(dramatic music)
- [Dan] Welcome, Battlefield fans.
This year, we've broken up the Battlefield V review
into its single-player and multiplayer components
to give fans of each style of play
a better idea of what's up.
This review covers only the single-player mode,
with our multiplayer review
and overall Battlefield V review coming separately.
Refreshing, Battlefield V's set of two-hour campaigns
are more than just short tutorials
for the multiplayer systems.
They take you through a diverse set of locations,
and the short war stories that accompany them are well done.
I'd just love to have seen them make better use
of Battlefield's awesome set of tools and toys
to put us in the middle of a full-scale war more often.
This is a run-and-gun shooter,
where the health is regenerating
and the weapons and ammo are plentiful.
As a result, whenever the action heats up,
the pace is generally as fast
as the explosions are spectacularly loud.
(explosion)
So it's an odd design choice by DICE that
after a brief intro, two out of the three campaigns
have you fighting almost entirely on your own,
emphasize the just okay stealth gameplay,
and keep you on foot so much of the time.
The first campaign, Under No Flag,
stars a young delinquent recruited by a gruff veteran
to join Britain's special boat service,
which, as it turns out, has very little to do with boats.
Their sabotage mission to North Africa
begins fairly linear and straightforward,
but it finds its footing with a wide-open map
where you have the freedom to choose your targets
and even hop on a plane.
It has a very Far Cry feel to it.
And even if the AI and enemy variety aren't great,
it's loop of tagging targets, thinning the herd with stealth
and then finishing the job with machine gun fire
works for similar reasons.
The second campaign, Nordlys,
sends us to a Nazi-occupied Norway
in the clogs of a young female resistance fighter who,
I kid you not, kills enemies by throwing knives at them
while she zooms by on skis.
Those knives do make stealth much easier to get away with,
and the skis get much more fun and useful
in her second to last mission, which again opens things up
and lets you choose your targets.
In a boost to gameplay variety,
Nordlys makes use of the weather
to force you to warm yourself at a fire every so often
to keep from freezing to death.
I wouldn't have wanted this mechanic to go on
any longer than it did though, since patience,
stealth kills, and time limits don't mix well.
I had a harder time getting interested in this character,
in part because it's hard to read subtitles
for Norwegian voice acting when you're being shot at,
but also because her motivations and origins
are so straightforward.
The third campaign, Tirailleur, is by far the best,
for two reasons.
The first is its story,
which deftly handles its commentary on racism
during the liberation of France
by making it the motivation for its protagonist.
But it's more universal statement on the human costs
of bravely and ambition takes center stage.
History, it says, does not always favor the bold.
Second, Tirailleur is the only campaign
that makes me feel like I'm an important part
of an army in a war, rather than a superpowered Rambo.
Right from the start, you fight alongside your fellow troops
and their presence makes the whole scenario
feel much more plausible.
These battles are large-scale,
and even though you never get to drive or fly any vehicles,
we do get to see the spectacular sights
of a battle raging across the map.
This is clearly what Battlefield is best at.
Replayability in the campaign missions comes from
scattered collectibles and achievement-style challenges,
which gives you something to do
besides the path of least resistance.
It should be noted that the campaign screen
has a spot held open for The Last Tiger,
which at some point in the near future
will let us play as a non-Nazi German
conscripted into a tank crew.
(gunfire)
Battlefield V's single-player campaigns
have a heavy reliance on stealth
that doesn't always play to the series' strengths,
but they do tell some poignant stories
and deliver great looking and sounding gunplay
and explosive battles.
A lack of enemy variety or consistent AI
makes it feel a little whack-a-mole
in the more linear segments
until it opens up and gives you some options
for how you want to tackle its objectives.
For more on Battlefield V,
check out the first 15 minutes of gameplay,
and stay tuned for our multiplayer review
and overall review score.