Battlefield 2042 Review

Battlefield 2042 is the entry that broke the series' credit with its own audience. The pitch is scale: a hundred and twenty eight players on maps big enough to hold a tornado, in a near future setting that lets DICE put drones, wingsuits and a grappling hook into the same firefight. Some of it works. The storm rolling across Hourglass is a spectacle nobody else builds, and the vehicle sandbox, when it holds together, still produces the stories that made this series worth playing.

The rest is a list of subtractions. Specialists replace the class system, so instead of four roles with clear silhouettes you get named operators with gadgets and voice lines, and squads of identical faces on both teams destroy the readability a Battlefield firefight depends on. The launch maps are enormous in the worst way, long empty runs between contested points that turn a match into commuting.

There is no campaign at all, which is where the story grade comes from. Portal, sold as the mode that would let players rebuild the series' history, shows up and gets farmed for experience points inside a week. Scoreboards, voice chat and the server browser are missing at release. Two years of seasons have since cut the maps down and put the classes back, and what exists now is a fair shooter with a decent argument. What shipped is the thing the series has to live down.