In Battlefield 6, the line between silliness and spectacle is razor thin. This is a shooter that lets you jump from a jet to perform trickshots, take down tanks with C4-laden quadbikes, and run through machine gun fire to save a squaddie who – in all likelihood – should have been cut in half by those same bullets 10 seconds ago.
Nothing in the game blurs that line like Battlefield 6's single-player campaign. Within a fairly tight nine-level run, here are just a few things it asks you to do:
- Skydive into Gibraltar to stop an invasion
- Save the president
- Blow up a dam
- Disarm a missile
- Save the president (again)
Busy schedule, right? The fact it's all presented without so much of a snicker – we call those "Battlefield Moments" – only makes the campaign more outrageous. And while its story and pacing get a little lost in the sauce, I'm glad Battlefield 6's campaign is so over-the-top – because if it wasn't, it would be a little too close to home.
Blurring the lines
Check out our Battlefield 6 review to help make up your mind
Battlefield 6 is a military blockbuster. You don't get many of these, nowadays, but you'll know what I'm talking about: picture the campaigns of Battlefield and Call of Duty's heydays, where you were rarely more than a cog in the military. These campaigns didn't always go as far as to directly glamorize war, but they were certainly guilty of buffing out the horrors until only the heroics shone, glamorizing the military-industrial complex itself.
In the years since, those campaigns have become sparser. Call of Duty has largely pivoted away from depicting regular boots on the ground engagements, and in recent years has focused more on fights between individuals – secretive special forces fighting intimate wars against shadowy terrorist cells, or countries being played off against each other but war isn't really their fault. Meanwhile, you're likelier than ever to stumble upon videos of real-world footage violence and atrocities on social media – and when you've seen the real thing, it can feel morbid to turn the subject matter into entertainment. Even now, the global political landscape is so tense that it seems impossible to avoid treading on very real fears and anxieties.
Battlefield 6 does try to stay in its lane. The baddies are a generic batch of rogue mercenaries, and levels jump between countries so quickly that the war itself never feels particularly grounded. Still, there are moments that feel unintentionally close to the bone. The most obvious example is the fracturing of NATO, but personally, the most impactful were when the reality of war felt casual – like watching unaware soldiers from a drone before dropping bombs on them, akin to firing from an AC-130 for the first time in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's Death from Above mission.
By leaning into those realistic parallels, Battlefield Studios is left with two options. It can use them to say something – whether it be exploring contemporary warfare, or mocking the military industrial complex à la Battlefield Bad Company 2. But it doesn't do that, leaving one route open: making the campaign so outrageously over-the-top that for every real-world similarity that rears its head, there are three things to remind you you're in an action game. Please refer back to:
- Skydive into Gibraltar to stop an invasion
- Save the president
- Blow up a dam
- Disarm a missile
- Save the president (again)
Battlefield Studios gets away with it, besides the occasional draft where reality blows in. It's been a long time since I played a new FPS campaign that felt so ludicrously big and action-packed, suggesting that you can – if there's an audience – keep making capital M Military games for as long as they can entertain. Driving a wedge between reality and fiction isn't the only way for war stories to be told in this medium (This War of Mine and Spec Ops: The Line would certainly say otherwise), but it cuts the Gordian Knot for companies who ply their trade on Big Silly games.
By turning warfare into one bombastic set-piece after another, Battlefield 6 limits the scope and depth of the story it can tell. But it also grounds it purely in entertainment, which is why tens of thousands of Battlefield fans will likely flock to the single-player campaign when a break from sprawling multiplayer carnage is necessitated. I certainly had a lot of fun with the campaign, though my biggest issues lay outside of its moral complexities. Strange cutaways, an overreliance on poorly-transitioned cutscenes, and a very muddled story all detract from the experience, although playing on hard mode I didn't seem to encounter any of the AI issues with squaddies that others have been dealing with.
Regardless, I still had a lot of fun with Battlefield 6's campaign, and I'm glad to be playing another boots on the ground shooter after such a long drought. Is it perfect? Is the approach flawless? No and no. But hey – if you don't laugh, you'll cry.
Check out this Battlefield 6 roadmap to see what else is on the way for EA's shooter
