Who are you, anyway?
To try and maintain some semblance of class identity, we’re offered a suite of “signature” options for each class to introduce some flair and personality to the way they play. Each class has a specific weapon type they favour, with benefits for opting for them, and a suite of signature traits to carve out a niche for them.
They also each get their own Active Ability, unlocked by earning sufficient score while playing the class, and a signature gadget. Engineers get their repair tool, Supports get a supply bag, etc.
It goes without saying that this system is a total flop. The buffs to signature weapons are so insignificant that they’re immediately forgotten about, and traits are hardly noticeable at all. Playing a Recon or an Engineer twenty minutes into a match feels exactly the same as playing one two minutes into a match.
The only true diversity comes from available gadgets, but even that is meaningless when anyone can equip any weapon. At least Battlefield Studios will be able to sell some more skins whenever that monetisation model drops.
Tear it all down
I’ll never forget the first time I saw the Shanghai skyscraper coming down or the Xiaowan Dam bursting – truly memorable moments and unique to the Battlefield series. While we’re a far cry from the peak days of Levolution, Battlefield 6 still makes a respectable tilt at the concept of reconfigurable terrain.
Take for instance my experience during our review period. Sick of dying from window campers who’re more interested in padding their stats during a playtest than playing the objective, I took it upon myself to engage in some aggressive remodelling. RPG in hand, I was able to knock down the walls of several building adjacent to objectives to really open things up a bit.
It’s remarkably satisfying to see and hear these buildings falling apart under the barrage of anti-tank rounds, and it can completely change the way each objective is played. Suddenly it’s not enough to hide in a corner, instead you need to consider bringing deployable cover to take or hold an objective.
Of course, thanks to the garbage design decision that is Open Weapons, that doesn’t matter at all – you can simply swap to the other class, equip whatever weapon is the meta at that moment, and continue on. Yet another example of how zero thought for anything outside of $$ went into the Open Weapons concept.
The mandatory single-player experience
I doubt there’s anyone out there who’s truly yearning for a Battlefield single-player campaign. Nevertheless, there is a blissfully short experience tacked on so I suppose I should talk about it at least a little.
Battlefield campaigns have been pretty hit or miss – there’ve been well told historical vignettes of war and genuinely lauded campaign entries, such as those in the Battlefield Bad Company games. Sadly, the campaign in Battlefield 6 will go down as a bit of a miss. There are some sparks here and there, hints of something interesting, but on the whole the single-player story is just another shooter campaign.
Set in the near future, the Pax Armata – a PMC that definitely, 100% wasn’t Russia at some point – invades Georgia, seizing much of its land. Honestly the reasoning behind that is forgettable, and long story short the head of NATO is assassinated, causing member states to scramble towards a suitable response.
While the mission-to-mission story has been pretty played out, I did quite enjoy the narrative framing used to drip feed us the story in the present day. Much of this is told by the characters as they question a VIP and recall the moments that lead them to their current circumstance. Sure, this isn’t exactly new either, but it is done well and remains the highlight of the single-player story.
The missions themselves aren’t ground-breaking either, and most of them are just your usual FPS fare. Mostly you’re on foot, but sometimes you’re shooting from a jeep, driving a jeep or even piloting a tank. The best mission in the campaign also happens to be the last one: Operation Ember Strike.
It starts out making good use of Battlefield’s strengths: a wide open map with multiple objectives that you can complete in any order. Somewhat reminiscent of recent Ghost Recon games, you’re able to move about and engage how you want to, which is a welcome breath of fresh air after the railroad-like missions that come before it.
After a couple of sequences that seem designed just to show off the new toys they’ve made for multiplayer, the action crescendos with some big set pieces that show what the team at Battlefield Studios is capable of. It’s just a shame they didn’t get to flex that muscle through any of the previous missions.
I’m not mad, I’m just…
Battlefield 6 is disappointing — not so much because of what it is, but because of what it’s not. As an FPS game, it’s more than serviceable. As a Battlefield game? It’s totally lost the plot. I don’t remember the last time there was this much fervour around the upcoming launch for something from this series; it’s sad to see such wasted potential, as compared to other titles from the storied franchise’s glory days.
Rather than sticking to its guns, Battlefield 6 diverges from the formula. We could have had a steaming hot meal of scrumptious all-out warfare, but instead we’ve been served a lukewarm plate of I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-CoD.
I hope it sells well, but with EA facing a murky future and this game failing to take the genre by the reins and steer it somewhere interesting, we can’t be sure we’ll ever see a mainline entry in the series again.
Battlefield 6 does enough, but it fails to retake the top step through its own power; it’s not as forgettable as other recent entries in the series, but it could have been so much more.
Battlefield 6 was primarily reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC via Steam; additional codes on PS5 were also provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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Battlefield 611 October 2025PC PS5 Xbox Series S & X
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