Battlefield 6 review: "More refined than innovative, this FPS is on target with multiplayer even if its campaign is just a big shrug"

Battlefield 6 reminds me a lot of the experience of watching the London New Year's Eve fireworks display. It's as bombastic and loud as it is straightforward and unsurprising. It's well-coordinated, energetic, good-looking, fairly superficial, clearly incredibly expensive, and largely comprised of endless, context-free explosions. But who doesn't enjoy a good fireworks show?

After the poor reception of Battlefield 2042 back in 2021, Battlefield 6 is a clear attempt to roll back the clock and return to the series' perceived golden era – i.e., Battlefield 3 and 4 – dialling back the extraneous elements and sci-fi tech in favour of a more grounded form of warfare. And while an overwhelming abundance of caution has resulted in a game that's not always particularly interesting to talk about, the sheer value and spectacle has made it undeniably fun to play.

The conventions of war

To start with the single player, Battlefield 6's plot sets up a perfectly straightforward premise. Set a couple of years in the future, an ominous new PMC called Pax Armata comes out of nowhere, intentionally destabilizing numerous nations and attempting to build a new world order with themselves at the center, becoming the connective tissue between the various countries that are abandoning NATO en masse. Eventually Pax's aggressive actions escalate tensions to the point of global conflict, all framed largely through the flashbacks of the members of Dagger 13, a squad of barely-distinct US Marines who constantly find themselves at the heart of events in their pursuit of a defector.

That premise takes us through a very succinct story mode, nine missions that can be cleared in about five hours. Each level is its own angle on military gameplay: clearing buildings tactically in one, guarding an armored convoy in another, or playing a scout-sniper clearing out enemy bases in a third. It's a smorgasbord of slaughter, and each mission can only really be judged on its own merits. That sniping mission, for example, is great – free reign in a vast section of countryside with a series of targets to hit however you want, ending in some impressive cinematic moments. Meanwhile, another mission has you rolling a tank through the desert, and it's already getting boring before you reach the halfway point. Ultimately your mileage will vary mission-to-mission, though it never fails to look pretty in any context, with beautiful landscapes and expensive, cinematic setpieces.

But on a broader perspective, if there's one word that's hard to associate with Battlefield 6, it's "originality", and that's especially true when it comes to the single player campaign. A cavalcade of well-worn tropes from war games and military movies alike, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single unique idea that distinguishes it from the morass. Fill your bingo card along with me: here's the bit where you mark airstrike locations, here's the bit where you watch the bad guy headshot a kneeling hostage through binoculars, here's the bit where you go out blazing against infinite enemies a la Halo Reach. Collapsing bridges, chopper going down, rail shooter sequences, "I didn't sign up for this", interrogation framing device, breach and clear, sniping level, burnt-face villain, clear the LZ, survive until evac, "got the scars to prove it", oo-rah Marines.

None of this makes Battlefield 6's story bad – these tropes are arguably popular for a reason – but it doesn't make for much of a lasting impact, and the story never really rises above that PH-neutral baseline. The characters are all gruffly interchangeable, and there's a real problem with seamless transitions (or lack thereof), as the plot leaps discordantly from one set piece to another with barely a sentence to justify why. At times it feels like chunks of the story are missing, and ultimately it's a campaign that can thrive in individual moments, but isn't at its best when looked at in the macro.

Slay, team

So it probably goes without saying that for most people their attention will be on the multiplayer, which follows a similar pattern of being highly-budgeted and refined, but without much in the way of innovation or unique twists. After the less-than-stellar reception of Battlefield 2042, BF6 has definitely planted itself in familiar ground – nine game modes of varied scale, ranging from claustrophobic deathmatches to vast theaters of warfare, in which burning aircraft wreckage plummets out of the sky and thundering tanks plow through scattering infantry.

Like the single player, there's not a massive amount of creativity here, but the pure chaos and size of things can't help but make the action feel more thrilling and unpredictable as organic moments of tension build. The ability to revive any ally, as ever, adds a natural excitement, and some of the best moments I had were when I was playing as a Support class and trying to hold down a capture point – slamming down defensive barriers, dragging fallen friends back to their feet, and desperately trying to hold off a hordes of foes with my trusty machine gun. And though the destruction physics aren't quite so omnipresent as some marketing material might have you believe, the occasional collapsing wall or exploding shack does add some spice – in fact, it's rare enough to be consistently surprising when it does happen.

Beyond that, layers of initially-hidden complexity add depth to seemingly straightforward systems. Smoke bombs aren't just for hiding in, they literally remove markers from any tagged players who pass through them. Suppressing fire isn't just about scaring cowering players with a barrage of bullets, it actually delays their passive health regeneration kicking in.

But greater complexity inevitably means more things to go wrong, and Battlefield's multiplayer is not without a few flaws. Certain game modes or maps feel weighed in favor of one side or another, the pace of unlocking new loadout equipment is a bit too slow, and the UI is pretty hard to decipher in times of stress. Sometimes as the squad medic I'd literally be standing on some poor bastard in need of defibrillation, and the tiny indicators orbiting the edge of the screen were doing very little for clarity or situational awareness.

I also think that for a game that's out to treat everybody like members of a kevlar-clad D&D party, BF6 could probably do more to encourage team cooperation beyond throwing a few pity-points at squads that remember to revive or spawn on each other. Healing allies or repairing their vehicles is clearly a big part of the meta, but I kept watching crowds of bloodthirsty assault players run off into the middle distance, all willing to bet the outcome of the match on their being the next John Wick, and no way to convince them otherwise.

It's a shame, because it's when a squad actually has some coherent cooperation that the game thrives, as each class has a clear role and purpose that's most effective when part of a unit. Recon picks off stragglers and marks targets, which helps the Engineer know where to throw explosives, which causes confusion for Assault to come in blasting, before the Support heals everybody in the aftermath and starts setting up defenses so they can hold that location. They all compliment each other nicely, even if the Engineer can feel a bit vestigial in the maps without vehicles or a lot of destructive scenery.

Shock and awe

And it is good-looking scenery, no matter whether you find yourself in the single player or multiplayer. There's an obvious attempt at grounded visuals, with lots of urban, industrial vistas clogged with burning debris, but grass is still allowed to be a vibrant green and the sky can still be a shining blue. Trundling through the desert in a tank might have been boring, but I'll be damned if it's not a very pretty desert.

In fact, Battlefield 6 has a general emphasis on sensory appeal, in a way that can make the experience pleasantly (and sometimes troublingly) cathartic. Guns have a real kick and recoil, the sound engineering working overtime to convince you that you just unleashed all the power of military grade-cordite into a squaddie's prefrontal cortex. If you blow up a tank, it doesn't just dissolve – no, huge pieces of burning steel fall out of the sky and crash to the ground with real weight behind them.

Walls aren't just reduced to powder when they're blown up, they crumble into avalanches of masonry, creating piles of rubble that can bury players and change the shape of the environment. Even the sharp ping of a spent cartridge exiting the chamber of a sniper rifle, and the snap of the bolt sliding a new bullet into place… it's all very tactile and satisfying.

And ultimately, this sort of thing is what makes Battlefield 6 worth your time. It might not have an original idea in its head, taking the safer choice every time one had to be made, but as might be expected with the backing of four studios, it presents itself incredibly well and has been refined into a very pure experience. It's deep enough to be tactical and simple enough to be accessible, and though the single player evokes little more than a shrug, the multiplayer will have people consistently coming back for more.

Check out the best Battlefield games of all time for more!