WASHINGTON: Battlefield: Hardline players currently enjoying the ongoing Double XP Weekend would be pleased to know that there are plenty more Battle fest community events planned for the next couple of months.
After a pretty significant delay, ‘Battlefield Hardline’ is out, and its cop-centric take on the modern ‘Battlefield’ formula is pretty fun by most accounts (review here). Amazingly, the PS4, Xbox One, PC, PS3, and 360 versions are all on sale today for $39.99
Despite Visceral’s best attempts to tell a good story, Hardline’s single-player campaign is a mess. The military shooter’s transition to a cops-and-robbers theme has shifted the gameplay focus from open warfare to sneaking up on and arresting people.
Stealth sequences make up the majority of the campaign, and despite taking obvious cues from the Far Cry series, they fail to deliver the same highs or tactical variety.
Shootouts are still frequent, but your limited arsenal (you can only have one firearm and a handgun at a time) and the superhuman accuracy of your enemies make them more frustrating than exciting.
The driving sequences are so slow, dumbed down, and scripted that they almost feel like on-rail segments. Aside from an explosive standoff at an abandoned airstrip, most of the set-piece moments are forgettable.
Police story
The story of wronged-cop-turned-renegade Nicholas Mendoza starts rough and ends with a facepalm-worthy final revelation. Downtime abounds as characters frequently and clumsily reflect on their own backstories, and a number of nonsensical plot twists undermine the personalities and motives of most of the cast.
Everyone ends up being bad, but unlike The Wire – where flawed characters get mired down in shades of grey – the cast of Hardline constantly contradicts themselves with sociopathic behaviour.
If Hardline was only its single-player campaign, it would be one of the biggest flops of the year.
Thankfully, Hardline isn’t just a solo cop drama gone wrong, and the heart of the franchise beats on – albeit at a different tempo. Its multiplayer scales down the maps and vehicular combat for a more condensed and faster-paced experience that’s still worthy of the Battlefield name.
Even the biggest maps, like the desert town of Dust Bowl and the industrial depots of Derailed, pale in comparison to the sprawling warzones of previous Battlefield games, but each one still serves plenty of interesting and dynamic locations to fight over.
The shift to mostly transport vehicles (tanks and jets are MIA) also limits the scale of combat, but I appreciate the focus on infantry, which is what most players spend their time on anyway.
Some diehard fans will dismiss Hardline as the further COD-ification of Battlefield, but the gunplay isn’t any twitchier than previous iterations. The smaller maps simply mean you have less downtime before getting into the action.
Thankfully, most of Hardline’s new modes are geared toward smaller player counts. Hotwire’s mobile take on Conquest delivers plenty of thrills, while Heist and Blood Money both offer interesting twists on capture the flag – and you won’t think twice about them all capping out at 32 players. Crosshair and Rescue evolve the one-life, five-on-five formula of Battlefield 4’s Defuse mode, and are entertaining diversions as well.
