Its been just over three years since I sat down and played Battlefield 5 for the first time. Three years and two days since I wrote my review in fact. Reading that back today was a trip, especially after the rollercoaster ride that DICE subjected us to with the drip feed of content over its lifespan... Let me just say right out the gate that I was a bit hasty to give BFV an 8/10. This time around I am a bit more - how do you say it - cynical with regards to how DICE are going to handle things this time.
I'm really torn on how to start this. I have a large pile of 'this sucks' and a small pile of 'this is good' and no matter which I put first I feel like im still not conveying the message I want to convey - that's just how much of a mess this game is. On the whole? It's 'good'. As of right now I have a good 30 hours logged, with the majority of that spent on the All Out Warfare mode. Portal was something I was really stoked for but its just kind of fallen flat with the custom rules editor that was touted as the main selling point being locked to TDM and FFA modes, and things in general just not being really as flexible as the community had come to expect. Hazard Zone may be fun but its not a mode for me - if I wanted to play Tarkov with no progression id just play Tarkov and not upgrade my hideout, and not jump into Battlefield for that fix.
So All Out War is my jam, and probably will be where I spend the rest of my time playing the game unless they pull out something wild for Portal in the future. The seven maps on offer are a mixed bag for sure. Manifest is head and shoulders above the others, a joy to play both on Conquest and Breakthrough which is more than can be said for some others. Its a decent size with a good mix of play spaces and seems to be the map that has had the most time put into designing for sure. Contrast that to Kaleidoscope and Hourglass which are practically wide open fields with little in the way of useful cover and you very quickly find yourself at the mercy of a team that is competent in vehicle use, which is further compounded when your own team seemingly doesn't understand what a rocket launcher is. The other maps are all fairly decent but just not to the same quality as Manifest.
Being average is honestly the theme around here, which is fine but when you think that this game has had three years in development with FOUR dev teams working on it, you really do start to wonder where the time went and what the teams did with it - even allowing for concessions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The most egregious is just how fragmented and unintuitive the UI and UX flow is throughout the game. The menus suck, customising weapons in a match sucks, seeing who is in your squad while not in a match is tucked into its own social tab for *reasons* and this is nothing to speak of issues console players face with navigating these menus on controller. Quality control has definitely taken a backseat at EA for this title, the whole menu experience just feels like a cheap F2P knock off and not at all what you would have expected from DICE especially after the complaints over the menus in BFV.
Balance is another area where things just seem very questionable, which is frankly absurd considering the slim offerings across the board in terms of weapons, gadgets, vehicles and specialists. Of the 22 weapons in the game (that's three sidearms, three SMGs, four assault rifles, three DMRs, three sniper rifles, two LMGs, two shotguns and a lever action rifle) about half of them are usable due to horrendous bloom and spread on the automatics paired with gratuitous visual recoil. Notably SMGs seem unaffected by this meaning the majority of any given server will be using the PP-29 which makes the already small pool of weaponry seem even smaller than it is. Vehicles are split between a selection of faction agnostic transport vehicles and then a faction pool consisting of a tank, a transport helicopter, an attack helicopter and a jet. The faction pool is functionally the same vehicle for either side with a different skin - the only exception here are the MV38 Condor and the F35E Panther for the US faction as they can switch between a hover mode and and a more traditional jet mode. Despite this, unlocks are separate for these faction specific vehicles despite there being no clear reason for it especially when you cant choose which faction you play as. Vehicle play on the whole right now is incredibly frustrating as you feel incredibly fragile no matter what you do, but conversely when faced with an enemy vehicle they just seem to be invincible - see my quip about playing on teams that don't know what a rocket launcher is. The icing on the cake? The Hovercraft is hands down the dumbest vehicle in the game. Not only is it possible to scale literal vertical walls and fly through the map with them, the minigun they are armed with by default can rip apart helicopters in no time at all while doing no damage to hovercrafts on the other team for no reason at all. For a transport vehicle they are currently way too durable and you will often find at least three hovercraft on each side just swarming objectives and being way too obnoxious.
Specialists are a nice concept, but right now the meta is very solidly 'play Falck if you are an infantry player' with others falling by the wayside. Her ability to heal herself is just far and away the most useful thing for a majority of players as it lets you bring an ammo box and just be a one man army. Casper sees good usage on Breakthrough as you can very quickly rack up spotting score very safely, and Angel is pretty decent for being able to distribute armor packs to friendly players. Sundance and their wingsuit are super fun to play with when you can get some elevation to properly use it, opening up some really neat flanking opportunities especially when paired with a spawn beacon. Other specialists are just kind of 'meh' on the whole. Rao and his hacking gadget is a great concept but currently it is really obnoxious to use - the slightest obstruction between you and the target will cause its long use time to reset. For some reason Mackay and Paik are locked behind levelling which is weird because while Mackays grapple is strong, its not strong enough to warrant being level gated - Paik I would have agreed with being level gated except her infamous wallhack gadget got nerfed into oblivion before launch and is now almost entirely worthless. I wonder just what they are going to do with the specialists we are going to get each season as right now it already seems like we have everything we need and anything new is just going to be more overlap that nobody will really take up after investing time on cosmetics for the characters they are playing right now.
Graphically the game is about on par with BFV, which is a shame considering how often prior titles would constantly push the bar. Maps like Breakaway and Manifest look great and detailed but then you contrast that with Hourglass and Kaleidoscope and its just barren landscape with a handful of buildings scattered about. The specialists themselves all look unique and have nice designs although the current cosmetic offerings are virtually all just color swaps with very few actual model edits or swaps - I hope we see more different and interesting skins going forward.
On the topic of performance I don't really have anything bad to say - I am running a 5600x with 16gb of RAM and an RTX 3080 and pull a constant 90+ FPS on ultra settings at 1440p. I do however see general consensus online that optimisation is almost non existent, with performance being incredibly hit and miss. There does seem to be a good chance of a memory leak existing within the current build too, though I also haven't seen that myself. Server performance on the other hand is incredibly poor at times, constant rubber banding and lag spikes really put a damper on things. The move to 128 player matches may be a factor here but im not entirely sure, though that could explain the lack of detail in most maps perhaps? Either way the increased scale just really doesnt feel too great to play with, which is a shame because years ago after playing MAG on the PS3 all I wanted was more massive scale shooters. Perhaps 64 really was enough after all?
Before I wrap things up I have a couple of other things I should mention. There is no scoreboard in game for god knows what reason. Its not something I really care for in general, it being gone doesnt bother me though it was nice to see when there is clearly a hacker on the other team. Not being able to switch teams or do ANYTHING in terms of squad management in game really does suck though. Gone are the days of 8+ of us joining the same server to play some BF as you cant leave the random squad you end up getting put into if you aren't part of the first squad to join a server, and then after the game ends you have to requeue into matchmaking to get into another. Its a real pain for our group in particular as we are often at least 6 players so it ends up with us just splitting off into two groups of 3 and just having less fun in general. A server browser would help in this regard, but at the same time we never used it in BFV and didn't have this issue so theres that. The complete lack of a stats page or platoons is just icing on the cake. It just feels like this game was rushed through development with no clear direction by amateurs, when in reality it was a three year dev cycle including world class talent from DICE, Ripple Effect (formerly DICE LA), EA Gothenburg (formerly Ghost Games) and Criterion. The fact that it feels like we have gone backwards from BFV is very worrying, especially when it comes to future content and how slowly that came out of the pipe there.
Overall I don't think BF2042 is bad, but I definitely don't think its anything special. Its fun to play with friends, but don't expect anything great as a solo player (but at that point why are you playing Battlefield anyway?). Future content is make or break for the game, with season 1 reportedly not starting until early next year I fear that the game could be dead on arrival which is a shame because it is unmistakably battlefield at heart and the gameplay loop is great fun. I wish at times though that we never moved on from the Premium DLC model - getting substantial updates to the previous games was always a guarantee and while splitting the player base did suck there are definitely ways around it. With some balance passes and new maps this game could be up there with BF2, BF4 and BF1 but until then it scores a very average 6.5/10 from me.
