This is a sad campaign — perhaps not quite the horror game that the devastation of the Great War deserves, but still one that confidently forgoes the patriotic pomp and war fetishization seen in most modern military shooters. That’s not to say there isn’t excitement or heroism — there is. But Battlefield 1 manages to capture the grit and valor of battle without being disingenuous. Each war story is grand in its smallness.
A Weak Beginning
The first story-driven mission, Through Mud and Blood, is by far the weakest when it comes to character, and the huge jump in quality that follows makes me wonder why DICE kept this one as the opening to begin with. The answer is probably familiarity — you play as Daniel Edwards, a young, inexperienced soldier part of a British Mark V tank unit pushing through German lines into Cambrai, France.It’s not that the story is bad, but Edwards is painfully bland, as is his mission. Capturing points along the way to Cambrai serves as an easy primer for one of Battlefield’s most popular multiplayer modes, Conquest, as well as a how-to on operating tanks, but offers little else in the way of storytelling opportunities.Edwards makes a cliche leap from a rookie struggling to operate the clunky Mark V to a one-man army who ends up bearing the brunt of his tank unit’s mission: going on foot to scout out enemy encampments, battling enemy infantry and FT-17s while his tank, Black Bess, demands repair, and finally holding out against waves of enemy vehicles in a wrecked trainyard. Not that the slow heaviness of the tanks isn’t fun — that last section in the trainyard is actually the first mission’s high point.
It’s a thrilling battle that had me desperately weaving my clunky Mark V in and out of cover, hopping out to repair with a wrench (a quicker, but consequently riskier alternative to repairing from inside), and swerving around my opponents to get a better shot of their tanks’ less-armored rears.But perhaps more disappointing than this first mission’s story is its bugginess, something that was thankfully absent from the rest of the campaign. My first time through, I spent 15 minutes running around an empty battleground attempting to trigger whatever event would move me on to the next scene.
Eventually I realized that an enemy tank had gotten stuck on a trench near the edge of the level, halting the mission’s script. Another segment where you control a carrier pigeon should have served as a thoughtful diversion from the horror of war, but thanks to the weird controls, camera, and collision (I clipped straight through a building), it was sadly comical.
High Points
As the American troublemaker narrated his escapades with his unsuspecting British co-pilot, I tore through the sky shooting down German aces, leading them full-speed towards barrage blimps before pulling up and watching them crash, while still taking the time to swoop down and bomb the anti-aircraft trucks below.But Friends in High Places is great even after you bring your biplane down from these exhilarating dogfights and crash land behind enemy lines. I played this on-foot section multiple ways, first stealthing my way through the trenches with satisfying melee-only kills, and then again going in guns-blazing. Each single-player level is large and relatively open enough to give you more than one option for confronting an obstacle, but still tight and focused enough to keep you on track without limiting your freedom. An approach like stealth is made viable by the ability to throw bullet casings to distract enemies, but also by poor AI that makes it extremely easy to just run from point to point undetected.
Later levels preserve this balance in their own way. Your adventure as an elite Italian soldier braving an enemy fortress to save his brother is recounted with quiet sadness from father to daughter. In the last, and most pleasantly surprising level, you take on the role of a Bedouin rebel as she fights alongside Lawrence of Arabia for freedom from the Ottomans. Each character in each war story is fighting for something much smaller than the war itself, and that shines through most vignettes with a beautiful, sad power.Overall, Battlefield 1’s single-player campaign is a decent series of adventures with a handful of memorable highlights, but serves mostly as a way to sample some of the vehicles, elite classes, and firearms you’ll be using in the much more interesting multiplayer.
Continue onto page two for Battlefield 1 multiplayer review.
Naturally, Battlefield multiplayer is what we’re all here for. This is where large-scale skirmishes unfold as emergent stories, and where things really shine.
Out With the New, in With the Old
And while a lack of recoil-reducing, spread-controlling attachments means you can’t custom tailor each weapon to your exact liking, it does end up demanding more careful experimentation and intimacy with the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the firearms themselves.I found myself leaning toward the light machinegun-wielding Support class, especially the MG15 n.A., and the Medic class and its sharpshooting semi-automatic rifles like the Mondragon Sniper. Most of Battlefield 1’s guns are very inaccurate if used without discipline, and because it takes a lot more damage and patience to bring down enemies than in previous Battlefield games, the moment-to-moment first-person shooting is a lot more skill-based.
Spray-and-pray tactics are obviously not effective unless you learn how to handle each weapon’s unique spread and recoil. The semi-auto rifles, for instance, recoil sharply up each time you fire — try to fire as quickly as possible without giving the recoil time to settle and you’ll likely only hit the first shot. But stay patient, track the enemy, and fire in moderated bursts, and you’ll hit your target every time.
Balancing Act
And you need to put on that gas mask, which is quickly accessed with the default T key and conveniently available to all classes. I found mustard gas especially useful as a last-ditch effort to clear enemies out of tight spaces and make a stealthy escape, to fog up telegraph posts in Rush and delay the enemy’s attempt to defuse the bomb, or to momentarily disarm snipers camped out in a particularly troublesome spot.
New vehicle-specific classes, which can load directly into available vehicle spawns, can conveniently repair tanks and planes from the inside. Hopping out to repair like in previous Battlefield games is much quicker, but also the riskier option, making teamplay and squad dynamics more important than ever. Vehicle spawns are also much more spaced out over the course of a match, preventing them from being overpowered and making them much less disposable in the long term.So much of Battlefield 1 is balanced in this risk-reward sort of way. Perhaps one of my favorite changes is how DICE has limited the spotting function. Previous Battlefield games let you spam the “spot” button to pinpoint enemies in-game and on the minimap, giving you bonus points with each enemy spotted. It made it much easier to target opponents, but reduced some direct firefights down into a game of “shoot the triangles.”
In Battlefield 1, marking enemies requires you to be more precise and the highlighting effect doesn’t last as long, demanding more caution and smarter positioning from both teams and resulting in more unpredictable and fun firefights.
But the lengthy Operations mode won’t replace Conquest, which still serves as the best, most immediate way to experience everything Battlefield 1 has to offer, with the added freedom of a wide-open map.
Theatres of War
That said, the large-scale approach still works well in this new World War I setting in Conquest and Operations. Amiens is a particularly strong map, set in a ruined city full of crumbled facades, alleyways, and bridges with a railroad running through it, which creates a ton of varied environments for compelling firefights. Perhaps my favorite close-quarters map is Argonne Forest, an extremely dense, green wooded area full of snaking ravines and with a wrecked train at its centerpoint.Meanwhile, Sinai Desert offers a sprawling playground of wide-open desert surrounding a handful of dense, city-based objectives and capped to the right with a huge arching cliffside. This map was the best to take advantage of the fun new cavalry class, since the relative lack of barbed wire and other obstacles means lots of unimpeded charging into battle, sabre in hand.
Landing a sabre kill or even a clean headshot with the rifle is extremely satisfying thanks to the speed and risk of riding in on horseback, but unfortunately there are very few maps where horses are preferable to an armored car or the compact convenience of the FT-17.But even Battlefield 1’s most boring maps are bolstered by the addition of Behemoth class vehicles like the daunting zeppelin and the devastating armored train. These spawn in Conquest, Domination, and Operations for the losing team once a significant difference in points is reached, offering an exciting way to turn the tide of a battle and make the remaining push for both sides more interesting.
The removal of Battlefield 4’s concept of “levolutions” and an increase in dynamically destructible environments means that the physical transformation of each level is an exciting, emergent, and ongoing activity rather than a manufactured event. Strategies will change as cover and key camping spots are destroyed, but in different ways every time. Getting sniped at from a natural rock formation on Sinai Desert? Blow up the ridge leading up to it and deny the enemy (and yourself) that position.Despite the map design lacking anything special, Battlefield 1 is a hauntingly gorgeous game. It captures the horror, grit, and tragedy of World War I’s many barbed wire-laced fronts in riveting detail. Ghostly barrage blimps hang dauntingly large in the sky above the black, muddy scars of the trenches in St. Quentin Scar. An ostentatious French mansion becomes the center of a grueling battle for power as biplanes spiral and crash in the distance. A crumbling city’s railway is taken over by a monstrous, cannon-mounted train of death. Everything is dust, mud, barbed wire, and rubble.
Dynamic weather also serves the visuals well, from moody rain to the much more detrimental fog and sandstorms. Smoke effects in general look fantastic, from the dreadful yellow plumes of mustard gas to the misty gunsmoke of the trenches, all adding to the grimy, rugged mood and style that so distinguishes Battlefield 1 from any of its predecessors.