After three years and two delays, Battlefield 2042 is here – and while it still offers somewhat of a Battlefield experience, it’s still a few months of tweaks away from the stellar experience fans expect. You see, Battlefield always launches with bugs, glitches, network issues, performance issues –the list goes on. People who play Battlefield know the drill, and in most cases, the core gameplay is rewarding enough to carry the game till the fixes arrive, but with Battlefield 2042, developer DICE has made such puzzling design choices that it’s hard to recommend the game in its current form.
Battlefield 2042 is the first Battlefield game to launch in a long time with no campaign. There’s a tutorial mission with bots as you load up to show you the ropes for the game’s two modes – Conquest and Breakthrough, and that’s pretty much it. From there on, you have three modes to choose from – All-out Warfare, Hazard Zone and Portal.
All-out Warfare takes place across huge maps full of 128 players across the two modes we mentioned earlier – Conquest and Breakthrough. Infantry-heavy modes like Rush, Domination and Team Deathmatch aren’t present at launch, but we’re hoping they’ll be added later. The current crop of maps in Battlefield 2042 look great, but they’re too big for their own good. This creates a lot of downtime, especially in Conquest, as you make your way from one point to another. If you decide to trek that distance, chances are you’ll either get picked off by a sniper camping somewhere, or worse, land up to a point that’s already been captured, making the whole trip redundant. Due to the heavy density of players, capture points are chaotic meat grinders, where it becomes challenging to capture points or rack up kills. And with vehicles being so overpowered at the moment, you’ll probably get gunned down mercilessly by tanks or hovercrafts sniping you from a nearby ridge.
Breakthrough makes for more focused gameplay since progression in that mode is done in a linear fashion, but this in turn makes those meat grinder situations even worse, since everyone in that server is now concentrating on just two points at all times. And with the new specialist system, you don’t know who’s running what kit, so a medic may not be able to drop health if he or she is running with a rocket launcher or an armour plate. Similarly, an engineer may not be able to take a tank out with his RPG because he’s packing a health kit or another gadget. This seems counterproductive to the older class system, where you knew who did what just by looking at them.
Things feel much better in Portal, since that mode sticks to the beloved Battlefield formula by remastering some of the maps from Battlefield 2142, Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 – across modes like Rush and Conquest. And with the player count being capped at 64 players, battles have an ebb and flow to them and don’t feel like constant chaos. Sadly, there is a limited amount of content available in Portal at launch, but we’re hoping DICE sees the huge potential in this mode and expands upon it significantly over time.
Hazard Zone attempts to be a high risk, high reward kind of mode inspired by games like Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: The Showdown, but it is in fact low on the risk, and even lower on rewards. You and your squad drop into a Hazard Zone at the start of a round. You attempt to locate data drives, steal those drives and then battle a bunch of bots and human players to successfully extract. Once again, it sounds good on paper, but Battlefield’s Hazard Zone lacks the thrills one expects from this mode, and will probably be something you’ll try once or twice before you forget it for good.
Battlefield 2042 has a solid base and there is quite a bit of fun to be had. Portal is a blast and, with more content, this could be the Battlefield 3/4 remaster we’ve always wanted. That being said, there is a lot wrong with the game, right from bizarre design decisions to bugs, glitches and performance issues. As with most Battlefield games, we expect 2042 to be in much better shape a few months down the line – and that is when you should look at picking this game up.
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