Battlefield 6 has proved to me that letting players test games through Betas or Demos can be a good way to encourage them to buy it, assuming the title is good, that is. In a couple of hours, I went from I don’t care, to this looks nice, then to I should get it.
To give you an idea of my level of indifference toward Battlefield 6, I didn’t even finish watching the gameplay trailer. However, a couple of days’ ago, when EA started dropping Beta keys, a friend told me to watch a Twitch stream to get one, just in case I change my mind. Long story short, it was good advice.
I went into the game not looking for much, with zero intent to buy it at launch. At best, I would have given it a shot when it becomes available on EA Play, and thus Game Pass. My first couple of matches were pretty bad, actually, as I got slapped by anyone I encountered. Furthermore, game performance wasn’t smooth enough as my Ryzen 5 7600X CPU was bottlenecking the GPU. After fixing performance and customising aim sensitivity, plus some other tweaks, I went back to take revenge.
The perfect speed for me
I liked how the gameplay felt; not too fast-paced a la Valorant and Fortnite, and not too slow like Enlisted – just the perfect rhythm for my ageing reflexes. It offered a good mix of adrenaline rush – when you manage to flank an enemy squad – and tactical thinking. For example, throwing smoke grenades to cover your advance. The sound is also great, with a good punch.
The destructibility of the maps was also pretty good, making camping windows a risky endeavour. While the beta didn’t have a lot of maps to try, the handful available were quite varied, from closed city streets to open mountainsides. I had a preference for the former, as it allowed close combat where aiming skill played a big role in victory.
I am also happy to report that, despite their large size in Conquest and Breakthrough modes, moving from one object to another was fast. But the best part for me was teamwork, when all my friends were online. Covering each other when capturing an objective or blasting a tank out of existence in a combined attack were great, exhilarating moments.
Surprisingly, at least during this short beta run, planes and helicopters weren’t that problematic, though this may change as players learn how to properly use them in the final game.
The game tanks
Does this mean the game is perfect? Of course not. So here a few little issues I have with the current state of the game. Let’s start with the elephant in the room: tanks. Boy, oh boy, these guns-on-tracks are so annoying in the hands of an experienced player. A single one of these death machines can hold a corridor or a capture point the whole game. The worst part about this is their outstanding longevity and ability to soak up damage, requiring four rockets or more to be destroyed.
And as if this wasn’t enough, should one engineer cling behind the tank to constantly fix it, then it becomes next to impossible to destroy. God forbid a team of engineers team up to repair it; you have better chances of beating a Dark Souls boss blindfolded. Wry amusement aside, there should be some sort of limit to how much a tank can be repaired, or a sort of delay after taking damage where you can’t receive repairs.
My second complaint is less severe as it depends on the players in each session. In game modes like Breakthrough, where one team attacks while the other defends, the latter can have an advantage in open, hilly maps. All you need is a squad of snipers on a hill, with a spawn point and ammo boxes, and you can paint the capture point with the attackers’ grey matter. I tried this with two friends, and we protected the first objective for the entire game. It was fun for us, most assuredly, but not for our beleaguered enemies.
Now, with all of this in mind, would I recommend getting the game? If you liked the Battlefield 3 and 4 modern combat style, this is fairly close to it, though I still have a nostalgic preference for BF3. The best way to know if Battlefield 6 is made for you is to play the next open beta test, scheduled for August 14. Just don’t leave after a couple of games, as I mentioned, because the first rounds were pretty unexciting for me… until I started getting the gist of things, so don’t give up quickly.
Roll on October 10, I say.
