Game:

Battlefield 1 (2016)

Category:

Review

Duration: 37:03

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Since 2010, EA and Battlefield developer DICE have seemed determined to take their multiplayer-driven large-scale shooter in the direction of its competitors. With Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the series embraced the progression and unlock system of more popular games. With Battlefield 3 and 4, the series structure resembled the systems and goals of its rival more and more, even as it tried to find the thing that would set it apart. As the console generation transitioned over, DICE struggled to find a happy balance in Battlefield 4 between the destruction Bad Company introduced and the big play spaces and high player counts the series started with.

Then, of course, DICE struggled to make the game actually work.

Subsequently, DICE took some extra time with Battlefield 1 and took it somewhere the series hasn’t been: World War I. And with that distance from modern warfare — rhetorical or otherwise — it seems the series has not only found something it’s been missing, it found stories worth telling.
For the first time in years, you can safely start a Battlefield game by venturing into the campaign. Battlefield 1’s campaign takes on the kind of importance the series hasn’t managed in the better part of a decade, and the result is a single-player component that doesn’t overstay its welcome or run out of ideas.

First, Battlefield 1 successfully threads a very delicate needle in its handling of a war that lacks even World War II’s "easy" dichotomy. Battlefield 1 brilliantly avoids the war shooter conceit of One Man’s Long Campaign. Hell, it avoids the single protagonist/storyline problem altogether, sidestepping the narrative difficulties of trying to stretch a story across six to eight hours. Instead, DICE has created a WWI anthology, telling largely unconnected stories about various men (and women) throughout the theaters of the Great War.

These stories are generally well-written and tonally varied. Some characters are desperately trying to survive, some are looking for redemption, and some are mounting a guerrilla resistance to centuries of occupation. There’s some quippy heroics at one or two points, which is nice, honestly, because Battlefield 1 is, more often than not, pretty dark. Any heroism on display is contextualized within a conflict that had little in the way of triumph.

Battlefield 1 navigates the tonal challenges of the awful human cost of WWI well, in part by not ignoring them. There’s a consistent acknowledgment of the abject terror and hopelessness that sat atop the people involved in the conflict on all sides, in part thanks to a grimly effective prologue. There's also less explicit demonization of the "enemy" — something that feels like a real relief in the military shooter space, which seems hell-bent on giving players something they can feel good about shooting at.
This is a point worth making. Battlefield 1 feels like a move away from military shooter doctrine in plenty of ways. But the biggest departure is in how little shooting there can be, at least compared to the game’s contemporaries. The first real chapter, "Mud and Blood," is often as much an exercise in stealth and avoidance as it is a combat shooter, if not more so — assuming you choose to play it that way.

Battlefield 1 clearly wants you to play it that way, with a presentation that emphasizes how overwhelmingly outnumbered you are as a tank driver guiding his crew through a pea-soup fog in a shell-blasted swamp. The second story places you in the cockpit as a fighter pilot, but after you’re shot down, you’ll have to make your way to, and then through, No Man’s Land, the machine gun-swept and mortar-blasted space between the German and British lines.

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Sneaking in Battlefield 1 doesn’t feel like a bolted-on idea or concept. Instead, it’s a clearly developed set of mechanics that feels lifted directly from 2015’s Battlefield Hardline. This is good, because there’s a lot of moving around bigger spaces where shooting isn’t always a good idea.

This departure isn’t strictly limited to sneaking, either. Battlefield 1’s campaign features the kind of variety many other shooters only pay lip service to, introducing new concepts and staples in every mission. From tank pilot to fighter ace, from Italian shock trooper to Bedouin horseback resistance fighter, I was never bored, because I was never doing the same thing for long. Despite some fairly common Battlefield issues — namely, brain-dead enemy AI, and allies who, among other things, crashed their vehicles into me — Battlefield 1 feels ... smart.

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