Took a two month sabbatical from other games for a minute so I could play something straightforward and uncomplicated. BF2042 is that game, for better and worse.

PROS: It's very polished, barring some hilarious exceptions. Movement, shooting, and traversal of objectives is fluid and satisfying. The maps are huge and multi-layered, I played as much as I could and I still don't think I covered more than half of the maps' areas during matches. Lots of options for killing bad guys. I didn't feel like I needed to buy a Battle Pass to do well at the game. It's very fun to shoot things in this game.

CONS: BF community fucking sucks most of the time, with players either ignoring objectives or camping at spawn points. Most players just play Conquest so that's the only game mode you can regularly find matches in. I did encounter cheaters every couple days. Vehicle combat is broken in too many ways. Weekly game modes were not fun.

I could go on, but here's the bottom line: this is a great game to pour time into if you're okay at FPSs. If you've got the time and patience for the game's long rounds and large online contingent, it can be very rewarding. Me? I bowed out after two months once I realized there wasn't really any way to elevate my game past where it was. I'm not big on MMOs at all, but I still had some fun here.

This is a multiplayer only game so compared to my other reviews, this review will be much shorter and with much less detail.

Battlefield 2042 is a weird game to talk about. Because I haven't played it at launch, I entered the game at Season 3 I believe and then continued on with 4 and left at 5. There have been a sixth season as well with a seventh one coming so I'm sure the game has already changed significantly since I played it.

But for the time I played, BF2042 was a game that tried to be a Battlefield game that was originally setup to be something different. The original launch had a bunch of problems and weird design decisions like Specialists instead of classes. Many of these issues have been addressed, like the reintroduction of classes into the game. Many maps also saw significant change.

128 players thing slowly rolled itself out and got replaced with 64 players again. But while these changes are mostly solid and a clear sign that the development team listens to feedback, the game has not been build to work properly with these systems so the game is like a weird amalgamation of ideas.

128 players is too chaotic, yes. But maps are too big for 64 players and you don't feel the atmosphere of war. Specialists was a bad system, yes. But classes doesn't have enough specific attributes to them to make them unique.

It feels like this Battlefield game has been made using an alpha build of another game, which is sad to see. However, it's still Battlefield. It looks great, sounds great and plays great. Gunplay is as strong as always. Grappling Hook, Wingsuit and other gadgets like that are also very fun additions.

So even if the game doesn't have a clear identity, I had a good time playing it. After around 35 hours though, it was enough for me and I moved to different games. It lives on as a good but not great memory in my head.