The Battlefield series has always been about having fun on your own terms. That’s essential because Battlefield 2042 feels like it’s working hard to strip as much as can from the game, resulting in a game jammed with strange new features that feel like they’ve been forced into a franchise that doesn’t really need them.
At EA‘s private review event, 2042 was one of the year’s worst disappointments. Since then they have improved many things, and after spending some time with the progression system and the servers full of Battlefield enthusiasts, we believe it’s playable now, but still a massive error for the Battlefield series.
battlefield 2042 Trailer
At its most basic level, Battlefield 2042 appears to be a chore. Customizing loadouts, getting your hands on a vehicle, and figuring out what you’ve unlocked are all difficult tasks. You’ll spend a lot of time trying to avoid death by helicopter because the skies are densely packed with them, but if you’re not careful, you’ll be killed by hovercrafts, a “light” vehicle with enough armament to conquer Iceland on its own. Aside from that, every gun in the game is, well, a bit shit, and the only way to fix it is to get kills with it in order to earn the attachments that would improve it marginally.
When the game works – and it does occasionally, despite itself – it’s difficult not to enjoy the sheer “Battlefieldiness” of the whole experience, laughing with friends as your little AA tank trawls through conflict after conflict, shooting down helicopters and fleeing the “real” battle tanks that can easily put a hole in you. It also works when it removes these strange features and allows you to play the regular class-based Battle in the Battlefield Portal. It is quite effective.
Before we get into everything that isn’t quite right in 2042, I’d like to give a shout-out to the graphics, performance, and sound, which are all excellent. It’s a magnificent game that runs smoothly at 4K on PC no matter how many explosions are going on, thanks to EA foregoing ray-tracing in favor of Nvidia’s DLSS rendering technology. While it’s not usual to be directly caught in Battlefield 2042’s weather effects, it does look the part, and whatever issues we do have with the game, they aren’t related to its appearance.
With that lauded, it’s time to discuss Battlefield 2042’s most egregious crime: the abolition of the class and loadout systems in favor of Specialists. These Specialists are loosely classified under the following categories: For example, Mackay, a figure with a grappling hook and a baseball cap attractive enough to feature in a Succession episode, is technically an Assault. Every Specialist, on the other hand, has access to every weapon, gadget, and piece of equipment.
As a result, Mackay isn’t an Assault in the traditional sense. He’s a man with a grappling hook, thus anyone who wants to use one can play him, whether they’re armed with an assault rifle, a light machine gun, or anything else. The means the class-based multiplayer at the heart of Battlefield is eroding, as 30 people with grapples charge into every conflict, often with a kit tailored to give them what they need: that sniper on a neighboring mountain may now bring ammo with him, resupplying himself until the universe’s heat death. Instead of a team of people storming ahead, ammo bearers handing out supplies as medics trail behind, healing fallen soldiers, you now have 128 different players (64 on last-gen consoles) all rushing around doing their own stuff.
Each operator in the game has their unique skill set, and while we didn’t give them a high rating during the review event, I’ve grown to appreciate them over time. Boris, who has a small turret that is more effective when he’s close to it, and Sundance, who has a pocket full of various grenades that will recharge over time, are two of our favorites. A brutal anti-vehicle smart grenade is one of these grenade kinds that has proven useful in a variety of situations. Nonetheless, it appears to be yet another surrender to allowing every character to play any job, despite the fact that specialists have varying strengths. Was this why we got rid of the class system? It feels odd, and the game design opposes it, as if Battlefield is attempting to shed the hero-shooter mantle that EA has draped over it.
Unfortunately, the heroes appear to have been included for the benefit of the new headline mode, Hazard Zone, which feels like a futuristic war-skinned version of Hunt: Showdown that no one wanted, and fails to do anything to break out of that mold at any time. Your ultimate goal is to accumulate a large number of credits so that you can buy the greatest gear with as much money as possible in your account. In Hazard Zone, you’ll join a queue with four other people and then buy a loadout with credits before entering a repurposed multiplayer level to hunt down data drives against several other squads, with AI soldiers acting as a minor stumbling block.
Get these data disks and your other squadmates into one of the extraction helicopters that land at random locations, and you’ll be out of there with a bunch of credits and a reimbursement for the stuff you took in. You lose everything if you die, which is highly likely based on our squad’s experiences.
As you might see, this makes it very simple for players who have been dominant in previous games to spiral out of control, especially because each consecutive extract allows them to equip even more.
In comparison to Battlefield’s normal explosive fare, it’s unnecessarily complex, and I’m not sure if it’s a worthwhile addition here. Because the time to kill is limited, death comes quickly, and you’ll essentially be avoiding being caught between two squads and taken apart. The problem is that if you crush it and win, all you receive is a slightly greater pile of credits. On the other hand, if you lose, you’ll have to fight your way back in through a slew of various screens and admin. So, when you win, you receive nothing, but when you lose, you’re sad.
Once you’ve gotten beyond Hazard Zone and the Operators in general, you’ll have to deal with a number of other features that appear out of place, such as weapon customization. You can modify things in-game on the go, which feels like another concession to giving players complete control without the need to specialize. we don’t use it, and we doubt many other players will, but it theoretically allows you to carry around a weapon with three different sights, as well as the ability to attach a suppressor or flashlight on the fly. This means you may chop and change to hide any flaws, allowing you to carry both a short-range and a long-range weapon simultaneously, switching between them with just a few button pushes.
Customizing your weapons (and the cross-system itself) is a headache if you don’t want to do it. The interface — and all menus in the game, for that matter – appears to have been meticulously designed to be as perplexing as possible. we spend hundreds of hours a year, much to our sorrow, playing multiplayer shooters and navigating the ever-changing upgrades in each of those games. It shouldn’t be as challenging as Battlefield 2042.
Breakthrough, a new Battlefield mode, feels like a poorer version of Battlefield Bad Company’s Rush game, with two capturable points replacing the two bombs. If you can get both of these, you’ll be able to take over the sector and push the enemy back. We like it, yet it’s difficult to play it without thinking of the greater Rush mode. Vehicles are both highly powerful and incredibly abundant in Battlefield 2042’s Conquest and Breakthrough phases, hence it suffers the most. I’ve seen the beginning of a Breakthrough round have 4-5 helicopters in the sky ready to attack, and since even a Hovercraft can be consistently destroyed with 2-3 rockets, having to fend off pairs of them every couple of minutes gets old fast.
You’re not always confined to getting these back at the spawn, either. Tanks and other vehicles (as well as enormously powerful robot dogs with machine guns strapped to their backs) can be summoned from anywhere on the battlefield. As a result, rooftop defense posts will frequently have a Humvee on the roof with a minigun scanning the skies for aerial intruders. Again, it seems as if the game never wants you to have all of the options all of the time and instead gradually gives you more control.
The Battlefield Portal appears to be the bright spot at the moment, and it’s fantastic enough to make the game almost enjoyable. You may create your own game modes in Battlefield Portal. They’re all a little sillier, and they serve as a good warm-up / cool-down for the more serious clashes in 2042. A fast blast of gun action may not feel like Battlefield, but it’s a fun way to pass the time.
In fact, given enough time, it’s not difficult to suppose that someone in the community would create something so popular that it becomes synonymous with Battlefield 2042, just as DOTA and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds were born from (kind of) ARMA.
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In actuality, the semi-complete remakes of Battlefield 1942, Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3 housed within are the main selling point right now. The 2042 engine provides smoother mobility, punchier shooting, and the graphics grunt to see sand kicking up as we drive Panzer tanks around the desert, In many ways we remember Battlefield 1942 feeling.
Verdict
Battlefield 2042
Battlefield 2042
Pros
- Battles feel epic
- Beautiful and detailed maps
- Abundant weapons customization
- Portal has a lot of potential
Cons
- Full price for only multiplayer
- Hazard Zone feels repetitive
- Specialists don’t differ much
