Battlefield 1 recaptures a revisionist perspective

Battlefield 1 has recaptured the magic of the good ol’ days. It’s easier than ever to create magic moments of wartime cooperation and peerless heroism that makes the Battlefield series shine. Better yet, it is the most visually stunning and auditory engaging game of this generation. The developers at DICE, coupled with their mastery of the Frostbite engine, create a WW1 atmosphere, which, while not entirely true to history, is a hell of a lot of fun to experience. Smashing a heavy tank through a quaint Italian stone cottage feels properly satisfying. The simultaneous war cries belted out by my fellow soldiers as we prepare to charge the next entrenched enemy position, while the thud of falling mortar shells engulf us is truly spectacular in a way that I’m 100% positive real combat never is.

Battlefield 1 also includes a single player mode, in the form of war stories. War stories consist of a series of four or five missions centered on a particular fictional character, introduced through cheesy, highly produced, although not-quite-good-enough-to-want-to-sit-through cutscenes that invariably end with a PTSD-induced flashback to a wartime experience. It is strange that the single player portion of the game attempts to adopt a decidedly melodramatic, ‘war is hell’ tone when so much of the experience revolves around creating gratuitously violent killing sprees for the player. Battlefield just doesn’t seem like the right outlet to grapple with the philosophical and moral implications of war, while also creating a game that someone would still want to play. The result is a single player experience thematically at odds with the bulk of its gameplay. Ultimately, this is a game focused on large scale multiplayer combat, glorifying the points and flags that are so, so important in war.

The usual Battlefield staples, Team Deathmatch and Conquest are present, along with some new modes. Smaller maps and game modes are available, which keep the pace of combat fast and significantly alleviates the problems many Battlefield games face due to the sheer scale of the maps and the distance between spawn points and the actual front line of combat. ‘War Pigeons’ focuses around finding and holding carrier pigeons long enough to call in artillery strikes on the enemy team. Teams compete to be the first to grab the pigeon that appears on the map, and then to protect the pigeon long enough to scribble down coordinates and call in the strike. It’s a modified capture-the-flag with the added amusement and horror of being able to shoot the pigeon out of the sky before it can fly away. Poor pigeon. (Pigeon pigeon pigeon).

The ‘Operations’ game mode is simple and by far the best innovation of Battlefield 1: one team attacks while the other defends on a series of maps specifically designed for epic combat. Each series of maps constitutes a front of the Great War, presented with semi-accurate revisionist history blather as you load into the map. Each map is divided into sectors with one to three objectives that the attacking team must take and hold. When the attacking team succeeds in capturing all the objectives in a sector, the defenders must retreat to the next sector while the attackers mercilessly mow them down to ‘secure the sector’. Attackers receive a limited number of respawn tokens per wave. When the last token is used, the battle resets at the last secured sector and the attackers bring in a fresh battalion to resume the assault, usually accompanied by some form of monstrous war machine to soften up enemy defenses. The map’s geography and the fortified defensive positions that WW1 is infamous for ensure asymmetrical gameplay balance—somewhat. Attackers only get three chances to complete the entire series of maps, each with upwards of five sectors. After a dozen hours logged in Operations, this reviewer has yet to actually win an attacking round.

There are a few problems in this otherwise impressive installment in the Battlefield franchise. The menu is minimalistic to the point of obtuseness. When something goes wrong, such as trying and failing to group up with friends, it can be very frustrating to figure out what is causing the problem. The game also leaves figuring out a lot of the controls as an exercise to the player. It took me almost a week to realize you could select which type of vehicle you would like to spawn with. I’m still not exactly sure how all of the abilities some of the vehicles have are supposed to work. As far as I can tell, the single player war stories do little to clear this up and an active warzone is hardly the best place for experimentation, but this does provide a very avant-garde, if grim, look at the battlefield of yore.

Battlefield 1 delivers on the promise of a blood-drenched, bayonet-packed WW1 fantasy. This installment offers innovative game modes, new, visceral hand-to-hand combat animations, and period-appropriate weaponry (almost), while staying true to the core concept of class-based Battlefield action. This game emphasizes survival and teamwork over reflexes—usually. More than anything, Battlefield 1 creates a framework for those one-in-a-million moments that captivated my imagination over a decade ago.