Battlefield 6 (Campaign) review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Ed’s Note: See our Battlefield 6 Multiplayer review here.

Battlefield 6 has brought campaign back to the Battlefield series! Campaigns have over the years seemingly become an afterthought for many developers when it comes to their big multiplayer forward games. Even DICE (now Battlefield Studios) themselves fell into the trap of skipping a campaign in favor of focusing on multiplayer in the last Battlefield entry: Battlefield 2042. Battlefield has historically… not been the greatest action stories in the world, but they have always been cool, cinematic, and action forward. In comparison to Call of Duty, which has accrued a roster of memorable characters in each branch, Battlefield has tended to focus more on your small role in the big picture. There’s very few recurring faces among the cast of characters, and nobody’s ever felt like more than their role — with the exception of Bad Company 1 and 2.

So with them bringing it back in Battlefield 6, I, for one, did not go in expecting more than that. It was going to be a flashy cool series of action moments and when I finish, I’m not going to remember a single one of these characters names. And to be honest, that is exactly what we got. It’s another Battlefield campaign, for sure. The characters have personalities that never serve much to stand out and make you remember them or find them endearing in any way. The story is… fine, and you get peppered with action shots of flashy cinematic goodness pretty consistently throughout. The review ahead is going to be full of spoilers, but I’ll avoid spoiling anything major in the plot just in case you want to actually sit down and intake it yourself.

You play in the role of one of the members of “Dagger squad” that sees a couple faces fall in and out throughout the length of the ~6 hour long campaign. The specific soldier you play as varies mission to mission, but they all feel very similar. Each character on the squad is one of the 4 classes you’re familiar with from Battlefield long term (Assault, Support, Engineer, Sniper). When you’re not playing as a given one, they are available to provide specific requests in battles to assist. Personally I never particularly found any of these abilities to be very useful aside from the one given by the squad’s sniper, Gecko. At your request, she will ping all enemies within a short range in front of you so you can plan your push accordingly. The other characters just offer a grenade launcher or smoke grenades at request. In my opinion this doesn’t help much since the time spent would’ve been better served by those squadmates just continuing to fire. Nonetheless, the ability is there should you desire.

Each member of the squad plays a role in the story, interacting in cutscenes and providing commentary, as you’d expect. The opening mission to the story sort of drops you in head first without much build up, so don’t expect to get very attached to these characters, though. This kind of remains the theme of how I felt about each mission as the game goes on. It plays out in a way you have probably seen before. The first mission sets you up to meet PAX Armata (the enemy forces) and witness a traumatic moment in the military career of the “main” character (if you want to call him that), Murphy . The follow-up flashes forward to meeting a new character unfamiliar to the player, Mills. I was a bit confused by this scene, as your character breaks into her house in the middle of the night and captures her with your other squadmates and begins interrogating. The rest of the campaign then plays out as flashbacks as you recount various missions that come up in discussion with Mills and slowly piece the story together.

Revisiting the stories of the squad, you learn more about the characters and how they got here, raiding this woman’s house in the middle of the night. The various missions run the gamut of what you’d want to see from a good AAA FPS game. Slow night time creeping with night vision, HALO jumps from a plane, blowing up dams, a whole mission inside a tank, and urban warfare. You name it. Each individual mission in a nutshell gave me a great unadulterated Battlefield experience. I loved each of them, and had a great time throughout. Fun, challenging, and spectacular across the board. I just wish I at least felt a little more cohesive pacing with them. It was a bit jarring jumping around wildly different environments as the same set of characters, but I guess that’s what you get with a flashback campaign.

I never really felt wowed by the story, but it was serviceable. It was very stereotypical action movie, but that’s not really a bad thing. Battlefield’s never been about the story being amazing. It’s about getting to go “OH WOW!” as something spectacularly blows up in front of you and the dazzling animation plays out. There’s definitely plenty of that in Battlefield 6’s campaign. My lizard brain was cheering as things exploded, buildings fell, dams burst, and whatever happened in front of me. Beautiful scenery and spectacular crumbling abounds. If you’ve loved Battlefield as a series, you’ll also love Battlefield 6. It’s definitely more of what it does best, better than it’s ever been.

The only real complaints I have are just some animation things. I’m not sure if this is something that will be fixed with a day one patch, but the animations in Battlefield 6’s campaign struggled sometimes. Any time you walk up to a point where the game takes over your character for a moment, it always wants you to start from a very specific spot, and only with whatever your primary weapon is. What this usually meant in practice was approaching a door, hitting E to open it, then you get sucked 5 feet to the side very rapidly and awkwardly shuffle your gun out. It looks… odd when it occurs. I have to mention that as I saw it a lot and took note of it. There was also a lot of little moments during the realtime cutscenes where it felt like everything suddenly went into fast-forward. Not sure how to explain, but you’ll know what I mean if you end up playing. It’s usually near the end of ongoing animations, but suddenly the process gets about 3 times faster randomly. An early example of this was in mission 2, at the very beginning. You get to perform a HALO jump, which is honestly an amazing visual experience as you come down through the clouds. When you land, as you’re about 20 feet off the ground, suddenly it’s like gravity kicks into overdrive and shwoop you’re sucked to the floor. It looks unnatural and I really hope this is a pre-day one bug that goes away for anyone else that plays this. It took me out of the moment every time.

So overall, what do I think of the Battlefield 6 campaign experience? I think it’s very much worth playing. Like I said, the story is… fine, but that’s not what you’re here for, is it? Go blow some stuff up and let the flames reflect in your sparkling little eyes. It’s glorious to behold. I have to give just one score to the campaign as a whole, so just know with this that I’m thinking the story is maybe a 6, but the mission to mission experience is probably more at a 9. Balancing that out, the campaign gets a middle grounded, 8. I lean toward favoring the strength of the experience over the weakness of the story because it’s doing exactly what it wanted to do, and does so very well. Buy it, try it, blow some stuff up in the Battlefield 6 campaign.

Note: EA provided us with a Battlefield 6 code for review purposes.