Distributor provided a review copy.
When I reviewed Battlefield 2042, I said that it would be good one day. It just wasn't ready at the time of launch. Since then, it has grown into something that's not quite a banger, but certainly not the disaster many would claim it to be. It just took three years and multiple major updates to find its groove.
If I reviewed Battlefield 2042 in its present state, it would most likely warrant two whole stars more. That's how big of a difference the updates have made.
Joonatan Itkonen
You can't review potential, only what's there at the moment.
Which is why Battlefield 6 is such a weird proposition to review now, a month after release, after spending dozens and dozens of hours in the multiplayer, and far fewer in its interminable campaign. In a week, it will launch new maps and a battle royale mode. Next year, who knows. We now live in a time where a service title like this doesn't launch just once, but multiple times over the course of almost half a decade.
But you can't review potential, only what's there at the moment. Therefore when I talk about Battlefield 6, I'm talking about what it looks and feels like today, in late October of 2025. Next week, month, year, or in the far future, it will be a different thing entirely. If I could, I'd rewrite this review once a year like a report card.
To begin with, Battlefield 6 has only one clear and major goal that it absolutely has to meet: It needs to remind players of what this franchise used to be. Mostly, it needs to bring back the ever faithful and aging group of gamers that were there for Battlefield 3 almost 15 years ago. Those that still enjoyed, but maybe didn't love where the series went with Battlefield 1, or who started to drop off when Battlefield 4 began to play around with shifting combat arenas.
Battlefield 6 needs to be a restart. Simple, direct, even nostalgic. Everything else is secondary because it can be updated and patched in later. But first the players have to feel like this is familiar enough to matter.
In that regard, Battlefield 6 is a success. The question then becomes: At what cost?
Campaign
Battlefield 6 has one of the worst campaigns in modern shooter history, period. It's as simple as that.
Poorly written, horribly paced, and with some of the ugliest politics since that ill-judged Medal of Honor reboot in the mid-2000s, the story missions are a waste of space that even the game instructs you to delete the first chance it gets.
Luckily, it's not necessary to play any of it, and at just over 5 hours in length it's a blissfully short detour if you do decide to wade in.
The plot is a childish mishmash of the worst Michael Bay and Tony Scott leftovers, where jilted soldiers and mercenaries plunge the world into chaos through the use of proxy militaries and unstable political alliances. At its core are flat caricatures of marines who could have walked out of a recruitement video.
The missions are dull shooting galleries without a single original idea to their name. It's everything we've seen in every single past Call of Duty in the last decade or more. Which is weird, because Battlefield 3 already raised the bar with a surprisingly cinematic story campaign that, while never original, was far better than competitors at the time.
And there's no reason this couldn't be good, either. The cinematics, though rubbish in content, are beautifully realized. The cinematography and acting are perfectly decent. You can tell the animators are world class. Every scene rivals the films they emulate in style and visuals. It's just that nobody at any point sat down to consider what these visuals mean or what they want to say with the inane script.
Battlefield 6 has private servers and a shooting range to practice your combat skills. Unlike other similar titles, where the campaign is a kind of expanded tutorial, Battlefield 6 doesn't offer even that. It's best to just uninstall it instantly and save yourself the headache and storage.
Multiplayer
Let's face it, nobody buys a Battlefield game for the single player campaign. We're here for the multiplayer, which once gave Call of Duty a run for its money. At one point, Battlefield was a series you could rely on for large-scale combat on hugely destructible arenas that let you live out Michael Bay -style power fantasies from the comfort of your home.
The last great Battlefield title was Battlefield 1, released 9 years ago. It moved the action away from the present day to historic events from World War 1, lensed through a heavy melodrama filter that allowed players to run atop zeppelins and fight alongside Lawrence of Arabia in the desert. It was big, goofy, and fun.
Then, for a number of years, Battlefield lost its way. It got bogged down with chasing trends and mixing up things that didn't need reinvention. Battlefield 2042, for all its positives, was the straw that broke the camel's back. The maps were too big and too desolate, objectives became unclear, and matches lacked the flow that made Battlefield so memorable.
It's important to remember this, because Battlefield 6 is a direct response to that criticism to the point that it weighs down any innovation or sense of fun. This is the safest the developers could play things, without any surprises or risks in sight. As a result, it does feel like Battlefield 3 to an extent, but also makes me wonder why I shouldn't just go and play that or Battlefield 1 instead.
The biggest changes are in the levels, which are now medium sized at their largest, and hopelessly cramped by default. Battlefield Studios has clearly panicked by the reception of the mammoth landscapes in 2042 and dialed everything back to a comical degree. At its worst, Battlefield 6 feels like a half-finished idea. A first draft of levels that are still worked on, as if they should connect together, but someone just decided to ship them in separate pieces.
On top of that, there just isn't a lot to play. There are only 9 maps available at launch, and most of them are mid-sized or smaller. If you're looking for that big, sprawling Battlefield experience, it just isn't there. Tanks, helicopters, and planes feel like an afterthought. Something the developers remembered the franchise always had, and quickly added in without much consideration.
This isn't a Battlefield where the action changes the landscape; it's a Battlefield where the landscape dictates the action.
Similarly, the promised return of destructible environments is more of a vague idea than an actual improvement. Yes, some buildings break down, and yes, it's still a thrill when it happens. Even the dumbest changes don't take away from the sheer panic and cinematic exhuberance of trying to exfil from a collapsing apartment block.
But barely anything feels destructible. After a few hours of gaming, you can tell exactly which pieces come apart, and it makes the levels feel even more sterile. This isn't a Battlefield where the action changes the landscape; it's a Battlefield where the landscape dictates the action.
Even more frustrating are the places where you think the environment should break and it doesn't. Battlefield 6 is full of blocked doors and dead end corridors that force you to backtrack in the heat of the fight. Doesn't matter if you've got a sledgehammer or an RPG; the environment is set in stone for 99% of the time.
After a month of playing the multiplayer, I've noticed that I don't even bother with going after the environmental elements anymore. If a building happens to go down in one of the scripted ways, it just happens, and there's no more wow-factor to any of it. At no point does it feel like the teams consider the tactics of leveling out a village or block to shift the game in their favor. It takes away a major part of the appeal of what made Battlefield so epic in the first place.
For Battlefield veterans, compare Battlefield 6 with Bad Company 2, specifically the map Valparaiso. You could flatten the entire expanse with the right team, forcing the defenders to escape into the hills. A good squad could protect the city and force the invading army into a desperate scramble into confined corridors, which, in turn, they could decimate with C4.
It was a constantly evolving experience that rewarded teamwork and routing of opposing forces. In Battlefield 6, there's nothing that compares. Every game plays out roughly the same way.
In Battlefield 6, there's nothing that compares. Every game plays out roughly the same way.
It leads to the frustrating aspect of reviewing a Battlefield title this early. Next month will see the release of new maps. This time next year, I wouldn't be surprised if the game didn't have major changes to how destruction works.
That applies to the gunplay as well. In its current state, Battlefield 6 is a frustrating and unfinished experience that rewards a singular style and punishes others. By unlocking weapons to every class in its default game modes, Battlefield has lost every compelling reason to play the objective and use the classic units for their intended purposes. Now, you can just pick a unit with the strongest gadgets and pair them with a gun from any other class. As a result, I've seen more and more soloing instead of teamwork during my time with the game.
Similarly, bloom and TTK (time to kill) are both currently broken. Submachine guns are overpowered and can beam down enemies from half the map away, while LMG's suffer from unreliable hit detection. The studio is reportedly aware of the issue and are looking into it, but at the time of writing this issue was still prevalent.
The new movement system, which allows for sliding and bunny hopping, is also a pain. It's another addition that feels too little and too late, like trying to bring back a trend that died out half a decade ago. It detracts from the supposed realism by allowing for some gamers to bounce around the map as they hipfire SMGs with deadly precision, while anyone playing the title as the immersive action simulation will be hopelessly outgunned. It feels like throwing a Call of Duty player and Battlefield player in the same room with different mechanics, and just hoping it all works out.
Experience points are handed out in scraps while challenges are more demanding than ever. To unlock everything for a single weapon takes dozens and dozens of hours of grinding. In the past, you could join a custom server to work on this with bots, which wasn't fun but at least provided a solution to an annoying problem. Now, those servers are closed due to gamers abusing the system with bot and XP farms.
As a result, progression feels like a chore instead of a constant series of peaks and valleys. Sometimes, even if you play well, you can go an entire round and not unlock anything. Some challenges are bugged, which results in stats not tracking as they should. My support tracker, which follows how many people I've healed, hasn't budged in a week at this point, despite every attempt.
Taken separately, they're small issues in search of fixes. In theory, you could always take your chance on the server browser and find places with hardcore rules that lock weapons in their respective classes. An eventual update will hopefully fix the recoil and blooming.
But as a whole, there are so many issues in so many decisive areas that Battlefield 6, like its two predecessors, feels unfinished at launch. Yet again, it's a service title, which means we now get a morsel of what it will eventually turn into. It leans on the hope that the foundational aspects remind you of Battlefield 3 enough to overlook all other shortcomings long enough for a patch to drop.
That means your enjoyment of Battlefield 6 hangs entirely on patience and how much you want to love it. Sometimes it will mean overlooking clear and present issues because it sparks a nostalgic joy we haven't felt in this franchise for a long, long time. And that's more than understandable. Games are meant to spark joy, and if something accomplishes that, it doesn't really matter how it happens.
Verdict
Battlefield 6 feels like less than the sum of its parts. By reminding us of the past, it does many things right. Most importantly, it recaptures a sense of cinematic mayhem the series has struggled to find since Battlefield 1. Even though the maps are cramped and there is surprisingly little content available.
But by leaning into nostalgia, Battlefield 6 is its own worst enemy. It reminds us that we already had all of this over 15 years ago, and we haven't progressed anywhere. Nothing in Battlefield 6 is as addictive or rewarding as the Paris Metro map from Battlefield 3. The destruction doesn't come close, and the unbalanced weapons and glacial pacing of challenges vs. rewards are so broken compared to prior iterations that it all feels stagnant.
Instead, Battlefield 6 expects us to be patient. We should be happy that we've found a starting point, and everything that comes after is the reward. But at a premium price, is it really fair to ask customers to wait another year or two for the product to reach its full potential? After all, there are other games out there.
For dedicated fans, Battlefield 6 delivers the essentials. No more, no less. It is the bare minimum Battlefield experience. A good starter that will be different in the years to come. At launch, it's far better than Battlefield 2042, but that's hardly the baseline anyone wants to set, is it?
