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

This year’s entry to the Battlefield series is coming to us seemingly hotly sought after by the FPS gaming community at large.  Pretty much any gaming space anywhere on the internet you happen to peruse, you’ll see people singing its praises. Doing nothing short of seemingly holding it on a pedestal as the savior: coming in to save gaming from the dark ages of so-called “Fornite-ification”. Fawning over the gunplay, or the fact that you have to work as a team, that… “Battlefield is back”. That’s what they say if you went online before release. The Battlefield 6 beta was hugely successful, drawing record numbers on the Steam charts, people were in it to win it. So now that the day finally dawns on us and we get to play the game? Yeah… it’s great. Battlefield really is (at least mostly) back.

Battlefield has long been a series that sort of finds the middle ground between the mil-sim military games like Arma or Squad and the arcade shooters like Call of Duty. Not really “realistic”, but not really ungrounded from reality. Call it the… cinematic action movie experience. Large teams clashing against each other in a symphony of tank shells and gunfire, explosions lighting up the field and tearing it down at the same time. This is what Battlefield does best. But at the same time, it’s always been important that any one squad on a team can affect the battle to a greater extent. Despite Battlefield 6’s teams of 32, you and your squad can make all the difference. Never you alone, and this is what makes the Battlefield series really shine. It encourages bringing your friends online in a way that most other competitive shooters don’t really do, in my opinion (Battle Royale’s not withstanding). Battlefield’s previous entry, Battlefield 2042 was an example of how that formula can be made wrong. In 2042, DICE played with the idea of much larger scale teams at 64 v 64, and it just… broke everything, in my opinion. A battle to that scale can be cinematic chaos for sure, but with 32 players on every objective… how does a squad of 4 begin to help? The answer was you didn’t and that was exactly what went so wrong for me with 2042.

With Battlefield 6, they’ve done a lot right to get back into the good graces of the FPS community. We’ve got a large assortment of weapons, great graphics, and pretty good maps to boot. Some don’t agree on the maps front, but in action, I’ve had a lot of fun with them personally. The weapon variety is great, and they’ve done good at making them all feel unique. The visuals look sleek, modern, and run surprisingly well on older hardware. The maps have some contest with the Battlefield community not feeling like they’re all quite large enough, but… I haven’t felt much to complain about with them myself. I’m hoping that with this entry, EA/Battlefield Studios keep on the right track, because they’ve got a promising opportunity in front of them, holding a huge chunk of the gaming community’s attention.

For the weapon variety, I’ve found the assortment to be quite nice. It’s nothing incredibly new to Battlefield as a series; they’ve always been rather consistent with their games taking place in modern times about what you can expect to show up. But what I find nice is the way that, in Battlefield 6, I feel like the guns have much more unique personalities than I remember experiencing with games past. Sporting eight assault rifles, seven carbines (arguably making for 15 ARs if it were any other game), eight SMGs, eight LMGs, four DMRs, three snipers, three shotguns, and four pistols, that puts us at a huge 45 guns available at launch. This is a huge number compared to a lot of games, and it’s impressive to me that each of them feel so different within their relative categories. Gunplay feels great, like it always does even in the worst of times for Battlefield. One thing to note, however, is the current contention within the community at large surrounding the spread that occurs with continuous fully automatic fire. The game doesn’t really explain this to you, and they changed it between beta time and release: holding down the trigger will increasingly spread where your next shot lands. This encourages “tap firing”, or shooting in bursts, but… with players being so used to recoil affected aim rather than this method, it’s causing a ruckus among a lot of people. It’s something you have to get used to, but… if the game never tells you about it, how do most players learn?

Personally I’ve found the experience in active play to be a ton of fun, and working together with my friends has been an extraordinary time. Short of the dedicated attention to not messing up you get from a game like Squad, but not to the level of never caring about what your teammates are actually doing that you get from a game like Call of Duty (yes, that’s projection and I know it’s how I play COD). What you get is a casual experience where dying is fine because they’ll jolt you back to life in a pinch, but focused enough that running in blindly is punished by having to spawn all the way back at your base instead of with your squad. Play carefully, but accept that dying is inevitable yet not super punishing. Speaking of, Battlefield 6 has officially changed how reviving works! Forget the old school way of all the medics trampling your corpse and ignoring you: now you can also get trampled and ignored by all of your squadmates!

As is the tradition for Battlefield, the Medic class (now Support) comes equipped with a set of defibrillator paddles that can be used to bring back allies who were slain in combat by any means. Inside a tank that exploded? Defib shock; get back in there, soldier. Shot in the head? Defibs. Fell off a 10 story building? Defibs do the job. This time around, Battlefield 6 has changed things around a bit, though. Instead of the previous way the defibrillators have worked, you no longer are required to charge them up. Now you can just click and instantly hit a downed ally to bring them back up. The cost of doing this is that they’re only brought back at half health, but you’re still able to charge and hit for the full HP revive. Also, as I mentioned before, squadmates can freely revive each other this time around. Seemingly co-opting Battlebit’s drag feature, Battlefield 6 now allows squadmates to drag eachother into safety and revive at will. You do not need to be any specific class for this. It’s slow, but it’s helpful in a pinch. It also helps to keep from pigeonholing one friend into always playing medic so you stop dying and losing the team tickets.

Battlefield 6 also looks great. The visuals are very nice, likely helped by the fact that the game has chosen to actually leave behind the last generation of consoles. What impresses me the most has been seeing reports of how well Battlefield 6 runs even on lower end or older PCs. I’m personally pretty up to date, but it’s rare for me to see a game that lets my 4090 run it at max graphics settings and native 4K without upscaling while getting over 100FPS. Reports I’ve seen online documenting performance has the game running great, even on hardware as old as a GTX 1070. AAA games as of the last several years have seen themselves becoming increasingly reliant on tools like frame generation and DLSS as a substitute for having to bother optimizing their game. It’s almost a sad note to feel that it’s notable to see a major game studio that cared to optimize, but that’s what you get with Battlefield 6. It feels like they really cared to put it all together to make everything great.

Which brings me to my last point: the maps. Discussions around Battlefield 6 have people at odds over how they feel about the maps available at launch. Admittedly, all of the maps available in the beta as a means to get people interested were rather on the smaller side. Luckily there are some larger maps available immediately and… matchmaking allows you to select what maps you’d like to join into. Don’t like a map? Just don’t choose it when you’re matchmaking. As something of an Operation Metro / Locker enthusiast myself, I find joy in the tighter maps, but I know it’s not to everyone’s taste. Luckily Battlefield 6 launches with nine relatively large maps for FPS games in general, but only maybe three or four that I’d say hit the point of tight areas with cramped gunplay the way you would with Metro or Locker. However, I must note that there is no map that is a strictly infantry only indoor map like either of those two, so I remain waiting for my moment in upcoming content drops. Here’s hoping we can get a new classic like those two.

So overall, I think Battlefield 6 has done pretty much everything right to start moving in a positive direction. Do I think it’s perfect? No. But what I do think is that Battlefield 6 is, at least for now, proof that there’s still a chance for this series. Perhaps Bad Company and Battlefield 3 are rose tinted memories, but I think this is the closest they’ve come since either of those releases to having a real classic on their hands again. Battlefield 6 is showing a lot of promise, and if Battlefield Studios are able to prove they are able to continue caring after launch, I hope to see this game stay as a mainstay atop the Steam charts for a while to go. If you are interested, just get it. It’s the best Battlefield experience in years and all things are trending upward, so let’s hope we have yet to see the peak for Battlefield 6!

Ed’s note: See our Battlefield 6 single-player Campaign review here.

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