Battlefield 2042

The ninth main installment on the Battlefield series and the 17th installment overall lacks a single-player campaign unlike the recent releases, so the lore is told through multiplayer. As stated in the title, Battlefield 2042 takes place in 2042, where the Earth is in a state of despair caused by global economies collapsing, the rising sea level, satellites shutting down, and increasing tensions between the United States and Russia.

Just like Battlefield 4, the game was rushed heavily. This lead to the game being released in a horrible state plagued with many glitches and other problems. The game was developed in 15 months. In March 2021, 6 months into development, DICE realized they were having trouble with the Frostbite engine. Several senior developers had left the company between 2015 and 2018.

The graphics and visuals feel downgraded even compared to previous titles such as Battlefield 1. An example would be the frame rate that runs lower than a standard frame rate number (to exaggerate, 10 frames per second). The latter of which is pretty unacceptable for today's standards. The animations can be pretty poor too. Despite its issues and not improving that much from previous Battlefield games, the graphics are still pretty good. The visuals of the maps are excellent and they contain a good of detail. Not only do the graphics see little improvements from previous Battlefield games but they also have their share of glitches and other issues as well.

The audio is lacking in detail. Footsteps all sound the same regardless of what surfaces you're stepping on. The surround sound is also poorly implemented which makes it difficult to tell what direction a sound came from. Additionally, the soundtrack by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who which won a Academy Award for the soundtrack for 2019 movie Joker) and Sam Slater is far too focused on sounding electrical and glitchy, which makes most of the tracks screechy, obnoxiously loud and overall awful to listen to. Even the main theme of the franchise sounds terrible here.

Although there's only three modes, the Breakthrough and Conquest modes have a lot more focus here thanks to the large maps and huge number of players. This minimizes any repetitiveness as a result. Close range combat is still pretty fun, and using weapons and killing players feels more impactful this time around.

While there's only seven maps to choose from, all of them are pretty large and offer a good amount of variety. They also offer more verticality compared to previous Battlefield games as mentioned above. There's now weather events that can happen on the maps to try and shake up the gameplay, which range from tornadoes to sandstorms. Even if their impact isn't that much it's still a nice touch to the gameplay.

Of course neither of those mean the game is far from enjoyable. A lot of features are missing, even basic ones as well as staples in the franchise like there's no single-player campaign at all. In fact this is the first Battlefield game in nearly a decade to lack a single-player campaign much like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and for the console ports, you have to pay a subscription for online play to use it, especially with the disc versions. What's worse is that the setting and story are both interesting-sounding and worthy of a campaign to see how it all plays out. Speaking of the setting and story, like Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell and anything else Ubisoft, the game tries too hard to be lighthearted and funny at times with the highlights at end of a match which are instead too cheesy and cringeworthy. What makes even less sense is that Battlefield is known for its serious and dark tone, and the setting's tone of this game is no exception. DICE later added Santa skins which received backlash due to the inconsistent tone.

While the premise is poorly executed due to the Specialists breaks down the franchise's serious and dark tone, the Story Cutscene shows the massive consequences caused by devastation events after Battlefield 3 and 4 campaigns (as mentioned on the Setting section). But playing only as the specialists takes away the unique gameplay feel of the Battlefield franchise and makes it feel more like a class-based shooter instead. There's also the fact that the specialists are unbalanced with some being overpowered while others are completely useless.

Player progression is awful since most of the weapons and attachments have almost if not completely identical stats to one another, which makes them more like cosmetics. The requirements for some of them are quite ridiculous as well such as having to kill 240 players just to unlock a certain suppressor.

The call-in system is far too overpowered. Players can request any vehicle they want to be quickly dropped off next to where they are and the cooldown is too short, lasting about only a minute.

There's barely any weapons and other equipment compared to previous games. There are only 22 weapons available (compared to Battlefield 4, which had nearly 70). What's not helping is that the weapon statistics in each weapon class are all too similar to each other.

Similar to Vanguard, there's a noticeable lack of destructible environments. Players can fire a tank at a building and no damage will be done to the building.

When a player gets shot down, the prompt to revive them often doesn't show especially if a downed player is next to something like a wall and not out in the open. There's also the chance that the shot-down player won't die either, rendering them stuck in said state for the rest of the match.

XP farming is rampant due to the game not having restrictions on custom maps and game modes to prevent it. This results in ludicrous scenarios such as a small group of players fighting against large groups of unarmed players (or bots) who have minimal health, while the small group is overpowered. Ignoring the rampant XP farming lobbies, at least Battlefield Portal allows for plenty of fun custom game modes, with featured modes being rotated from time to time to experience more custom modes all while being able to play on maps from older Battlefield games to try and recapture those games' feel.

The physics are incredibly wonky and broken, which also adds to the mention of poor programming. Also, the controls are unresponsive. The players are oftentimes unable to crouch (or vice versa, where they're stuck crouching) or switch their weapons. Even the UI is handled poorly here, most notably being vague regarding displaying information.

Worse still, crashes are common with many of them even crashing one's console. There have even been reports about the game crashing before reaching the startup menu. The aforementioned frame rate issues are rampant, even on the most powerful of PCs. The official Nvidia trailer for the PC port even had frame rate issues within the gameplay as pointed out by many commenters.

One of the game's few good features can be that up to 128 players can play in the same map (except for the PS4 and XBOX version which has 64 maximum). However in May 2022 a patch was released and removed it for Breakthrough, reducing the count to 64 on all platforms for said mode.

With all of the above problems taken into consideration, charging $60 is far too much for this game. What's worse is that next-generation ports and the Gold and Ultimate editions cost $70, $90 and $110 respectively. But overall because of all of the issues above, EA already started working on the next Battlefield game, meaning it's most likely going to be abandoned. However, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, DICE said that removing Russia from the game would make the plot irrelevant.

And I thought that the franchise was at its best. This...this is just wrong. Is it because these companies do not know how to make good decisions or do they not care about their players or other franchises? Either way, I am done EA. You are so dead to all of us. Even forty years later and you charge us for everything. For shame, EA. For shame.