BATTLEFIELD V
It’s World War II again, now looking better than ever
WAR, ACCORDING TO the Fallout games, never changes. It doesn’t in Battlefield, either, despite the rising tide of battles royale that have forced even COD to bend before their power. The latest installment in EA’s series couldn’t be more traditional at launch, from its World War II setting to its single-player campaign.
There’s a more modern tradition in evidence, too: The game, at the time of writing, isn’t all there. There’s no co-op mode yet, and one of the single-player missions—collectively known as War Stories—is also missing in action, and bound to cause controversy when it appears, putting you in the turret of a German tank. You’ll have to wait for the inevitable battle royale mode, too.
The War Stories themselves are nicely written, and put up a decent challenge. The first, which sees a British bank robber sprung from jail, so he can use his explosives skills to inconvenience the Nazis, is an entertaining romp, but teaches you a harsh truth about the game—you’re no bullet sponge, and a few well-placed shots or a single rocket will put you down. It forces you to be clever.
We’re used to a single-player campaign being mere training for multiplayer, and there’s certainly a bit of that going on here, but the War Stories ascend beyond that. Each is self-contained, and differentiated enough in their plots, characters, and settings to not feel familiar, even if they often fall back on the “approach objective and shoot everyone or blow it up” style of play. Objectives can often be tackled in any order, and this feeling of versatility and variability carries over to multiplayer.
Grand Operations is probably the best mode so far, although there are plenty of others if it doesn’t catch your attention. It chains together different styles of play to create a campaign that takes place over a couple of days, throwing you into largescale battles as well as tighter maps.
Visually, it’s highly accomplished, but there are glitches. It freezes for a few seconds every so often on our AMD/Nvidia setup, with the CPU nowhere near maxed out. Then there’s the pop-in, with rocks and piles of snow teleporting into place as you approach them. In War Stories, enemy soldiers can be dumb enough, depending on difficulty setting, not to notice their friend being shot in the head, as long as you suppress the gunshot.
Owners of RTX hardware will see performance increases as patches drop to improve ray tracing, but for the majority without it, this is still a good-looking, fast-paced action game, with top-rank multiplayer and single-player stories that can be genuinely affecting.