Battlefield 1 Review
Battlefield 1 Review
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The crude, archaic charm of World War I's weaponry
lends unique personality to Battlefield's already strong first-person
shooting.
By Chloi Rad
Battlefield’s formula for large-scale,
objective-driven warfare is as intense and theatrical as ever against
the haunting, archaic backdrop of World War I. Battlefield 1’s
single-player campaign is a short but pleasantly surprising anthology of
small, human stories that does a good job spotlighting some of the key
technology of the era.
But it’s the exhilarating multiplayer that
most strongly capitalizes on the potential of this old-school arsenal,
bringing a number of subtle changes that keep the combat balanced and
smart while still allowing for the hallmark chaos that makes Battlefield
such a fantastic first-person shooter series.
The Battlefield series has not been known for the quality of
its single-player in recent years, so Battlefield 1’s campaign is a nice
change of pace. The way each story juggles charm and tragedy in equal
measure helps humanize the war and the people that fought it with quiet,
welcome restraint. Overly simplistic objectives hold it back from being
the memorable saga it could be, but a strong sampling of some of
Battlefield’s most defining elements — like objective capturing and
vehicular warfare — make it, at the least, a worthy primer for
multiplayer.
“
Battlefield 1's single-player is more interested in telling the human stories of WWI.
Rather than restricting itself to one time, place, and character,
Battlefield 1’s vignette-style approach to single-player allows it to
touch on under-explored theatres of war that made up the nightmarish
global campaign of World War I. Its short prologue and five “war
stories,” each lasting about 30 minutes to an hour, took me on a
harrowing journey from the bleak, muddy fields of the Western front to
the sun-baked deserts of North Africa. Because of the wide leaps in both
geography and chronology, the campaign never delves too deeply into the
political complexities of The Great War. But interesting storytelling
prevents it from feeling superficial — these vignettes are more
interested in telling the human stories of World War I than delivering a
bombastic history lesson, and they do so with mostly effective power
and grace.
Storm of Steel, the prologue mission, sets this up with a
tragic honesty. You take on the role of several members of the US 369th
Infantry, an all-black regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. I was
happy to see the historic importance of these soldiers, mostly made up
of African-American and Puerto Rican-American men, recognized so early
on, but I would have preferred to see their rarely-told tale saved for a
full, character-driven mission.
“
Captures the grit and valor of battle without being disingenuous.
As you and your fellow Hellfighters desperately try to push back the
incoming German forces, you’ll meet death time and time again, but it
won’t necessarily be your fault. Sometimes death is awkwardly forced
upon you if you end up surviving longer than the script expects, because
death is part of the plan. At least it’s handled poignantly. While
Storm of Steel effectively works as a way to introduce you to some
Battlefield basics — how to shoot, reposition, and reload — its grim
reminders of World War I’s overwhelming death toll establishes the
tragic tone.
This is a sad campaign — perhaps not quite the
horror game that the devastation of the Great War deserves, but still
one that confidently forgoes the patriotic pomp and war fetishization
seen in most modern military shooters. That’s not to say there isn’t
excitement or heroism — there is. But Battlefield 1 manages to capture
the grit and valor of battle without being disingenuous. Each war story
is grand in its smallness.
A Weak Beginning
The
first story-driven mission, Through Mud and Blood, is by far the
weakest when it comes to character, and the huge jump in quality that
follows makes me wonder why DICE kept this one as the opening to begin
with. The answer is probably familiarity — you play as Daniel Edwards, a
young, inexperienced soldier part of a British Mark V tank unit pushing
through German lines into Cambrai, France.
It’s not that the
story is bad, but Edwards is painfully bland, as is his mission.
Capturing points along the way to Cambrai serves as an easy primer for
one of Battlefield’s most popular multiplayer modes, Conquest, as well
as a how-to on operating tanks, but offers little else in the way of
storytelling opportunities.
Edwards makes a cliche leap from a rookie struggling to
operate the clunky Mark V to a one-man army who ends up bearing the
brunt of his tank unit’s mission: going on foot to scout out enemy
encampments, battling enemy infantry and FT-17s while his tank, Black
Bess, demands repair, and finally holding out against waves of enemy
vehicles in a wrecked trainyard. Not that the slow heaviness of the
tanks isn’t fun — that last section in the trainyard is actually the
first mission’s high point.
It’s a thrilling battle that had me
desperately weaving my clunky Mark V in and out of cover, hopping out to
repair with a wrench (a quicker, but consequently riskier alternative
to repairing from inside), and swerving around my opponents to get a
better shot of their tanks’ less-armored rears.
But perhaps more disappointing than this first mission’s story
is its bugginess, something that was thankfully absent from the rest of
the campaign. My first time through, I spent 15 minutes running around
an empty battleground attempting to trigger whatever event would move me
on to the next scene.
Eventually I realized that an enemy tank
had gotten stuck on a trench near the edge of the level, halting the
mission’s script. Another segment where you control a carrier pigeon
should have served as a thoughtful diversion from the horror of war, but
thanks to the weird controls, camera, and collision (I clipped straight
through a building), it was sadly comical.
High Points
“
A decent series of adventures with a handful of memorable highlights.
At first, I thought this bird segment was meant as a way to teach you
how to operate biplanes, but that comes later, in the much stronger
second level, Friends in High Places, which excels in both gameplay and
storytelling. It’s a level that’s full of high points — figuratively and
literally. You spend most of your time in the air as a cocky American
pilot who has infiltrated the British Royal Flying Corps for his own
amusement, and the chance to fly the Bristol F2.A biplane fighter.
Flying any of Battlefield 1’s biplanes, in single- and multiplayer, is a
freeing experience. They cut through the air smooth as butter and
control with ease and precision.
As the American troublemaker
narrated his escapades with his unsuspecting British co-pilot, I tore
through the sky shooting down German aces, leading them full-speed
towards barrage blimps before pulling up and watching them crash, while
still taking the time to swoop down and bomb the anti-aircraft trucks
below.
But Friends in High Places is great even after you bring your
biplane down from these exhilarating dogfights and crash land behind
enemy lines. I played this on-foot section multiple ways, first
stealthing my way through the trenches with satisfying melee-only kills,
and then again going in guns-blazing. Each single-player level is large
and relatively open enough to give you more than one option for
confronting an obstacle, but still tight and focused enough to keep you
on track without limiting your freedom. An approach like stealth is made
viable by the ability to throw bullet casings to distract enemies, but
also by poor AI that makes it extremely easy to just run from point to
point undetected.
“
Each character is fighting for something much smaller than the war itself.
As for the guns-blazing approach: ammo is extremely limited but weapon
crates are numerous, and you can always grab guns from fallen enemies,
too. I found that playing this way was unsurprisingly the best.
Battlefield isn’t really built for stealth, and getting the chance to
experiment with a wealth of World War I-era weapons (like the newly
invented submachine guns or the simple, but effective bolt-action
rifles) and changing up my tactics depending on what I could salvage
from enemy encampments was a more gratifying experience.
This brief, stealthy trudge through the trenches and then the
muddy graveyard of downed Mark V tanks, bodies, mangled trees, and
barbed wire that made up this No Man’s Land area was a haunting break
from the epic dogfights preceding it, a transition that Battlefield 1
handles with grace. While most military shooters attempt to make some
grand statement about war while making the horror of it a fun adventure,
Battlefield 1 uses clever storytelling to maintain a balance.
Later
levels preserve this balance in their own way. Your adventure as an
elite Italian soldier braving an enemy fortress to save his brother is
recounted with quiet sadness from father to daughter. In the last, and
most pleasantly surprising level, you take on the role of a Bedouin
rebel as she fights alongside Lawrence of Arabia for freedom from the
Ottomans. Each character in each war story is fighting for something
much smaller than the war itself, and that shines through most vignettes
with a beautiful, sad power.
Overall, Battlefield 1’s single-player campaign is a decent
series of adventures with a handful of memorable highlights, but serves
mostly as a way to sample some of the vehicles, elite classes, and
firearms you’ll be using in the much more interesting multiplayer.
Continue onto page two for Battlefield 1 multiplayer review.
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