This week I decided to go looking through my archive of old games that I have played over the last two years, this is mainly because I am patiently waiting on my copy of Spider-Man to hopefully arrive sometime today. That's when I realized I have not yet reviewed the latest Battlefield game, which I played about a year ago, so I dusted it off and popped it in for this review.
Battlefield 1 is all out war, it's like being thrown into the first battle scene in the film Saving Private Ryan. Only this time we are dealing with the events of World War 1, and the game is inspired by actual historical events. If you're not all too familiar with the Battlefield series, it's one of those games where anything and everything can be used to attack the opposition. This means, any vehicle, artillery, helicopter and plane, anything on the battlefield is a weapon you can use, and in this instance set in the era of 1918 style weaponry and gear. The other major part about this game is that it is also a MMO, which is short for "massively multiplayer online game", and in this installment of Battlefield the games can supports up to 64 players. This is fun and at times can be super frustrating, especially if you're not all too accustomed with the mechanics or maybe you lack the experience, because other more experienced players will make rather short work of you. Imagine starting a game and then dying only a minute or two later, so best to start with the training and the single player game before you take on the big boys.
The player initially starts out near the front lines of this battle and must survive as long as possible against waves of German soldiers crashing down on the Harlem Hellfighters squadron. If you character survives the attack then an artillery barrage will rain down killing you, and your perspective will switch to a different soldier who is still alive, only to continue the assault. At the start of the battle, the Harlem Hellfighters initially lose ground to the Germans, but the British tanks force the German troops into a retreat, that is until their tanks are decimated by the German artillery.
The only recourse for your squad is to mount counteroffensive and push forward, but the Germans put up a heavy defensive and hold their ground. When the perspective finally switches to the last soldier in the gameplay, a German soldier attempts to kill your character with a shovel but is stopped by an artillery barrage that wipes out all of the combatants on the battlefield and renders you unconscious for the most part. When you eventually come to, you find the the other soldier has also survived along with you, both pointing their weapons at each other in what looks to be a last stand face off. This is when the game then switches to the opening cinematic, and opens up to the other War Stories.
When it comes to the story the Battlefield series for the most part has never been big on the story and have also not been known for the quality of their single-player game modes. This is after all a predominately multiplayer battleground game, but this time round I was rather pleasantly surprised that the developers actually listened to their fan base and made the appropriate changes. The single player missions were a tad bit short, but does take you on a harrowing journey through different stages of the war, the campaign unfortunately never gets too deeply into the political complexities of the Great War. I should say that overall, Battlefield's single-player campaign is a good adventures with a few memorable highlights, but serves mostly as a way to sample some of the vehicles, classes, and weaponry that you will be using later on in the multiplayer. You could say the campaign serves mostly as a thorough training simulator to get you well versed with all aspects before you take on the much more challenging multiplayer.
When it comes to the actual multiplayer you have ten different game modes to choose from, all the standard modes like conquest, team death match and a few new ones that are pretty epic, like the air assault. If you have played the Star Wars version you will have notice quite a few similarities, especially when it comes the the class structure. Battlefield 1 features four main classes, Assault, Medic, Support and then my personal preferred class, the Scout. There is nothing like a lone man only with his rifle looking for that perfect shot.
"They push. We push. Every once in a while, we push hard enough that the light breaks through the clouds,
and the world beyond the war glimmers. Behind every gun sight is a human being. We are those people. If history only remembers one in a thousands of us, then the future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did. But until that day comes, we will stand. We will look death in the eye and we will fight." The Narrator
It just feels way more authentic and realistic than your more modern day war games, especially when it comes your arsenal, like the very slow bolt action rifles that has the iconic sound when you fire the last bullet. The game does a great job of immersing you into the absolute horror that was war back in those days. The biggest and probably the only downside to the whole game was the maps, it just did not feel interesting enough, size was good but it was lacking that something special. The environmental effect were stunning and I can only imagine what a visual feast this would be on a high end gaming rig, still it looked beautiful on my good old PS4.
The game is well balanced in my opinion, I would really have loved the single-player campaigns to have been a lot longer, but this is essentially a multiplayer game at it's core. I also found the game to be a little bit harder than previous installment where you have more modern weaponry, here it is far more difficult to land a head shot with the old fashioned sniper rife, but when you do it's extremely satisfying.
They have brought us basically the most of the games in the Battlefield series, Mirror's Edge series as well as the Star Wars Battlefront series, which I'm sure if you have played either of these two games you would have noticed how very similar they both are to each other when it come gameplay and game structure. This title falls under Electronic Arts publishing and is the fifteenth installment in the Battlefield series, and the first main entry in the series since Battlefield 4. The next installment, Battlefield V which was planned for this weekend was delayed until November 20, which makes it a good time to get this before the new game drops. It was released worldwide on the now dominating three main platforms, being Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in October 2016.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not
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