Single player review only
Its heart is in the right place and the presentation is strong, but the campaign has way too many problems that bring it crashing down.
The Good:
Focusing on dramatized versions of lesser-known events of the war is a refreshing change of pace from the usual America-centric Saving Private Ryan stuff - Friendly AI actually helps out - Strives for believability with unlocalized languages - Crouch sprinting is a good addition - Solid 60 frames on consoles - One quarter of the campaign is from the German side against the Americans, perhaps a first for the genre
The Bad:
Squanders its stealth potential with a lazy hive mind AI straight out of the 1990s - Poor aiming controls on consoles make lining up shots a mess - Wobbly aiming due to an unnecessary knee bending simulation - Unflinching bullet sponge enemies, both grunts and borderline unkillable elites, and magically shielded machinegunners - Bad cover hitboxes - Omniscent, overly accurate enemy AI - Poorly placed checkpoints and map boundaries - Historically inaccurate weapons and equipment - Generally unpolished with convenience mechanics that get in the way of the player
---
Many will remember how when Battlefield V was first announced it was met with howls of disdain from the gaming community: early trailers seemed to hint at an alternate history setting more concerned with showing "war is fun!" over the top action and starring a stylish amputee female commando (whose hook prosthetic was comically mistaken by many for a bionic arm) and a gallery of wisecracking soldiers that greatly jarred with the expectations of the franchise fanbase. It seemed like DICE listened because the final game hasn't a single point of resemblance to that early material: gone are the quirky characters, gone is the amputee lady, replaced by a much more grounded female co-protagonist and gone is the "superfriends" Mavel movie tone of the whole package, in place of which we are treated to a gritty, tragic, no-nonsense cinematic presentation that focuses on the horrors of war in a melodramatic but tactful way. For over half of its campaign it also forgoes much of the usual heavily scripted style of level and encouter design, preferring an open ended stealth approach reminiscent of the original Crysis more than any military shooter of the post-Call of Duty era.
The single player mode is split into four mini-campaigns, opening with Under No Flag, a sabotage raid starring a conscripted british burglar on a suicide mission, then moving on to Nordlys where we play as a Norwegian teenager striving to save her partisan mother and destroy german WMDs, then Tirailleur tells us the story of French-Senegalese infantry and how racism left their act of valor unsung, and then closing with The Last Tiger, in which we control a disillusioned German panzer commander in the last hours before the fall of Berlin. The first two offer the aforementioned Crysis-style open ended approach, while the latter two, while still allowing for some degree of stealth, are geared towards more typical Call of Duty gameplay with all out infantry and tank combat respectively. They also all offer top quality cinematics that are not only gorgeously made but, while not always historically correct, present sides of the war that aren't usually explored, like forced conscription, civilian fighters, racism among the ranks or showing the war effort from the side of the German army, even letting you fight American troops, which has to be a first for a single player game in the WW2 genre, which usually focuses on the American side of things, styling the products after Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan. Here DICE also made a point of having every character speak their native language when it makes sense for them to: no stilted english with fake German accents here but German, French and Norwegian with subtitles, which adds authenticity.
Unfortunately what Battlefield V does right in its story and presentation is pretty much nullified by the gameplay: the game suffers from a plethora of oversights, obsolete mechanics and issues big and small that stack up to make it a miserable experience to play. For starters if you're playing on anything other than keyboard and mouse you will immediately impact with the poor aiming controls, which make lining up any shot an incredible chore on a gamepad. This really becomes a problem when you realize that weapons all have massive recoil and enemies are all bullet sponges that barely flinch when shot, therefore making quick target acquisition a must, especially on harder difficulties (I played on the hardest skill available but the enemy health pools are the same on all of them). You will also notice how the enemies are impossibly accurate from any distance: a grunt with an MP40 will cut you to shreds in seconds with perfect accuracy from 200 meters away, not to mention riflemen and snipers. On anything higher than normal you will spend half of your play time patiently waiting for your health to slowly regenerate after daring to stick your head out from behind your cover and being shot in the face by a hitscanning guy with a submachine gun on the other side of the map. Going one on one with enemies is also a problem since they can kill you just about as fast as you kill them, which translates to half a magazine of ammunition each.
If the normal grunts weren't enough, throw in elite enemies: these come in different varieties, generally flamethrower or gunners, they are recognizable (usually too late) by three dots over their head and can tank several magazines of ammunition to the face before going down. I once saw a flamethrower soldier standing still a distance away: I started sniping it in the face and it took something in the ballpark of fifteen sniper rounds to bring him down. The alternative is to shoot their fuel tank but that's easier said than done, since they will run at you ignoring the damage you're dealing and set you on fire without much recourse on your part. Your best bet on the harder skill levels will be to turn tail and run and try to deal with them with explosives from a safe distance or better yet find a vehicle and run them over, which hilariously has no physics to it: you just drive through them like they're ghosts and they begin their "oh no my fuel tank explodes" animation as if it had been shot with guns.
One might interpret these units as divine punishment for being bad at stealth and there is merit to that assertion, only that it isn't so much the player that is bad at stealth, so much as the game being incompetently made in that regard. For starters you will not always be given the tools for the job: suppressed weapons are scattered around the world but you will have to find them for yourself before you can even have a shot at completing your objectives without going loud. How easy is it to fail at stealth then? Very: it feels like the game is not designed for it at all: you can't hide bodies even though they alert enemies when found and the AI will immediately be alerted the minute they hear a gunshot, even from an enemy, and at that point they will always know exactly where you are, even if you zigzag away after breaking line of sight and hide under a rock somewhere. Oh the enemies will lose sight of you, and loudly announce that fact, but they will still relentlessly zero in on your position to patrol it, and inevitably find you and tear you a new one. During the first mission I was set upon by two elite shotgunners who started dealing critical damage to me as I was sitting on top of a literal mountain, ineffectually sniping them in the head over and over. They gave chase and forced me to retreat for several miles, still getting peppered with gunfire despite them being so far away I couldn't even see them. They eventually gave up and went back to their base, at which point I managed to hike back and kill them both with a rocket and completed the objective.
You can also alert the enemies by setting a bomb on something and blowing it up, which sounds fair nough, only this will alert them not to the site of the explosion, but to your position, even if you traveled to the other side of the map before blowing up the dynamite with your anachronistic remote detonator. Anotehr way you can botch your stealth run is by missing a shot, which alerts the enemy that was its intended recipient, which is realistic and cool, but since the enemies are such bullet sponger it is possible to shoot an unaware guard and not deal enough damage to kill, and by the time you have chambered another round he's already shooting you in the face from a mile away, alerting half the world to your exact location. The game also has no material penetration whatsoever, a feature that was standard in Call of Duty 4: nothing conveys the feeling of firing a high power sniper rifle more than killing two enemies in one shot and that feature is completely missing in Battlefield V, along with all the tactical options it opens up.
If things do go wrong in any such way and shooting starts, and if the stars smile upon you and no elites are present, you had better win too, because the game is uncommonly stingy with checkpoints, in fact it will usually only save when a set of objectives is completed, which can be something as simple as stealing documents from a house or something time consuming like destroying not one but three fuel caches scattered around a huge coastline. Get killed at the third one and it's back to square one, having to redo the other two as well. Had I died against the two aforementioned shotgunners I would have had to redo about a half hour of mission. I usually don't mind far away checkpoints if the game is well made and losing at it is the player's fault, since they add tension and raise the stakes, but here it just feels like the game is not playing fair and sending you back for no fault of your own.
Where things really hit the fan, however, is when the game drops the pretense of stealth and forces you into scripted battle sequences, Call of Duty style. This is where you realize that every enemy soldier is hunting you down with a vengeange. Luckily the friendly AI can distract them just enough that they will leave you alone for a few precious moments. This is also when you'll notice the bulk of the issues with this game: from the unkillable turret gunners on enemy vehicles and gun emplacement operators, who have what seems to be an impenetrable and invisible shield stopping all fire directed at them from the front and sometimes even from the sides, to the annoying convenience mechanics such as auto leaning/peeking and auto bipod deployment, which rarely trigger properly and often do when you do not want them to: I spent the entire first third of the Tirailleur level looking at my guy's hand extending and retracting the bipod on a constant loop every time I went prone or walked anywhere near chest-high walls. DICE also saw fit to introduce a simulation of your character behinding his knees when moving couched. I won't spend too many words on this, but I just hope you are not prone to seasickness.
When trying to aim over and around cover you will notice the terrible hitboxes of the boxes and sandbags you are hiding behind, which will often absorb your bullets despite your sights being squarely set on an enemy, forcing you to expose yourself further to hit your mark, meaning you will be shot more. You will come to hate the animation where the character holds ammunition boxes up to his face every time he grabs one off the ground where they lie in their dozens since every enemy and friendly drops one upon death; at least it's not as bed as the open beta where it would actually interrup your aiming, but it's still jarring and distracting. You will always loathe how your character seems to stand up at random when he doesn't like the spot you decided to go prone, which will result in a number of undeserevd deaths. Level design is highly problematic as well, with map edges being placed haphazardly to prevent you from avoiding set pieces entirely, but often way too restrictively, resulting in you carefully crawling among the rocks and then having to run back the way you came to reset the "RETURN TO THE COMBAT ZONE" 9 seconds countdown before the game kills you for trying to play smart.
Rocket soldiers will be the bane of your existence: they are astonishingly precise, firing their explosives in a straight line towards your skull, often blowing up your cover and killing you in one hit regardless of where you were hiding. Thankfully the game has the decency to put an icon over their heads when they're about to fire, which can help you prioritize them before they can do real damage, but the icon looks almost identical to the objective waypoints that are omnipresent on your hud, so you are likely to overlook it until it's too late. Enemies will also call mortar strikes on you in case you are too good at staying out of their fire for long, which is always "fun".
DICE also patched in further single player and coop content in the form of PvE missions for 1 to 4 players. Unfortunately these are are designed in a way that seems to base around stealth, and their use of the multiplayer loadouts allows suppressed weapons for one class (medic of all things), which means stealth is technically viable, but each mission funnels you towards a last stand scenario at the end where you need to survive for several minutes against a horde of enemies who know where you are no matter how well you hide, which makes the whole stealth implementation completely pointless.
On a final note, for a game that spends so much energy trying to be historically correct or at the very least believable, it drops the ball with the completely randomic weapon placement around the missions: clearly not everyone knows all about the history of firearms, but seeing British DeLisle commando carbines and Bren guns lying around in German outposts, or the French army using Lee Enfield rifles, or yet again German 88 artillery firing themselves as if operated by a ghostly crew (even in cutscenes!) is just laughably silly and further detracts from the believability that the game strived so hard for.
In conclusion, the campaign mode of Battlefield V is a missed opportunity: for every one thing it does right there are ten it does horribly wrong, undermining its very foundations in irreparable ways and ultimately sinking the experience entirely unless playing on PC or on the easier difficulties, which can help mitigate some of the issues, but does nothing for many, many others.
Its heart is in the right place and the presentation is strong, but the campaign has way too many problems that bring it crashing down.
The Good:
Focusing on dramatized versions of lesser-known events of the war is a refreshing change of pace from the usual America-centric Saving Private Ryan stuff - Friendly AI actually helps out - Strives for believability with unlocalized languages - Crouch sprinting is a good addition - Solid 60 frames on consoles - One quarter of the campaign is from the German side against the Americans, perhaps a first for the genre
The Bad:
Squanders its stealth potential with a lazy hive mind AI straight out of the 1990s - Poor aiming controls on consoles make lining up shots a mess - Wobbly aiming due to an unnecessary knee bending simulation - Unflinching bullet sponge enemies, both grunts and borderline unkillable elites, and magically shielded machinegunners - Bad cover hitboxes - Omniscent, overly accurate enemy AI - Poorly placed checkpoints and map boundaries - Historically inaccurate weapons and equipment - Generally unpolished with convenience mechanics that get in the way of the player
---
Many will remember how when Battlefield V was first announced it was met with howls of disdain from the gaming community: early trailers seemed to hint at an alternate history setting more concerned with showing "war is fun!" over the top action and starring a stylish amputee female commando (whose hook prosthetic was comically mistaken by many for a bionic arm) and a gallery of wisecracking soldiers that greatly jarred with the expectations of the franchise fanbase. It seemed like DICE listened because the final game hasn't a single point of resemblance to that early material: gone are the quirky characters, gone is the amputee lady, replaced by a much more grounded female co-protagonist and gone is the "superfriends" Mavel movie tone of the whole package, in place of which we are treated to a gritty, tragic, no-nonsense cinematic presentation that focuses on the horrors of war in a melodramatic but tactful way. For over half of its campaign it also forgoes much of the usual heavily scripted style of level and encouter design, preferring an open ended stealth approach reminiscent of the original Crysis more than any military shooter of the post-Call of Duty era.
The single player mode is split into four mini-campaigns, opening with Under No Flag, a sabotage raid starring a conscripted british burglar on a suicide mission, then moving on to Nordlys where we play as a Norwegian teenager striving to save her partisan mother and destroy german WMDs, then Tirailleur tells us the story of French-Senegalese infantry and how racism left their act of valor unsung, and then closing with The Last Tiger, in which we control a disillusioned German panzer commander in the last hours before the fall of Berlin. The first two offer the aforementioned Crysis-style open ended approach, while the latter two, while still allowing for some degree of stealth, are geared towards more typical Call of Duty gameplay with all out infantry and tank combat respectively. They also all offer top quality cinematics that are not only gorgeously made but, while not always historically correct, present sides of the war that aren't usually explored, like forced conscription, civilian fighters, racism among the ranks or showing the war effort from the side of the German army, even letting you fight American troops, which has to be a first for a single player game in the WW2 genre, which usually focuses on the American side of things, styling the products after Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan. Here DICE also made a point of having every character speak their native language when it makes sense for them to: no stilted english with fake German accents here but German, French and Norwegian with subtitles, which adds authenticity.
Unfortunately what Battlefield V does right in its story and presentation is pretty much nullified by the gameplay: the game suffers from a plethora of oversights, obsolete mechanics and issues big and small that stack up to make it a miserable experience to play. For starters if you're playing on anything other than keyboard and mouse you will immediately impact with the poor aiming controls, which make lining up any shot an incredible chore on a gamepad. This really becomes a problem when you realize that weapons all have massive recoil and enemies are all bullet sponges that barely flinch when shot, therefore making quick target acquisition a must, especially on harder difficulties (I played on the hardest skill available but the enemy health pools are the same on all of them). You will also notice how the enemies are impossibly accurate from any distance: a grunt with an MP40 will cut you to shreds in seconds with perfect accuracy from 200 meters away, not to mention riflemen and snipers. On anything higher than normal you will spend half of your play time patiently waiting for your health to slowly regenerate after daring to stick your head out from behind your cover and being shot in the face by a hitscanning guy with a submachine gun on the other side of the map. Going one on one with enemies is also a problem since they can kill you just about as fast as you kill them, which translates to half a magazine of ammunition each.
If the normal grunts weren't enough, throw in elite enemies: these come in different varieties, generally flamethrower or gunners, they are recognizable (usually too late) by three dots over their head and can tank several magazines of ammunition to the face before going down. I once saw a flamethrower soldier standing still a distance away: I started sniping it in the face and it took something in the ballpark of fifteen sniper rounds to bring him down. The alternative is to shoot their fuel tank but that's easier said than done, since they will run at you ignoring the damage you're dealing and set you on fire without much recourse on your part. Your best bet on the harder skill levels will be to turn tail and run and try to deal with them with explosives from a safe distance or better yet find a vehicle and run them over, which hilariously has no physics to it: you just drive through them like they're ghosts and they begin their "oh no my fuel tank explodes" animation as if it had been shot with guns.
One might interpret these units as divine punishment for being bad at stealth and there is merit to that assertion, only that it isn't so much the player that is bad at stealth, so much as the game being incompetently made in that regard. For starters you will not always be given the tools for the job: suppressed weapons are scattered around the world but you will have to find them for yourself before you can even have a shot at completing your objectives without going loud. How easy is it to fail at stealth then? Very: it feels like the game is not designed for it at all: you can't hide bodies even though they alert enemies when found and the AI will immediately be alerted the minute they hear a gunshot, even from an enemy, and at that point they will always know exactly where you are, even if you zigzag away after breaking line of sight and hide under a rock somewhere. Oh the enemies will lose sight of you, and loudly announce that fact, but they will still relentlessly zero in on your position to patrol it, and inevitably find you and tear you a new one. During the first mission I was set upon by two elite shotgunners who started dealing critical damage to me as I was sitting on top of a literal mountain, ineffectually sniping them in the head over and over. They gave chase and forced me to retreat for several miles, still getting peppered with gunfire despite them being so far away I couldn't even see them. They eventually gave up and went back to their base, at which point I managed to hike back and kill them both with a rocket and completed the objective.
You can also alert the enemies by setting a bomb on something and blowing it up, which sounds fair nough, only this will alert them not to the site of the explosion, but to your position, even if you traveled to the other side of the map before blowing up the dynamite with your anachronistic remote detonator. Anotehr way you can botch your stealth run is by missing a shot, which alerts the enemy that was its intended recipient, which is realistic and cool, but since the enemies are such bullet sponger it is possible to shoot an unaware guard and not deal enough damage to kill, and by the time you have chambered another round he's already shooting you in the face from a mile away, alerting half the world to your exact location. The game also has no material penetration whatsoever, a feature that was standard in Call of Duty 4: nothing conveys the feeling of firing a high power sniper rifle more than killing two enemies in one shot and that feature is completely missing in Battlefield V, along with all the tactical options it opens up.
If things do go wrong in any such way and shooting starts, and if the stars smile upon you and no elites are present, you had better win too, because the game is uncommonly stingy with checkpoints, in fact it will usually only save when a set of objectives is completed, which can be something as simple as stealing documents from a house or something time consuming like destroying not one but three fuel caches scattered around a huge coastline. Get killed at the third one and it's back to square one, having to redo the other two as well. Had I died against the two aforementioned shotgunners I would have had to redo about a half hour of mission. I usually don't mind far away checkpoints if the game is well made and losing at it is the player's fault, since they add tension and raise the stakes, but here it just feels like the game is not playing fair and sending you back for no fault of your own.
Where things really hit the fan, however, is when the game drops the pretense of stealth and forces you into scripted battle sequences, Call of Duty style. This is where you realize that every enemy soldier is hunting you down with a vengeange. Luckily the friendly AI can distract them just enough that they will leave you alone for a few precious moments. This is also when you'll notice the bulk of the issues with this game: from the unkillable turret gunners on enemy vehicles and gun emplacement operators, who have what seems to be an impenetrable and invisible shield stopping all fire directed at them from the front and sometimes even from the sides, to the annoying convenience mechanics such as auto leaning/peeking and auto bipod deployment, which rarely trigger properly and often do when you do not want them to: I spent the entire first third of the Tirailleur level looking at my guy's hand extending and retracting the bipod on a constant loop every time I went prone or walked anywhere near chest-high walls. DICE also saw fit to introduce a simulation of your character behinding his knees when moving couched. I won't spend too many words on this, but I just hope you are not prone to seasickness.
When trying to aim over and around cover you will notice the terrible hitboxes of the boxes and sandbags you are hiding behind, which will often absorb your bullets despite your sights being squarely set on an enemy, forcing you to expose yourself further to hit your mark, meaning you will be shot more. You will come to hate the animation where the character holds ammunition boxes up to his face every time he grabs one off the ground where they lie in their dozens since every enemy and friendly drops one upon death; at least it's not as bed as the open beta where it would actually interrup your aiming, but it's still jarring and distracting. You will always loathe how your character seems to stand up at random when he doesn't like the spot you decided to go prone, which will result in a number of undeserevd deaths. Level design is highly problematic as well, with map edges being placed haphazardly to prevent you from avoiding set pieces entirely, but often way too restrictively, resulting in you carefully crawling among the rocks and then having to run back the way you came to reset the "RETURN TO THE COMBAT ZONE" 9 seconds countdown before the game kills you for trying to play smart.
Rocket soldiers will be the bane of your existence: they are astonishingly precise, firing their explosives in a straight line towards your skull, often blowing up your cover and killing you in one hit regardless of where you were hiding. Thankfully the game has the decency to put an icon over their heads when they're about to fire, which can help you prioritize them before they can do real damage, but the icon looks almost identical to the objective waypoints that are omnipresent on your hud, so you are likely to overlook it until it's too late. Enemies will also call mortar strikes on you in case you are too good at staying out of their fire for long, which is always "fun".
DICE also patched in further single player and coop content in the form of PvE missions for 1 to 4 players. Unfortunately these are are designed in a way that seems to base around stealth, and their use of the multiplayer loadouts allows suppressed weapons for one class (medic of all things), which means stealth is technically viable, but each mission funnels you towards a last stand scenario at the end where you need to survive for several minutes against a horde of enemies who know where you are no matter how well you hide, which makes the whole stealth implementation completely pointless.
On a final note, for a game that spends so much energy trying to be historically correct or at the very least believable, it drops the ball with the completely randomic weapon placement around the missions: clearly not everyone knows all about the history of firearms, but seeing British DeLisle commando carbines and Bren guns lying around in German outposts, or the French army using Lee Enfield rifles, or yet again German 88 artillery firing themselves as if operated by a ghostly crew (even in cutscenes!) is just laughably silly and further detracts from the believability that the game strived so hard for.
In conclusion, the campaign mode of Battlefield V is a missed opportunity: for every one thing it does right there are ten it does horribly wrong, undermining its very foundations in irreparable ways and ultimately sinking the experience entirely unless playing on PC or on the easier difficulties, which can help mitigate some of the issues, but does nothing for many, many others.