Battlefield Hardline - Maxi-Geek Review

When EA and Dice first announced a new Battlefield game, that was not going to be like 3 or 4, I had hoped it was going to be a lot like the Bad Company series, but when I learned it was going to be a cops and robbers style game, my interest was piqued, because who does not love playing cops and robbers.

Battlefield games have not been known to offer up amazing single player experiences, not due to lack of effort, but it is not just DICE’s thing and in previous games the single player campaigns have been pretty lacklustre. When it was announced that Visceral Games were making the game, I was elated, after the success of their own series, Dead Space, I knew the team could deliver something awesome and I was almost right.

The team have built a strong story, with really interesting characters, Stoddard and Khai being my two favourites, but it unfortunately stuck to the standard cop fare and never really broke from it. You play as Nick Mendoza, a Cuban/American cop stationed in Miami and you work alongside Stoddard, Khai and Captain Dawes to bring justice to the streets of Miami from the drug war that is currently raging. Throughout the story, we get to learn more about Nick and his past and some of the other characters as well, with each of the missions sporting a few cutscenes to help move the story along.

The first few missions will have you navigating around parts of Miami,  but it is when you get to go down to the everglades and are given the freedom to move around more, that the game feels more like Battlefield. Once you battle through a whole lot of bad guys in a hurricane the story takes a turn and events change, loyalties are tested and people get hurt. The problem is, we never get more of an understand as to why some characters end up the way they do, which is not a huge deal, but the game wants us to care and without knowing why people are doing things it is hard to.

One area the game has done really well, is with the optional single player mission content, at any point in the campaign, you can pull out your scanner and look for evidence from other cases and in doing so, you can actually learn more about the world, you can even scan the bad guys to see have warrants outstanding, which if you arrest them, you earn more xp. You can of course choose to ignore that, except when the game needs you to use it and focus more on getting through each mission, but you would be missing out.

Perhaps the other area where the game has tried to innovate is in the point between missions, each mission ends with a look at the mission stats, did you arrest any bad guys, how much evidence did you find, the problem with this is that the wrap up is on auto scroll and scrolls a little to fast, the game also gives you a counter before the next mission starts to load, like Netflix does, which is nice. Even when you quit and come back to the story, you get a next time on Hardline, or previously on Hardline, like you would with a tv show.

Of course, the single player story, is not why people play Battlefield games, or at least it was not, up until now, the gameplay is why people come and it is as solid here as ever. Shooting with the variety of guns on offer is as great as it was in the previous Battlefield games and the few times you are allowed to drive a car, it varies from fun and exciting to average. If you have played any of the previous two games in the Battlefield series, then the layout and hud will feel really familiar to you, as it is almost identical, there are a few tweaks here and there, but you will only notice them after a while.

The real meat and potatoes for any Battlefield game is its multiplayer and here we are given a different game from what we normally see. In the traditional games, the maps are open and are filled with tanks, jeeps, helicopters and other vehicles, players have to make their way from one side of a large map to the other, dealing with whatever along the way. In Hardline though, the multiplayer is scaled down considerably, it’s not bad, it’s just different.  Anyone coming in expecting to see the same style of multiplayer is going to be letdown and it’s a shame if they give up to soon.

There are some more open maps, where you have the freedom to explore, usually in a car, but the bulk of them are in smaller self-contained sections of game world. Levelolution also returns from Battlefield 4 and this time it is more focused and the few times I actually experience the events, it changed things in a much more meaningful way. What the multiplayer offers up this time is a more focused experience, it still gives you freedom to play as one of the four classes, but it also helps you get back into the fight all the quicker. My favourite mode was called Blood Money, where a large pile of cash has been left for two teams to raid, with the highest amount taken winning, the difference is that you can also steal from the opposing teams “saved” cash and add it to yours, the tactics that I saw online were pretty amazing.

If you are worried that the multiplayer here does not offer enough for you, remember it has team deathmatch still, the squad mechanics are still in play and you level up and can unlock new weapons as well, though the last part is a little different. As you complete in game objectives, holding a control point, pointing out enemy players and such, instead of just earning XP, you earn cash, which you can then use to purchase any gun or upgrade for any character class, which also means should you play as an Operator (Medic for those from BF4) for most of the game, but want to switch to the Mechanic (Mechanic for those from BF4), you no longer need to start with the basic weapons again, you can purchase some more powerful guns and gadgets and get back into the fight with a chance.

From a presentation look, the game nails it in almost every aspect, characters are lifelike and emit emotion, with their looks able to help sell the words. The games locations, in both single and multiplayer are wonderfully detailed, with destructible environments again proving that you are not safe behind any form of cover. There are a few instances or characters looking plastic, but that can be brought down to the lighting at the time, but for the most part, visually this is one nice game. The sound, well it will vary for each, as the single player uses quite a lot of music you might hear on the radio and people will either dig it or they won’t, for me it actually worked within the context of the story and while I won’t be rushing out to buy the album anytime soon, I had no issues with the songs in the game.

The music in the multiplayer was pretty standard fare, with it working, but not really doing anything to amazing there, but the one part that was great was the voice work. Lately we have begun to see a lot of voice actors being used as the face of a character as well and in Hardline, it works great. Seeing the faces of characters and being able to say, oh that is this person and mean it is truly something great. Of course, there are some liberties taken with some, but for the most part the faces are those of the actor, the voices even more so. While the men behind the face and voice of Nick Mendoza, Nicholas Gonzalez and Philip Anthony-Rodriguez are not known to me, Khai portrayed by Kelly Hu and Stoddard portrayed by Travis Willingham are actors I really like, so getting to interact with them, in a digital sense was fun.

Battlefield Hardline is a strange best, on one hand it gives us perhaps the best single player experience that we have gotten from the Battlefield series, but it also changes up the multiplayer enough that it could not be considered Battlefield worthy, but both parts of the game add up to a pretty amazing experience. Aside from a story that does nothing different from all the others, the game is Battlefield through and through.

Thanks to EA Games Australia for supplying the game for review.