The Big Bad of Battlefield 6 is a private military contractor called Pax Armata, which is about all that’s clear about them. They’re nothing more than a cardboard prop as presented throughout Battlefield Studios’s game, whose plot is just a series of missions in which you react to Yet Another Bad Thing Pax Has Done (or Is Trying to Do): killing NATO’s secretary general, attempting to assassinate the U.S. president, taking over Cairo, setting up supersonic rocketry in Tajikistan, and more.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that Pax is a C.I.A. creation gone wrong, and their omnipresent villainy plays to diminishing returns across the campaign. Mission-to-mission objectives feel largely the same throughout, whether you’re shooting your way through the streets of Gibraltar’s Old Town or downtown Brooklyn. That’s made all the more conspicuous by Battlefield 6’s largely linear approach: With one late-game exception, each level is basically a shooting gallery with a different variety of destructible landmarks, from bridges to city halls.
The undefined nature of the villains might not matter so much if we at least felt more of a connection to the game’s heroes or the peril of their situations. But Battlefield 6 so badly wants to show off its visual splendor that it keeps you at a distance from both, as in one cutscene depicting a HALO jump that seems to exist only to make us marvel at the way the sun pierces the clouds. In another, you drive a heavily armored amphibious tank through a watery minefield and then through beach emplacements, and as your safety is never threatened, you may think you’re riding on a Disney cruise rather than beholding the horrors of a Normandy-like battle.
So many scenes here don’t care to defy the laws of plot armor, as in a desperate last stand involving a downed chopper that’s all about you witnessing your comrades dying. There’s so little here that feels recognizably real, and the high-definition sheen of it all only makes that so much more obvious. Take an early campaign mission in which you take a detour through an underground WWII museum. In corridors packed with mannequin soldiers, you engage in a shootout with the enemy, and it’s hard to say that the Pax soldiers are any more lifelike than the dummies. Seeing the stakes of a real war used to try and lend some import and credibility to this game’s silly one isn’t quite stolen valor, but it’s offensive nonetheless.
The game is eerily prescient about armed forces being sent into cities against the will of the people. But it has no interest in any point of view but the military’s. And given the jingoism of the game’s soldiers, when you’re shown protesters against Pax Armata’s overreach in Cairo or those pushing back on the U.S.’s martial law during a Brooklyn-based operation, they’re framed in a critical light. Your squadmates make their disdain for the people they’re meant to save clear, suggesting that individual concerns (like liberty) pale against an ambiguous “bigger picture” and wishing that New Yorkers would just shut up for an hour to let the soldiers do their job.
In Battlefield 6, a platitude like “People don’t fight when they’ve been taught not to think” is immediately contradicted by the fact that this game is basically an invitation to fight, not think. On that note, your A.I. squadmates seem to have gotten that memo only too well, and will compromise their positions—and your back—in order to keep fighting.
“I don’t know what’s more impressive, the view or the firepower,” says one of your squadmates at one point, summing up the two things that Battlefield 6 gets right, to the detriment of both. Yes, the settings are detailed and occasionally breathtaking, and there’s a glorious range of weapons, vehicles, and gadgets to mow down enemies with. But the focus given to the view and the firepower makes the lack of detail everywhere else all too apparent, and the end result is about as satisfying as an action film that’s all special effects and stunt work.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Tara Bruno PR.
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