The Battlefield franchise has always been about finding your own fun. That’s important, because with Battlefield 2042, it feels like the game itself is working hard to cut as much away from the game as possible, offering up a game crammed with weird new systems that feel like they’ve been shoehorned into a franchise that, really, doesn’t need them.
This is a review-in-progress, and there will be an official score after playing the game on the live servers for a weekend and experiencing what the community has to offer, because the 12-15 hours of playtime at the private (digital) review event held by EA ahead of the game wasn’t enough time to explore everything 2042 has to offer. However, based on what I’ve played so far, it’s hard not to view Battlefield 2042 as one of the year’s biggest disappointments.
When the game works – and occasionally, in spite of itself, it will – it’s hard not to enjoy the sheer “Battlefieldiness” of the whole experience, giggling with a friend as you swing past enemies in a hovercraft while your squad guns down approaching infantry.
When it sheds these bizarre additions, and you can play the classic class-based Battlefield in the Battlefield Portal, it works. It really really works.
The most heinous crime is the removal of the class and loadout systems, replacing both with Specialists instead. These specialists are grouped, loosely, into the classes of old: Mackay, a character tooled up with a grapple hook and a baseball cap nice enough to appear in an episode of Succession, is technically an Assault, for example. However, every Specialist can equip every weapon, gadget and piece of equipment.
As a result, Mackay isn’t really an Assault. He’s a man with a grapple hook, and so he can be played by anyone that wants to use that, whether that’s equipped with an assault rifle, light machine gun or anything. That means that the class-based multiplayer that’s at the heart of Battlefield is eroded by this, as 30 people with grapples run into every fight, often equipped with a kit designed to give them what they need: that sniper on a nearby mountain can now take ammo with him, resupplying himself until the heat death of the universe. Suddenly, instead of a team of people surging forwards, ammo bearers tossing out supplies as medics follow at the tail end, reviving fallen players, you have 128 disparate players (64 on last-gen consoles) all charging around doing their own thing.
Every operator in the game has their own ability, but most are unremarkable. One character has a big shield – and currently in the build we were playing a completely broken hitbox making him impervious to everything but high explosives – for pushing up close, another has a little medical gun that can heal people at range. Elsewhere, characters can put down turrets or build deployable cover. Was this what we lost a class system for? It feels unnatural, like Battlefield itself is trying to throw off the hero shooter cloak EA has thrown over it.
The heroes seem to be added for the benefit of the new headline mode, Hazard Zone, takes ideas from Escape From Tarkov but oversimplifies it, making the situation so complicated as to make it an exercise in frustration. You’ll queue up with four people and then buy a loadout with credits, before dropping in to a repurposed multiplayer map to try and hunt down data drives against several other
Get these into one of the helicopters that hovers around the map, and you’ll extract and get a bunch of credits and a refund for the items you took in. Die… which is pretty likely, based on the experiences we’ve had with it so far, and you lose everything.
It’s overly complex compared to Battlefield’s usual explosive fare, and I’m not sure if it’s a worthy addition here. Death comes pretty quickly as the time to kill is low, and you’ll basically be avoiding getting caught between two groups and picked apart. The difficulty is that when you do smash it and seize victory, you just get a slightly larger pile of credits. On the flip side, when you lose you have to fight through tons of different screens and admin to get back in. So, when you win you get nothing worthwhile, but when you lose it’s miserable.
Get past Hazard Zone and the Operators in general, and you have to fight with several other systems that seem to be a weird fit: weapon customisation is awkward. You can change stuff in game on the fly, and the menu to select these is archaic.
The shining light at the moment seems to be the Battlefield Portal, which is good enough that it makes the game almost worthwhile. In theory – and maybe that’s true, we’ll experiment more over the weekend – Battlefield Portal allows you to make your own game modes. We got to try this out with a weird free for all game-mode, it seemed fine, the community will do great stuff with it.
In reality there’s are semi-complete remakes of Battlefield 1942, Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 contained within. Battlefield 1942 feels like how I remember Battlefield 1942 feeling, with the 2042 engine providing the graphical grunt to have sand kicking up.
Again, Bad Company 2 is flawless: it’s a solid remake and apes the movement from Bad Company 2, so there’s no ability to prone and you can no longer strafe to the sides. The only disappointing part is that it’s not a full remake, because it feels
Unfortunately, these are still so fun at this stage that it just throws some of the issues
The worst part – at this stage – is that Battlefield 2042 is the game that’s appeared, rather than full remakes of Battlefield 1942, Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3. All of which feel just as good as they did back in the day, easily going toe to toe with today’s shooters.
I’m hoping that, freed from the confines of the EA review event, Battlefield 2042 will come to life and deliver on the series’ magic, but at the moment it’s too busy getting in its own way. We’ll have a full review over the next few days.
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