GordonJAGReview Battlefield 6 Review

I haven’t regularly played a modern military shooter in many years, and Battlefield 6 does nothing to make me want to play them again, and I really tried to like this game. I’m glad I didn’t buy into the hype this game had, instead opting to play the game while trying to be pleasantly surprised, so I at least don’t feel obligated to pretend I’m liking the game by huffing obscene amounts of copium. To give it a little begrudging praise, at least BF6 has a campaign. That inherently makes it infinitely more valuable than Battlefield 2042, and that’s not even including everything else that made that game complete garbage. Having a campaign at least gives the game some worth when the multiplayer inevitably dies off in the future. It’s the difference between Titanfall, a game no one remembers or cares about, and Titanfall 2, a game that’s pretty universally beloved. If you’re charging full price for a video game—especially now that so many of them are charging $70—you'd better have a single-player campaign ready to go to justify that price tag. Sadly, the campaign is fried booty cheeks served on a doodoo platter. It’s so painfully obvious that whichever team was tasked with making the campaign didn’t actually care about doing a good job. It’s over quicker than a cup of coffee, which may be to its benefit, since it’s also miserably bad. If I were tied down to a table and having both of my feet sawed off, it’s true that I’d prefer the sawing session to be over with as quickly as possible. First, I got to encounter a very fun issue with the campaign. I lost power partway through the 5th mission, which completely wiped my campaign save progress. I have been playing video games for over 20 years, across so many different platforms, and I’ve never had a power outage wipe my entire campaign progress in any game ever. It is absurd that a game with the financial backing of EA, released in 2025, had this happen. Even then, the campaign isn’t any good. You primarily play as two characters who are both so generic I can’t even remember their names, so I’m going to call them John Battlefield and Jane Sniperwoman. I can’t remember anything about their characters or personalities, except that Jane Sniperwoman was a no-nonsense sniper, because named women in military games are always assigned that role if she’s not given the pilot role. That’s her defining trait, and everyone else is just as bland. I think I remember something about John Battlefield being so deeply moved by the loss of his men that he doesn't actually change at all, so there's that. It’s honestly amazing how quickly the story lost me. One of the first few lines of spoken dialogue is an overconfident military soldier man being unbothered that engaging with a PMC might cause World War III, which perfectly encapsulates what a modern military shooter is about: PMCs, a complete disregard for the consequences of actions, and pure United States of America, guns, and glory injected directly into everyone’s veins. The only upside is that the PMC is at least diverse, with men and women of various races making up its ranks, so at least it basically avoids being racist and sexist while I'm replacing their brain matter and memories of childhood with hot pieces of lead. Actually, I tell a little lie. I did get a little jolt of joy when I learned that the BF6 story, with nothing but genuine seriousness, expected me to believe that this PMC was a credible threat to NATO to the point that countries were defecting from NATO to join the PMC. That is beyond hilarious to me. NATO is an entity that includes the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Finland, and so many other significant countries. And the writers of this awful mess expect me to believe a PMC is having countries of that significance defect to their side. If there was any hint of self-awareness in the campaign, I would have been ready to consider it some kind of parody, but there’s no shot anyone involved with this is anywhere near smart enough to make that happen. But the multiplayer is what the bulk of this game’s hype surrounds. Sadly, the multiplayer is a mess for completely different reasons. I kind of respect just how badly this game falls apart in nearly every way. First, the maps aren’t great. I wouldn’t call any of them outright terrible, but there are so many baffling design decisions behind them. Some maps have their initial spawn points on the side of a cliff, making them great for players who want to snipe to set up shop. The issue is, those players are just getting a kill every 6 minutes while doing nothing else. They annoy the enemy team, but they don’t do anything to stop the enemy team. They can pad their kill stats without dying a lot, but they’re not helping their team in any meaningful way. It feels like these maps were designed in the exact wrong way to encourage players to engage in the game and try to win. Tied into the questionable map design is how obvious it is that no one at DICE has ever seen a building or stepped outside before. Seriously, does anyone on that team know how sunlight and shadows work? The lighting in the game is horrendous, and that isn’t helped by buildings that I can only describe as feeling AI-generated. You run up an impossibly dark, murky staircase, just to see the staircase ending at a wall. Not a door that’s just part of the set dressing. Stairs ending at blank, featureless walls. I don’t know if DICE’s studio head is secretly a Minotaur, necessitating the building layout to be that of a labyrinth, but it’d be nice if they consulted with a few people who have seen a handful of buildings in their lives. When the lighting and buildings aren’t conspiring against you, the weapons sure are. I remember playing Call of Duty: Black Ops when I was a teenager, and that game had some pretty bad bullet registration issues. It’s disappointing that 15 years later, we still haven’t figured out that the most important element of a shooter is that the bullet needs to go into the person I’m shooting. I have a clip of me putting 9 bullets into another player, with only 3 of them registering before I get killed by the other player. It’s just inexcusable that with all of the tech behind video games now, the simplest core element of a shooter has a 33% chance of working. One thing I will give DICE is that they’ve done a masterful job at deflecting blame for their horrible mess of a game. Explosives are useless against infantry, vehicles are way too strong, you can spawn with an enemy looking right at you, the game will randomly spawn you with a class you didn’t select at a spawn point you didn’t choose, and you’ll randomly switch to your secondary weapon without any input. Even with all of those issues, DICE has still managed to make the dumb majority of the community only mad about a cosmetic that has a little bit of blue in it. It legitimately impresses me how easily the developer of this game could so easily manipulate thick people into caring about something so completely meaningless. Anyway, the game’s a wash. It wears the skin of BF3, an infinitely better game, without understanding what made that game fun to play. The best thing I can say about BF6 is that I had a few laughs with a squad of friends as we steamrolled through games, but even that only means I like to hang out with my friends, and that fun would have been had on any game we played together. You couldn’t pay me to play this game’s multiplayer solo. BF6 is in the spot of sharing the worst game I’ve played this year with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, so hurray for $70 AAA games being the absolute pit of the industry in 2025.