One of many; you only need to spend a few seconds in Battlefield 6 to realize that you’re not winning any wars on your lonesome. There are no power fantasies to be exacted by taking the shoelace express into the heart of battle, an act that’ll likely see you shot dead the moment more patient eyes set their sights right. Glory and victory come not from individual performances, but a collective one. Two teams of 32, further divided into eight squads per team, charge into battle against one another. What distinguishes them? Coordination, communication, and keeping up with the situation — what it calls for, what your team needs, what your enemies want. This is what Battlefield is: large-scale battles where teams push and defend and try to cover their bases (in both literal and figurative senses), while exploiting the holes in their enemies’. On any given team, everyone plays their part. Wins are team victories; losses are collective failures. That’s Battlefield.
Battlefield 6, the latest entry in EA’s long-running series of war games, is all of the above, but it’s also the publisher’s latest effort to prove that this series still has legs capable of not just standing tall in today’s multiplayer gaming landscape, but also keeping the pace moving forward. This game is tasked with following the maligned Battlefield 2042, a title that failed to strike a chord with players. In my own experience, I have a similar view of 2042 that I do of, say, eating at a McDonald’s or Taco Bell: I played it because it was there, and good or bad, it wasn’t exactly something I thought too much about afterwards.
This latest title, however, compels me. Certainly more than 2042 did, and in a much different way than other online games I routinely partake in. It’s a damn fun team game that aims to harken back to what people love about the series, while reigning in recent entries’ missteps. But for as much as it seeks to look back, Battlefield 6 is also painfully aware of the times, as evidenced by the live service trappings it’s employed since its launch. With this title, the newly formed Battlefield Studios proclaims confidently that Battlefield is back, but whispers off the mic suggest another proclamation that might’ve been better left unsaid: This is just how AAA multiplayer games are now.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Battlefield is a simple concept to grasp; an easy game to pick up and play. When a match starts, you pick a class of soldier to spawn in as, then try to complete the stated objective while playing to your class’s strengths. The assault class will probably feel right at home to many of the FPS faithful, and each team will certainly require a fair number of gunslingers to clear out enemy forces. But raw firepower alone typically isn’t enough to seal the deal here. You also need supports, who can quickly revive and resupply their allies, while also laying down some heavy suppressing fire with monstrous LMGs; recon units, who overlook the battlefield, spotting and sniping foes from afar; and engineers, whose specialties lie in both destroying and repairing vehicles, another valuable piece to the puzzle that is each match.
How these units are utilized typically depend on the game mode being played as well as the flow of the match. When playing Breakthrough, you might find your advances stagnating against a competent squad or two manning the frontline. Situations like this can benefit from the presence of some supports dedicated to getting wounded soldiers back in action or throwing up cover, sustaining the firefight, and keeping pressure on the defenders. In Conquest, vehicles, some of which possess significant firepower, can also be used to quickly move a few soldiers between outposts, giving them great combat and strategic utility. As useful as they are, they’re also high-priority targets for the enemy team. But that’s true of every role to play here. There’s a high reward to be exacted from playing your part, but also a lot of risk.
The large-scale battles that Battlefield is known for typically allot each team hundreds of lives — or tickets — which may present a facade of comfort in the face of frequently-dying players. But the point of Battlefield has always been playing the objective, and you can’t do that if you’re dead. It may only take a few seconds to respawn, but during that time, the enemy has succeeded in putting a crack in your team’s armor. Your absence may prove to be just what they needed to make another one, and before you know it, everything has dominoed into a wide-open hole in your team’s defense. No one piece grasps victory on its own, but the absence of just one piece can cause the whole house to come falling down.
Team composition plays a big role in both match flow and team performance. An imbalanced team can get dogwalked quite easily. But when you get matched with a team that really understands the situation, or at least communicates with your ailing team to get them better aligned on a strategy to fulfill your objective, it’s transcendent.
The matches do a great job of forcing you to establish a sense of community for 20-40 minutes as you fight, reinforce, supply, repair, destroy, and overall, survive alongside 31 others. When a match concludes, you can opt to matchmake once more with your four-person squad if you feel you really clicked with them. But on occasion — particularly after a victory — there will be a fleeting sense of appreciative sorrow that you can’t play just one more game with the full team. That’s fine, because every match is an opportunity to hunt that communal success, evoke that same feeling, albeit with a new group of people.
Everyone’s mileage will certainly vary regarding online experiences, but I had a surprisingly cooperative and overall pleasant time engaging with my teams. That’s not to say that negativity or trash talk were completely absent, but more that the majority of the people I played with knew what they were signing up for when forking over their money.
Despite the technical competence of this game and the pleasure that it is to play, it doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table. In serving as a return to form for the series, it plays things remarkably safe, lacking innovation beyond its visual and aural fidelity. It feels like it’s lacking a certain quality to distinguish itself from the best among its predecessors; it simply reaches for the bar those before it set, rather than aiming to raise it further, which leaves me to question how confident EA really is in this series.
Many ways to play
The game modes on display are plentiful. Large-scale modes like Breakthrough and Conquest are arguably the main attractions, but if you’re looking for something a little tighter, there are mid-to-small-scale modes to pick from, such as team/squad deathmatch or Rush. The matchmaking is robust and will let you search for exactly the mode you want on the exact map you want to play on, while the compatibility with Battlefield Portal (an official tool accessed separately from Battlefield 6 that allows players to create custom game modes as well as edit levels) means that you’ll never have to look too far if you’re looking for a little variety between the official modes.
But customization isn’t limited solely to Portal. As is the case in these types of games, you can customize each class’s loadout with myriad weapons and pieces of equipment that you’ll usually unlock by ranking up, but occasionally by fulfilling certain challenges. It’s here where you get a chance to really experiment with fleshing out your soldiers, ideally optimizing your class play. You can even swap out each class’s signature primary weapon with that of another. Want a medic with a sniper? Go for it.
Multiplayer challenges come in a few different varieties, mainly dailies, weeklies, and assignments, the last of which consists of a variety of challenges specific to certain weapons, classes, or game modes. If you want to quickly level up and max out your arsenal of gear, focusing on challenges will probably be the way to go. However, playing with a challenge-first mentality did not result in a particularly great time for myself or my teammates. It’s much more enjoyable to play the game how it’s supposed to be played, naturally achieving challenge milestones along the way.
That said, the stats these challenges are tracking, headshots hit or allies revived, as examples, don’t always appear to be tracked reliably, thanks to a bug. It is a little bewildering that a high-budget release in the year 2025 has trouble with this sort of thing, particularly when it’s the backbone of one of its core systems.
A new war story
In living up to being a return to form for the series, Battlefield 6 reintroduces a single-player campaign, a mode that was notably absent in 2042. The nine-mission story follows a struggling NATO military force as they combat Pax Armata, a private military company that has been violently taking the world by storm. The content of the story is pretty standard for military fiction set in the near future. It’s not too far off from the campaigns of previous Battlefield games or those of its contemporaries. But that’s really neither here nor there. These modes aren’t typically notable for their stories, but rather for providing a few hours of thrills, perhaps some more theatrical gameplay than you would normally see in the main game, and maybe teaching you a few things on how to play the game. If you’re lucky, you might even have some memorable personalities to write home about, like Bad Company’s titular squad.
Battlefield 6’s campaign exists, and that’s the most positive thing that can be said about it. There is truthfully nothing about it that makes it worth playing. It’s only a few hours long, but it’s also the most bored I’ve felt while playing a game this year. The levels are mostly linear slogs where you, typically accompanied by a small group of soldiers, fight against hundreds of enemies who have the survival instinct of a group of lemmings. Veer just outside the track the game wants you to ride, and you’ll be threatened with a game over unless you get back to the arbitrarily defined mission area. In a nutshell, you walk forward, crouch behind cover, shoot enemies, and repeat until you get to the next cutscene. The mode tries to present an artifice of exploration by way of dog tags that can be found throughout each mission, but this laughably thin veneer of credibility ironically deprives the campaign further of any it once had. It’s a mode that presents itself like some high schooler’s rushed homework, and it feels like homework to play.
The creative choices made here are baffling. It simply rehashes a lot of the worst tropes found in single-player shooter campaigns since the 2010s. It’s understandable why a single-player mode in a multiplayer-focused game like this might be a little less refined than what most would consider to be the Main Game. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect such a mode to at least translate the experience of playing the Main Game into something digestible. Especially when similar games like Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and Star Wars Battlefront II managed to do just that twenty years ago. Thankfully, this mode is very easily ignorable. There are cosmetics to be earned from wading through its missions, but nothing worth any serious grief. You can even choose to uninstall it to save space — something I personally recommend you do as soon as you start up the game. The lack of congruence it has with the bulk of the game makes it a rather inexplicable blemish on what is otherwise a pretty solid multiplayer package.
Pay up
With the big update that hit the game in late October, a whole lot of new customization items were added to the game, albeit in the form of a battle pass. Thankfully, gameplay-affecting rewards such as weapons appear to be unlockable through a free version of this battle pass. Like the campaign, this is another portion of the game where one’s participation is optional, but it is undeniably a little side-eye-worthy, at best. Especially when your gaze shifts over to a related addition: The Battlefield Store, where you can buy Battlefield Coins, pre-customized weapons, and cosmetics.
The reason for this huge live service push is most evident in the update’s biggest addition: Battlefield REDSEC, a free-to-play, standalone battle royale mode that shares progression with the main game. I interpret these live service trappings as existing primarily for the REDSEC players, who might be inclined to purchase the full game one day with the knowledge they could retain their weapons and cosmetics acquired. But these elements also work to the main game’s detriment. Their presence further clutters the already messy UI, and it feels like the game is constantly trying to sell you stuff — understandable and expected in a free-to-play title, irritating and insulting in something that already demands a $70 entry fee.
I’d be remiss to act like Battlefield is the only AAA series charging its player base big money up front followed by seasonal requests for incremental payments; this is sort of the industry norm now. That said, some norms are pretty bad, and it’s worth considering whether the industry is worse off for embracing them.
Battlefield 6 is a great time — for now. When I go to boot it up, I actively look forward to immersing myself in its battles, playing any role that I can in the hopes of pulling out a win. But everything I love about this latest entry can be found in the prior games. There’s nothing particularly innovative about it, which reads to me as a risk-averse decision made in the wake of the PR nightmare that was 2042. The game has only been out for about a month now, and the true test of its quality will come in the months, ideally years, following its release — how it’s supported, its post-launch content, and its coexistence with REDSEC. Will players still flock to it six months from now?
The quality of a multiplayer game is more fluid than ever nowadays as time goes on. But at this point in time, Battlefield 6 is a pretty enjoyable game, and I hope it stays that way. However, I also hope EA doesn’t take its broadly positive reception so far as a sign that reaching the standard is as sufficient or desirable as raising it.
Battlefield 6 starts its life as an enjoyable, albeit overly safe, return to form for the series. How’s the game now after over a month? Here’s our in-depth review.
One of many; you only need to spend a few seconds in Battlefield 6 to realize that you’re not winning any wars on your lonesome. There are no power fantasies to be exacted by taking the shoelace express into the heart of battle, an act that’ll likely see you shot dead the moment more patient eyes set their sights right. Glory and victory come not from individual performances, but a collective one. Two teams of 32, further divided into eight squads per team, charge into battle against one another. What distinguishes them? Coordination, communication, and keeping up with the situation — what it calls for, what your team needs, what your enemies want. This is what Battlefield is: large-scale battles where teams push and defend and try to cover their bases (in both literal and figurative senses), while exploiting the holes in their enemies’. On any given team, everyone plays their part. Wins are team victories; losses are collective failures. That’s Battlefield.
Battlefield 6, the latest entry in EA’s long-running series of war games, is all of the above, but it’s also the publisher’s latest effort to prove that this series still has legs capable of not just standing tall in today’s multiplayer gaming landscape, but also keeping the pace moving forward. This game is tasked with following the maligned Battlefield 2042, a title that failed to strike a chord with players. In my own experience, I have a similar view of 2042 that I do of, say, eating at a McDonald’s or Taco Bell: I played it because it was there, and good or bad, it wasn’t exactly something I thought too much about afterwards.
This latest title, however, compels me. Certainly more than 2042 did, and in a much different way than other online games I routinely partake in. It’s a damn fun team game that aims to harken back to what people love about the series, while reigning in recent entries’ missteps. But for as much as it seeks to look back, Battlefield 6 is also painfully aware of the times, as evidenced by the live service trappings it’s employed since its launch. With this title, the newly formed Battlefield Studios proclaims confidently that Battlefield is back, but whispers off the mic suggest another proclamation that might’ve been better left unsaid: This is just how AAA multiplayer games are now.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Battlefield is a simple concept to grasp; an easy game to pick up and play. When a match starts, you pick a class of soldier to spawn in as, then try to complete the stated objective while playing to your class’s strengths. The assault class will probably feel right at home to many of the FPS faithful, and each team will certainly require a fair number of gunslingers to clear out enemy forces. But raw firepower alone typically isn’t enough to seal the deal here. You also need supports, who can quickly revive and resupply their allies, while also laying down some heavy suppressing fire with monstrous LMGs; recon units, who overlook the battlefield, spotting and sniping foes from afar; and engineers, whose specialties lie in both destroying and repairing vehicles, another valuable piece to the puzzle that is each match.
How these units are utilized typically depend on the game mode being played as well as the flow of the match. When playing Breakthrough, you might find your advances stagnating against a competent squad or two manning the frontline. Situations like this can benefit from the presence of some supports dedicated to getting wounded soldiers back in action or throwing up cover, sustaining the firefight, and keeping pressure on the defenders. In Conquest, vehicles, some of which possess significant firepower, can also be used to quickly move a few soldiers between outposts, giving them great combat and strategic utility. As useful as they are, they’re also high-priority targets for the enemy team. But that’s true of every role to play here. There’s a high reward to be exacted from playing your part, but also a lot of risk.
The large-scale battles that Battlefield is known for typically allot each team hundreds of lives — or tickets — which may present a facade of comfort in the face of frequently-dying players. But the point of Battlefield has always been playing the objective, and you can’t do that if you’re dead. It may only take a few seconds to respawn, but during that time, the enemy has succeeded in putting a crack in your team’s armor. Your absence may prove to be just what they needed to make another one, and before you know it, everything has dominoed into a wide-open hole in your team’s defense. No one piece grasps victory on its own, but the absence of just one piece can cause the whole house to come falling down.
Team composition plays a big role in both match flow and team performance. An imbalanced team can get dogwalked quite easily. But when you get matched with a team that really understands the situation, or at least communicates with your ailing team to get them better aligned on a strategy to fulfill your objective, it’s transcendent.
The matches do a great job of forcing you to establish a sense of community for 20-40 minutes as you fight, reinforce, supply, repair, destroy, and overall, survive alongside 31 others. When a match concludes, you can opt to matchmake once more with your four-person squad if you feel you really clicked with them. But on occasion — particularly after a victory — there will be a fleeting sense of appreciative sorrow that you can’t play just one more game with the full team. That’s fine, because every match is an opportunity to hunt that communal success, evoke that same feeling, albeit with a new group of people.
Everyone’s mileage will certainly vary regarding online experiences, but I had a surprisingly cooperative and overall pleasant time engaging with my teams. That’s not to say that negativity or trash talk were completely absent, but more that the majority of the people I played with knew what they were signing up for when forking over their money.
Despite the technical competence of this game and the pleasure that it is to play, it doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table. In serving as a return to form for the series, it plays things remarkably safe, lacking innovation beyond its visual and aural fidelity. It feels like it’s lacking a certain quality to distinguish itself from the best among its predecessors; it simply reaches for the bar those before it set, rather than aiming to raise it further, which leaves me to question how confident EA really is in this series.
Many ways to play
The game modes on display are plentiful. Large-scale modes like Breakthrough and Conquest are arguably the main attractions, but if you’re looking for something a little tighter, there are mid-to-small-scale modes to pick from, such as team/squad deathmatch or Rush. The matchmaking is robust and will let you search for exactly the mode you want on the exact map you want to play on, while the compatibility with Battlefield Portal (an official tool accessed separately from Battlefield 6 that allows players to create custom game modes as well as edit levels) means that you’ll never have to look too far if you’re looking for a little variety between the official modes.
But customization isn’t limited solely to Portal. As is the case in these types of games, you can customize each class’s loadout with myriad weapons and pieces of equipment that you’ll usually unlock by ranking up, but occasionally by fulfilling certain challenges. It’s here where you get a chance to really experiment with fleshing out your soldiers, ideally optimizing your class play. You can even swap out each class’s signature primary weapon with that of another. Want a medic with a sniper? Go for it.
Multiplayer challenges come in a few different varieties, mainly dailies, weeklies, and assignments, the last of which consists of a variety of challenges specific to certain weapons, classes, or game modes. If you want to quickly level up and max out your arsenal of gear, focusing on challenges will probably be the way to go. However, playing with a challenge-first mentality did not result in a particularly great time for myself or my teammates. It’s much more enjoyable to play the game how it’s supposed to be played, naturally achieving challenge milestones along the way.
That said, the stats these challenges are tracking, headshots hit or allies revived, as examples, don’t always appear to be tracked reliably, thanks to a bug. It is a little bewildering that a high-budget release in the year 2025 has trouble with this sort of thing, particularly when it’s the backbone of one of its core systems.
A new war story
In living up to being a return to form for the series, Battlefield 6 reintroduces a single-player campaign, a mode that was notably absent in 2042. The nine-mission story follows a struggling NATO military force as they combat Pax Armata, a private military company that has been violently taking the world by storm. The content of the story is pretty standard for military fiction set in the near future. It’s not too far off from the campaigns of previous Battlefield games or those of its contemporaries. But that’s really neither here nor there. These modes aren’t typically notable for their stories, but rather for providing a few hours of thrills, perhaps some more theatrical gameplay than you would normally see in the main game, and maybe teaching you a few things on how to play the game. If you’re lucky, you might even have some memorable personalities to write home about, like Bad Company’s titular squad.
Battlefield 6’s campaign exists, and that’s the most positive thing that can be said about it. There is truthfully nothing about it that makes it worth playing. It’s only a few hours long, but it’s also the most bored I’ve felt while playing a game this year. The levels are mostly linear slogs where you, typically accompanied by a small group of soldiers, fight against hundreds of enemies who have the survival instinct of a group of lemmings. Veer just outside the track the game wants you to ride, and you’ll be threatened with a game over unless you get back to the arbitrarily defined mission area. In a nutshell, you walk forward, crouch behind cover, shoot enemies, and repeat until you get to the next cutscene. The mode tries to present an artifice of exploration by way of dog tags that can be found throughout each mission, but this laughably thin veneer of credibility ironically deprives the campaign further of any it once had. It’s a mode that presents itself like some high schooler’s rushed homework, and it feels like homework to play.
The creative choices made here are baffling. It simply rehashes a lot of the worst tropes found in single-player shooter campaigns since the 2010s. It’s understandable why a single-player mode in a multiplayer-focused game like this might be a little less refined than what most would consider to be the Main Game. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect such a mode to at least translate the experience of playing the Main Game into something digestible. Especially when similar games like Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and Star Wars Battlefront II managed to do just that twenty years ago. Thankfully, this mode is very easily ignorable. There are cosmetics to be earned from wading through its missions, but nothing worth any serious grief. You can even choose to uninstall it to save space — something I personally recommend you do as soon as you start up the game. The lack of congruence it has with the bulk of the game makes it a rather inexplicable blemish on what is otherwise a pretty solid multiplayer package.
Pay up
With the big update that hit the game in late October, a whole lot of new customization items were added to the game, albeit in the form of a battle pass. Thankfully, gameplay-affecting rewards such as weapons appear to be unlockable through a free version of this battle pass. Like the campaign, this is another portion of the game where one’s participation is optional, but it is undeniably a little side-eye-worthy, at best. Especially when your gaze shifts over to a related addition: The Battlefield Store, where you can buy Battlefield Coins, pre-customized weapons, and cosmetics.
The reason for this huge live service push is most evident in the update’s biggest addition: Battlefield REDSEC, a free-to-play, standalone battle royale mode that shares progression with the main game. I interpret these live service trappings as existing primarily for the REDSEC players, who might be inclined to purchase the full game one day with the knowledge they could retain their weapons and cosmetics acquired. But these elements also work to the main game’s detriment. Their presence further clutters the already messy UI, and it feels like the game is constantly trying to sell you stuff — understandable and expected in a free-to-play title, irritating and insulting in something that already demands a $70 entry fee.
I’d be remiss to act like Battlefield is the only AAA series charging its player base big money up front followed by seasonal requests for incremental payments; this is sort of the industry norm now. That said, some norms are pretty bad, and it’s worth considering whether the industry is worse off for embracing them.
Battlefield 6 is a great time — for now. When I go to boot it up, I actively look forward to immersing myself in its battles, playing any role that I can in the hopes of pulling out a win. But everything I love about this latest entry can be found in the prior games. There’s nothing particularly innovative about it, which reads to me as a risk-averse decision made in the wake of the PR nightmare that was 2042. The game has only been out for about a month now, and the true test of its quality will come in the months, ideally years, following its release — how it’s supported, its post-launch content, and its coexistence with REDSEC. Will players still flock to it six months from now?
The quality of a multiplayer game is more fluid than ever nowadays as time goes on. But at this point in time, Battlefield 6 is a pretty enjoyable game, and I hope it stays that way. However, I also hope EA doesn’t take its broadly positive reception so far as a sign that reaching the standard is as sufficient or desirable as raising it.
by Jon Yelenic
