[rwp-review id=”0″]
So here we are, finally toying around with DICE’s follow up to BF4 – Battlefield: Hardline. The latest version of the franchise is everything you loved about BF4, minus the gazillion weapons and now set in urban cops vs. robbers environment where your focus are heists and policing instead of warfare. What a stroke of genius that idea was.
BFH’s campaign starts you off as Detective Nick Mendoza, a good cop who finds himself smack dab in the middle of a drug war in Miami, full of bales of illicit substances, corrupt cops and stereotypes. I’m only partially surprised that Nick isn’t wearing a white jacket with his sleeves rolled up ala Miami Vice, but more on that later. Nick is just a plain ol’ Cuban immigrant spurred on to become an honest cop because of his old man who was a corrupt enforcer back home. Add a hard-working single mother who toiled to raise her only son in Miami and you have a perfect cop, albeit with some serious daddy issues.
Partnered with Khai, a butt-kicking veteran detective voiced by Kelly Hu, as Nick, you are charged by Captain Julian Dawes with taking on the drug war and bringing it to a stop. Together you investigate projects, everglades and more in an attempt to undercover drug production, distribution and corrupt police personnel. Gameplay focuses more on stealth and submission rather than shooting everything up. Of course, you CAN gung-ho your way through every single mission, but the game will reward more you for not raising alarms, subduing baddies with your badge and silent takedowns. Every mission will also have a set of thugs with warrants, for whom arrests count as extra, and evidence pieces, which when collected help you solve cases and underlying narratives within the campaign.
Comic relief comes in the form of Boomer, a con specializing in gadgets and Tyson Latchford, also a con, who is/used to be a drug pusher. While Nick and Khai are the more serious pair from the main cast, Boomer, through his love affair with a anarchist redneck’s daughter and Tyson with his smart wit form a fun pair to follow around. On a serious note, the anarchist redneck ‘patriot’ story arc is one of the most fun in the game.
All in all Battlefield: Hardline sets up a good premise to start off a great campaign.
[Warning: Ahead be spoilers]
Unfortunately for DICE, underneath the backdrop and storyline however is Battlefield’s constant struggle to come up with a campaign narrative that’s enticing enough to unseat Call of Duty — the ‘epitome’ of war-based first person shooters. Nick’s character leaves you desperate to empathize with him. A clean cop, sure, but his motivations are blurry, making him hard to root for. The other characters are sadly not any better. Rationale behind Khai’s actions throughout the game is, as far as the narrative goes, almost non-existent. Sure, solving a particular case will give you a little context, but why did she spring Nick from jail after helping to put him there in the first place? Why would Nick help someone who put him in jail for three years?
And, dearie me, the ending. Not only did it make no sense at all, but it leaves so many questions unanswered that you’re left absolutely disheartened by the time and effort you put into reaching there. Dawes letting Nick off him and then giving him all his money made as much sense as the decision to cast Hayden Christensen as Anakin/Darth Vader. To sum it up: poor writing, poor character development and poor narrative makes the campaign dull to play and unfulfilling to complete.
But you don’t really play Battlefield for the campaign. You play it for its massive multiplayer offering.
When I started this review with, ‘everything you loved about Battlefield’ I should have clarified that it’s mainly about the multiplayer. With seven different multiplayer games, you are spoiled for choice. Heist pits the cops and robbers against each other in a, well, heist scenario. Robbers try to steal a high value object and it’s up to the cops to stop ‘em! Hotwire is essentially Domination but the difference being that you have to control vehicles and drive them above a certain speed to diminish the opposing team’s points. Hotwire will also become your default game when you need to raise cash for weapons and gadgets; other games raise it far too slowly. That also serves as a problem though; once you realize the disparity in raising money that Hotwire has over the other game types, it becomes your cash cow; you play it until you’ve raised the money you need and then you move on. It sorta kills the actual fun element of Hotwire.
Blood Money is a bit odd; cops and criminals fight to take control of a huge stack of cash. You run to the pile, grab it and take it back to your vault. You can also raid the other team’s vault, but that’s not always a smart thing to do. This is probably the most boring option from all the multiplayer games. Crosshair is a classic ‘eliminate the president’ game; cops are carrying a VIP who they need to protect and the criminals need to off. Rescue can be fun too; cops have to rescue hostages and criminals have to make sure they don’t (an old throwback to Counter-Strike!). Conquest is Domination or classic Battlefield point control and then there’s Team Deathmatch; straight up PvP.
The urban environments and the game options make Hardline’s multiplayer an enticing offer; traditional cops and robbers in various game types make for a potent combination for online gaming.
But I’ve got some beef with it
While Battlefield offers a much more diverse multiplayer gameplay experience than, say, Call of Duty, it fails in that the multiplayer gameplay is actually quite tedious and cumbersome to understand. Maps are insanely large which means that if you can’t spawn near a vehicle, you gotta walk a long way. When you get the chance to spawn on a squad mate, there’s no way of telling if it’s a safe spawn site or not. CoD has a bad spawn problem of approximately 1 in 30. In Hardline, this number, if you choose to squad spawn is much, much higher. Unlocking upgrades for your weapons means a minimum of 60 kills for some items, which if you’ve played Battlefield before you know, means a lot of rounds before you unlock that upgrade.
Don’t get me wrong, Battlefield has many, many aficionados. And while critics did say that the game is good, and for the most bit I agree, I can see why it’s not great. I can see why it’s not an Advanced Warfare or a Halo. The campaign narrative is average at best and the multiplayer, while incredibly immersive, has a steep learning curve and can come across as extremely confusing to the average video gamer. This is where games like Call of Duty, Halo and even third-person games like Batman: The Arkham Series have the advantage; they feature simplistic yet challenging multiplayer and very well scripted narratives and character development.
Long story short, Battlefield: Hardline is a fantastic spin on the traditional Battlefield games, but I don’t think it’s everyone’s cup of tea.
