It’s hard to pick out exactly what’s wrong with this game. Maybe it’s the fact that WWI was a real life dying simulator. Typically games do their best not to call out the actual horrors of the war they represent. Battlefield One went entirely the other direction with it.
The campaigns, obviously, intentionally did this. Each one tells a different story from a different part of the war. Other places around the internet discuss the veracity of these stories, I’m not going to get into it. What I care about is the authenticity of the experience itself, and by and large they did a great job of simulating World War I. The varied nationalities of the player characters, the variety of tactics (even though each story pretty much focused on one tactic each), and the amount of death by overwhelming numbers help project this illusion.
Multiplayer does the same thing. There are Grand Operations, wherein players contend in real situations from the war. These operations span over two or three maps, with the assaulting team attempting to push the defensive line back through all of them. If the defenders win a round, the game restarts at the checkpoint it left off at, except the attackers get a zeppelin or an armored train to back them up. It’s a grueling experience, especially when there are ten or twenty snipers on the 64 v 64 or 40 v 40 maps. There is rarely such a thing as a killing spree unless you find one of the few defensible spots or you’re an absolute animal on assault.
On the surface it’s an excellent game, one great for Battlefield fans and FPS fans in general. Unfortunately, by the time DICE released new content to freshen up the 10 or so multiplayer maps, it had already gone stale, thanks in large part to the awful unreliable nature of most of the weapons. There just isn’t diversity in the game. They went too far with trying to represent WWI and perhaps lost sight of the fact that it’s supposed to be a functioning game.
Bottom Line: Since I last played, DICE has introduced new content. It may very well be worth picking up if you’re an FPS player dismayed by the contending entries from this past holiday season.
