Battlefield 6 (Campaign)

I didn’t have particularly high expectations for the Campaign of Battlefield 6. I figured it would be a perfectly fine – if forgettable – experience. Turns out, I was wrong. I should have set my expectations even lower because the Campaign of Battlefield 6 isn’t just forgettable – it’s just bad.

Now, you might say it doesn’t really matter – that nobody is playing Battlefield 6 for the Campaign. But the fact is, the Campaign is part of the package you’re paying for and as such, it’s fair game for review.

The Campaign consists of nine missions and took me about 4-5 hours to complete on the hardest difficulty, although that time didn’t include hunting down the collectible Dog Tags. So let’s start with the story – the Campaign opens with a conflict breaking out between NATO and the PAX Armata – a global, private military force.

You’ll play as a select few characters throughout the missions as you fight to thwart the nefarious plans of PAX – you only ever see the conflict from the NATO side, which is kind of a shame, because PAX could have been a more interesting and morally / politically complex force than just the ‘bad guys doing bad things’ they end up being.

The missions are framed as flashbacks to events prior in the conflict as the story tries to inject a rather trite ‘CIA conspiracy’ angle into things. It’s all complete nonsense, of course, and totally unnecessary. It certainly doesn’t add anything to the story because the Campaign ends right when you ‘expose’ the truth. Sort of. Maybe. I don’t know. None of it really makes any sense if you stop to think about it.

The characters are of the ‘Oorah!’ variety, all very serious, all very ‘Oorah!’. I don’t really mind that though – I mean, it’s exactly what I expected. And even if the story is kind of shit, I wouldn’t care so much about that either if the missions themselves were fun.

Oh dear. The missions just aren’t very fun at all. I thought the Campaign might see you switch between characters that represent the different MP classes – Assault, Recon, Support and Engineer – giving you a taste of each and their associated abilities / gadgets. It – sort of – does this, but it doesn’t really commit to it and a lot of the abilities / gadgets of MP aren’t available at all.

This is also true of vehicles. Aside from a single mission in which you get to drive a tank (and a pretty dull mission at that) there’s practically no vehicle use in the campaign. I’m not asking for the entire Campaign to serve as a general tutorial for the MP, but I’d expect it to at least reflect all aspects of the MP experience.

Where’s the helicopter mission? Or the jet mission? There aren’t any! The only moments you get in a helicopter are entirely scripted. In fact, most vehicle use is just you locked into a static turret section. A Battlefield Campaign should play to the strengths of Battlefield – large scale battles, lots of vehicles, combined arms – instead, the Campaign plays out like a really bad, heavily scripted Call of Duty campaign.

The mission design is generally poor and feels like something ripped out of a bog-standard military shooter released 20 years ago. The destruction physics, like the vehicles, are barely utilised, and the AI is absolutely atrocious. I can’t recall the last time I saw AI this bad in a shooter.

I just don’t get the point of it. It doesn’t serve as a good tutorial for MP in terms of classes, skills, gadgets or vehicles and it doesn’t reflect the Battlefield ‘experience’ in terms of large scale battles or combined arms. It barely utilises the impressive destruction physics when – in a scripted campaign – it could have done so in some truly exciting ways. The story is bad and the AI is terrible.

Even if you already own Battlefield 6 it’s hard to recommend bothering with the campaign unless you want those collectible achievements. And if the Campaign was one of the main reasons you were thinking of picking it up – don’t. Seriously, don’t.

Now Playing: Deliver At All Costs

In Deliver At All Costs you play as Winston, a young man who takes a job at the ‘We Deliver’ courier service, tasked with making various deliveries throughout a 1950s-esque American world, one in which nearly everything can be driven through, into, over and destroyed.

I was expecting an isometric Crazy Taxi style experience, with timed missions in which your goal is to – as the title suggests – deliver at all costs by ignoring the roads and ploughing through anything that gets in your way. But sadly, that’s not what I got.

The first thing that surprised me about Deliver At All Costs was how many cut-scenes there were and how prominent the story was in the experience. I didn’t see this is a bad surprise – at least initially – because I was curious to see how the story would play out.

But within the first few hours of play, I found myself growing rather sick of it, feeling that I was spending as much – if not more – of my time watching (rather dull) cut-scenes than actually playing the game. To make matters worse, the game forces you to tediously drive to and from work between every mission or two.

It’s a repetitive and frankly unnecessary journey that feels like it exists purely to pad out what is already a fairly meagre quantity of content. I was spending more time driving to work and back again between missions than I was actually playing the missions themselves.

And the missions suck for the most part. It’s not like there’s no fun to be found here, but every time I did start what felt like a fun mission, the game ruined it by needlessly dragging the mission out by forcing me to do the same, repetitive task several times in a row.

The mission I probably enjoyed the most involved towing a ‘bomb shelter’ (shaped more like a wrecking ball) to a property and watching as it flung itself through buildings and smashed over cars like something out of the ending of Fast 5. But even that mission is marred by the game continually redirecting you to yet another location to the point of tedium.

 

And then you get a lot of missions that really aren’t fun at all – like one where you’ve got to tediously ‘catch’ boxes that fall from the sky and the game wants you to do it several times in several different locations.

Or there’s the mission I hated the most that sees you transporting a bomb on the back of your truck and even the slightest of knocks causes it to explode. In a game with rather wonky driving, the mission was tedious as f**k to get through because even a tiny knock kills you and forces you to watch the same ‘comedic’ cut-scene before re-spawning (thankfully) somewhat nearby.

I’ve used the word ‘tedious’ or a variation of it a lot already in this review because that’s how I can best sum up my experience of playing Deliver At All Costs. I feel like there’s a really fun, simple and more arcade-like experience buried here beneath layers of boring story, pointless back and forth travel and dull as dishes mission design.

You also realise quite early on that the ‘destruction’ aspect really is just a gimmick that’s more detrimental to your experience than transformative. Sure, you can plough through a building on your way from A to B but chances are, it will only slow you down if not stop you entirely when you get stuck on some piece of fallen scenery.

There’s also a lot of environmental pieces that can’t be destroyed, and it’s quite easy to get your car totally stuck forcing you to go into a menu to re-spawn nearby. So in the end, you learn that sticking to the roads and avoiding driving through, into or over anything leads to a smoother, less irritating and more enjoyable experience – which kind of defeats the entire point of the game.

After about 2 hours playing Deliver At All Costs I thought I might just give up because I really wasn’t enjoying it, but I decided to persist and see if the game improved. Spoiler: it didn’t. I started skipping most of the cut-scenes but I saw enough to know the direction the story takes is absolute nonsense.

The game is split into 3 acts, the first of which is the longest, and then the next two are both pretty short. The last is only 3 missions. I finished the game with about 5 hours clocked, but if I hadn’t been skipping so many of those boring cut-scenes it might have been 10.

Overall, Deliver At All Costs isn’t a game I can recommend. I got it for free on Epic and honestly, even if you got it for free too, I’d say don’t waste your time with it. It’s a game that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. I kind of hated most of my time playing it aside from those very, very occasional moments in a mission when I suddenly realised I was having fun. But those moments are fleeting and don’t last very long.

4/10

Gallery: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Now Playing: Lethal Company

Lethal Company is a co-op focused sci-fi survival horror game in which you play as employees of ‘The Company’ who send you and up to three friends to various moons to collect, return and sell scrap. You have a set quota to meet within three days. Hit that quota and you can continue on to the next. Don’t hit it and . . . you’ll see what happens.

Every time you visit a moon (even the same moon) the facility you’ll be searching for scrap is randomised so you never know the exact layout, what kind of scrap you’ll find or what kind of nasty creatures lurk within. The randomisation doesn’t always feel fair – I’ve died upon first entering a facility because a creature or lethal trap is just on the other side of the door.

But that random element and just how unforgiving Lethal Company is does give the game a unique sort of charm. I can’t imagine ever wanting to try playing this solo. This is a game designed for co-op because those bad rolls of the dice are where you’ll likely find the most funny and unexpected moments.

It’s undoubtedly repetitive, however, even with the randomisation. The facilities you enter tend to all look alike and follow the same basic structure. There is progression in the sense that as you sell more scrap you can also purchase more equipment to improve your chances of success, but everything resets once you miss that first quota sending you straight back to square one.

And you’ll probably be missing your quota a lot early on so that means a lot of restarts. Sometimes you just get a bad run of luck as the game decides to generate the most hostile facility imaginable and there’s little you can do about it. It can be frustrating but, provided you’re playing with friends, you probably won’t care too much as long as you’re having fun.

And there is a lot of fun to be had in Lethal Company, mostly from your (nearly always) lethal encounters with the weird creatures that inhabit the facilities. You never know what you’re going to find and I’m still encountering all kinds of new weird shit every time we start a fresh run.

I’m not convinced by the longevity of the title, not without a more permanent progression system (an option would be nice) or a wider variety of randomised facility types, but it’s the kind of game I’m happy to drop into now and then to mess about with a friend. We chat, we laugh, we die a lot.

The visuals are deliberately muddy and simple. I’m not sure if the stylised aspect of it is intentional or just a convenient way to hide the low quality models and textures. It’s a shame there’s very little in the way of game or UI customisation options but I know there’s a fairly active mod scene that probably addresses a lot of my issues.

And Lethal Company is still in Early Access so it’s possible it will improve upon all of its features going forward, but given how infrequently and unsubstantial the updates appear to be, I wouldn’t bank on it. For the eight quid we each paid for it I’m sure my friend and I will get some value out of it though.

Lethal Company, at the time of review, is a cheap and cheerful and undoubtedly amusing little co-op game. There’s fun to be had but also a lot of room for improvement. I’m sure it’s something we’ll return to now and then if we fancy a change of pace from our regular Phasmophobia games.

6/10

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (BETA)

As a big fan of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed I was eager to give Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds a spin to see how it compared. As far as a BETA goes, this was very polished and smooth and I didn’t encounter any issues when playing online. The game looks great. It’s bright, colourful, but pretty easy to read even amidst the chaos. And ‘chaotic’ is how I’d best describe playing CrossWorlds.

Item spam is pretty crazy when playing online or with harder AI settings, and this BETA didn’t even give us access to the top tier AI difficulties. Item effects are popping off all around you practically from start to finish. That . . . might need to be a little toned down, because right now, it feels like item usage / management is actually far more important than the actual driving.

It’s not unusual to be leading a race and go from 1st to 12th and then back again all within the space of ten seconds or so because of items being used against you, only for you to use them back and regain your position. Transformed spaced out item pick ups far more and only let you carry one at a time so their usage had to be more considered, whereas CrossWorlds lets you carry two and pick ups are found on nearly every turn.

Handling is pretty good, but you need to make sure you turn off any drive-assists. Drifting feels a little more . . . rigid, I guess, than in Transformed, but it’s something you learn to manage. I actually downloaded Transformed again and played through a few tracks to better compare and . . . yeah, I think I do prefer the handling in Transformed, but there’s not a lot in it, and they’re both fun.

I also really liked Transformed for the Sega nostalgia angle and whilst I’m sure CrossWorlds will delve into Sega history for various racers and tracks, the game is set up to do what so many big and successful live service games do these days – crossover IP. They’re already announced Minecraft, SpongeBob SquarePants and Pac-Man. It’s a clever way to expand the appeal of your game and open the door to all kinds of other crossovers regardless of platform.

The ‘gimmick’ I guess of CrossWorlds is how you seamlessly switch between tracks during a race. It does help keep things fresh because you never know what track you’ll be racing on for the next lap. Visually, CrossWorlds looks great and runs flawlessly, at least from what I experienced. I also like the vehicle customisation and the gadgets that provide various modifiers to play with.

Overall, although I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this BETA I do feel, frankly, like I could just go back and play Transformed again because I’m more interested in the Sega stuff than this other IP and also because I think the item / race balance is far better. I like to feel that my driving skill is what ultimately wins a race, not how lucky / unlucky I am when it comes to items.

I’m also not sold on the price which feels a tad steep, but I guess it’s not that unusual these days. So yeah, I’m kind of on the fence with this one, but we’ll see how it shakes out and what new content they add. And also if they find a better balance when it comes to driving skill versus item usage because it’s a little too messy right now.

Gallery: Stellar Blade