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.