Battlefield V

The sixteenth installment in the Battlefield series enters mankind's greatest conflict as the series goes back to its roots with a never-before-seen portrayal of World War II.

While combat and sound design are still good, and the soundtrack is great, like previous entries in the series that is not 2042, the game takes place during World War II, but has an uninspired atmosphere and is incredibly inaccurate historical-wise, taking away the feeling of playing a WW2 game and in a way is even being very disrespectful towards those who were involved in World War II:

• The most notorious example is a female soldier with a prosthetic arm who was one of the focuses of the game's reveal trailer.
• Some cosmetics for British Army say "For The Queen", even though United Kingdom at that time was ruled by King George VI, not Queen Elizabeth II.
• Both the Germans and the British use the American built C-47 Skytrain cargo plane, the Junkers Ju-52, which the Germans should be flying, was not included until the introduction of the battle royale game mode.
• Swastikas are censored even in the campaign. In fact, German soldiers are never even referred to as "Nazis".
• Many weapons that were used in WWII are absent at launch, such as the M1 Garand/Carbine, one of the most iconic weapons of the war. Speaking of guns, they also appear at the wrong periods of time, such as the STG44 (which, as the name says, was developed in 1944) appearing in 1942 in North Africa.
• None of the well-known battles of WWII appear and there is also a serious lack of factions in the multiplayer compared to Battlefield 1, with British and German factions being available at launch, even with two additional factions, the American and Japanese factions being added in post release. Worse, some update swapped out the British faction and was replaced by the American faction for some maps in the game.
• Multiplayer customization and characters are also heavily ahistorical. In fact, some soldiers look even more like gangbangers.
• The game's final Elite, Steve Fisher, feels nothing like the most of the elites, but rather like a generic action movie that stars Tom Cruise, with cringeworthy dialogue that you'd expect in those types of movies also being included.
• The story missions are all horrendously rewritten with feminazi-pandering in mind: one mission replaces a team of male Norwegian commandos with a woman from Norwegian Resistance and her daughter who exhibits Violet Evergarden levels of strength and endurance (somehow surviving a fall from a bridge 80m tall into a shallow river and overpowering a healthy German soldier while suffering from hypothermia), one acts like the British SBS would recruit a criminal (in reality they consist mainly of volunteers of the Royal Marines), and a third adds a bunch of modern-day race politics to black Senegalese soldiers serving in the French military, despite the fact that France at the time was not even THAT racially prejudiced like some other countries were and their armies were not racially segregated (it is true that Senegalese soldiers did experience some prejudice, unfair treatment and discrimination, with the worst and extreme case being Thiaroye massacre, but the game does exaggerate certain aspects).
• Despite many requests, the game lacks a feature to turn off historically inaccurate character customization for those who want a more authentic WW2 experience. While DICE still claims that this is "everyone's Battlefield."
• Despite the numerous historical inaccuracies and SJW-pandering, some of the war stories cover more obscure aspects of World War II, like the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.

After the backlash for the lack of historical accuracy, Patrick Söderlund (EA's vice president at the time) called the critics "uneducated," gave a stupid justification about his daughter and said that if they gamers had two choices, either accept it or don't buy it, apparently many choose the latter.

What's worse is that the game lacks the chaos and brutality of war that Battlefield 1 had. In Battlefield 1, if a match was going poorly, characters would panic and scream out in distress (crying for their mother, begging the enemy to stop shooting, swearing, etc), whereas Battlefield V does not feature any of this. Also, melee animations seem more toned down in comparison, despite some of the melee animations were reused from Battlefield 1. Even finishing off wounded players on enemy teams in multiplayer mode is removed, due to "Geneva Convention", which is just a really poor excuse (especially considering how heavily historically inaccurate the game is).

Oh, and speaking of Battlefield 1, this game doesn't even have neat extras such as Codex Entries, which gave a lot of interesting information on various events, battles, weapons etc. There are collectable letters however, but they just don't feel as interesting and are there for more drama, though they are still touching and if you collect them all, you will get a unique cosmetic item in the multiplayer (one for each chapter).

The campaign mode is very short, repetitive and easy, and character progression is no better, only terrible. The player has to spend in-game credits to unlock items, but the amount of credits the player receives is too low, forcing the player to do unnecessary grinding. In addition the Under the Flag War Story is terribly written it is made worse as it tries to push humor, but it consists of unfunny jokes. While easy, the campaign missions are now less linear, and there are multiple play-styles to use.

Subtitles and other text that appear on the UI can be difficult to read as the text is usually on a white background, which is the same color font as the text. This problem is particularly annoying when a character is speaking a foreign language. This is made even worse by bad voice acting, especially with the female soldiers, and the screams that male characters make are hilariously bad, to the point where they sound like a dumb South Park woman screaming.

The stealth experience in campaign mode is bad due to terrible mechanics. Many campaign challenges require players to stealth certain missions, while these missions never provide any weapon or gadgets for stealth gameplay. Enemies will spot you from very far away no matter if you are in a crouching or prone position, not even behind cover. Lure sometimes alerts entire area of enemies, or enemies will go to your position instead of where the lure landed. Even worse, the amount of health is ridiculously low, resulting in little to no reaction time when being attacked by an enemy player.

The game can fell very cheap in terms of fairness at times. For a example, if you get revived by a medic, there is a chance you can get instantly killed by a player uses the Bayonet charge, making it extremely unfair when you got revived. Also, lighting tends to be too bright at times, making the graphics look washed out, but aside from that, the graphics and destruction are great. The TTK (time to kill) is absurd, with overpowered, unbalanced weapons such as the Type 2A and STG-44, which is not especially help. And Animations (apart from a few bugs of course) are exceedingly well done except for the hideously long revive animations, which completely kill the incentive and initiative to revive teammates.

Character classes are unbalanced, as weapon selection is overly-restricted. The aforementioned medics are completely pointless because not only are they under-powered, other classes can also revive players though at a slower rate than the medics, although you will need them at times as you don't fully regenerate your health in the game, as they will give you medical supplies to self heal, and medics can self heal at anytime they are low on health.

Bugs and glitches are common. One of them is where sometimes you are holding a weapon, but cannot do actions by firing, switching guns nor gadgets. Even with the latest patch, this bug does not fixed after all. You are forced to restart from checkpoint (campaign) or respawn (multiplayer) in order to deal with these actions again. What's worse is that cheaters are becoming more and more common on the PC version! Movement is very fluid aside from some bugs. There is crouch running, manual leaning, and you can crouch mid-air to roll onto the ground to avoid taking ground damage or dive into water to avoid some of the gun fire. In fact many of the worst bugs have been fixed, even though some bugs remain. Additionally, there are some improvements from previous games, such as the ability to throw back grenades.

It can take a while to get into matches due to the low player-base. Also, squads can only have up to four members instead of six like older Battlefield games. On start, only eight maps were available, which is low when compared to other first-person shooters, especially an older entry to the series, Battlefield 4, which contains 33 maps, with 16 of them being paid DLC and three of them being free. Making matters worse is that many British vs Germans maps are set in locations where they NEVER crossed swords, like Rotterdam or Narvik. Player spawning is broken in most of the maps, especially the map "Hamada", where players in planes can bomb all of the opposing team's vehicles seconds after the match starts. On the Uwo Jima map, a tank player on the Japanese faction can go to the right place to trap any enemy tank on the American faction where it spawns to instantly kill them in a very cheap way. The maps "Aerodrome" and "Twisted Steel" are fun to play on, however. Finding games is much easier nowadays. Even Pacific Theatre maps and combat which were added in 2019 are a great experience.

Though not there at launch, finding a game via server searching, which is called Community Games for this game, makes a return, although it is not as good as previous games. Even better, unlike Battlefield 3, 4, Hardline, or 1, you don't have to pay real world money to rent one for a limited amount of time as you can make one at anytime.

Parts of the game weren't available at release, most likely due to the game being rushed. This includes game modes "Tides of War" and "Practice Range", one of the campaign's war stories called "The Last Tiger" (which interestingly allows you to play as Germans and shows that not all German soldiers were actually Nazis and bad people, which is very rare for a WW2 game, even though it's pretty watered down; it is also arguably the best chapter in the campaign), a bunch of customization options (especially for tanks), and the Battle Royale mode (which was delayed until March 2019).

The heavily hyped ray-tracing graphics option on the PC version tanks performance to virtually unplayable levels, while only offering very slightly nicer reflections in return. At first this was assumed to be the result of Nvidia's then-new GeForce RTX cards just not being powerful enough to do the technology justice, but later games such as Metro: Exodus have used it for vastly improved graphics at similar or better performance compared to this game, this feature was actually rushed due to in order to cover up the lack of hardware ray-tracing supported games.

For a Battlefield game, you can build fortifications, structures that can block the path of the enemy, which requires tactics and planning for the enemy team, as it is pretty decent. In addition to this all DLC is free, and the microtransactions are only for cosmetics.

Before the game's discontinuation, DICE didn't give up on the game despite the initial turmoil, and they (for the most part) listened to player feedback.

Not as I expected it to be as good as Battlefield 1 and others before it, but still.