Game Details Developer: DICE

Publisher: EA

Platform: Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 (reviewed on Windows, XB1)

Release Date: October 18, 2016 (early enlister edition), October 21, 2016 (regular edition)

Price: $79.99 / £69.99 (early enlister edition), $59.99 / £44.99 (regular edition)

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Links: Origin DICE: EA: Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 (reviewed on Windows, XB1)October 18, 2016 (early enlister edition), October 21, 2016 (regular edition): $79.99 / £69.99 (early enlister edition), $59.99 / £44.99 (regular edition): M for Mature

The Battlefield video game series has turned the clock backward and forward on its military-combat scenarios for nearly 15 years. Whether focused on wars of the past, present, or future, developer DICE has continually introduced different set pieces and weapons to the games. As such, the eras have ultimately been a backdrop for the same experience time and time again: big battles, big squads, and big machinery.

There are particular eras where'd it's be easy to envision DICE being forced to change the Battlefield formula drastically—maybe millennia into the past, where the only "vehicle" on offer is a giant Trojan horse, or so far into the future that the battles take place via telepathy (or something weird like that). But the latest rewind to World War 1 in the newest installment, Battlefield 1, isn't enough of a change, apparently.

Tanks, boats, airplanes, grenades, sniper rifles, shotguns, automatic pistols, mounted chain guns, and on and on and on—in many respects, you've played this Battlefield before. In fact, anybody charmed by an impressive advertising campaign, complete with horse-riding Ottoman warriors and era-appropriate bi-planes, should take a breath and plant their war-shredded boots back into the mud of a trench. In practice, horses are just slightly slower motorcycles. Bi-planes work as you'd expect a plane to work.

So this is business as usual, right? Not exactly. For the most part, Battlefield 1 gets away with normalcy by delivering exactly what we hope "triple-A" games can pull off with their giant budgets and enormous expectations. This is a beautiful, polished, and oftentimes very fun experience for the masses. It's also another feather in PC gaming's cap in 2016, as this game has been so nicely optimized that it offers a "next-gen" experience right now on even moderate PC hardware.

“A no-good, lying son of a bitch”

















Campaign mode is again a decidedly single-player affair, but not in the same vein as other recent Battlefield games. Frankly, the last three major series releases all dropped the ball in delivering decent campaigns. Each aspired to some Call of Duty-like threshold of what a military-shooter video game should look and play like, and that approach misses the point of Battlefield. Giant-squad battles were removed. The game's war machines were relegated to on-rails levels of boring, automatic piloting. The plots stank to high heaven.

After all, how can you tell a story of a massive, full-country squad when you're too busy setting up jokes and repartee between Guy McGrimaceface and his "clearly going to die by mission nine" buddies? (For the record, Battlefield's offshoot Bad Company 2 release was the rare exception with a high-quality story.) What a difference 100 years makes. Battlefield 1 is by no means the end-all, be-all of military shooter single-player modes, but its "war stories" construct is a brilliant solution to the prior games' tendency to get stuck in the narrative weeds.

BF1 tells its World War 1 story via five separate war plots starring five protagonists from around the world—all following a brief, introductory mission in which nearly every single character you control dies. In this intro sequence, instead of rewinding to a checkpoint after deaths, the camera pans out and a narrator describes the emotions of war as you take on a different soldier in that same battle. (This last-stand battle doesn't end well.)

The approach is interesting, but it also sets an inconsistent tone that perhaps focuses too much on the small scale, individual experiences of the war. The soldier-death camera-pan moments include brief epitaphs (soldier name, birth year, death year), which touch on a surprisingly anti-war tone. How often does a video game remind you, as your hero dies, how old he lived to be? Do many similar titles stop and show you a character's real, full name while loading the next combat sequence?

But the intro's narrator never seems to say anything with the same emotional weight as those notices, nor do any other characters. Battlefield 1's stories avoid talking about either the full scale of the global conflict or about their own nations' involvement, meaning that the results feel surprisingly tone-deaf at certain moments. The opening sequence, in particular, completely avoids mentioning the history of its starring characters: the Harlem Hellfighters, an American battalion who were forced to enlist with the French during WWI because they were black.

Why point this out? Because at its best, at least, Battlefield 1 pulls off some very touching plot moments that raise expectations for what a war game's campaign can muster. The best stories narrow their storytelling focus on smaller-scale relationships, with every war story's protagonist building a relationship with exactly one fellow soldier. A sibling here, an underling there—these people are the reason you fight in each story.

This approach mostly works because BF1's acting and writing hold up to scrutiny, if only because the best of these five war stories crib liberally from so many pulp novels written and told in the war's aftermath. The best is the story of Clyde Blackburn, an American "no-good lying son of a bitch" who scams his way onto a wealthy British man's fighter plane only to inadvertently find himself in a war. Thanks to your masterful piloting and shooting, Blackburn proves himself a hero for the Allies.

Highly optimized on PC Images in the gallery below were snapped during live PC gameplay at maximum settings at 1800p resolution (80 percent of the 3840x2160 "4K" standard). I could enjoy stable 60 frames-per-second performance with an i7-4770k CPU overclocked to 4.2GHz and a factory-overclocked GTX 980Ti video card. Images in the gallery below were snapped during live PC gameplay at maximum settings at 1800p resolution (80 percent of the 3840x2160 "4K" standard). I could enjoy stable 60 frames-per-second performance with an i7-4770k CPU overclocked to 4.2GHz and a factory-overclocked GTX 980Ti video card. That performance is slightly better than I got in the game's public beta, which already ran quite well. Other tests in the wild confirm a full 60fps lock on moderate systems at the "ultra" preset at 1080p, including GTX 1060 and RX 480 systems. (DICE's recommendation for nothing less than an i5-6600K CPU seems a bit overkill in practice; this is a GPU-locked game more than a CPU-locked one.) Even better, downgrading some settings to "high" on weaker systems will keep performance in the locked 60fps zone while still retaining the game's visual superiority on PC. Battlefield 1 ultimately appears to be as optimized as this month's impressive Gears of War 4. In fact, BF1 may be slightly more optimized—and it does this without locking users into either DirectX 12 or Windows 10. DICE has demonstrated a mastery with its Frostbite 3 engine that should carry over nicely to the PS4 Pro/Xbox Scorpio era. Worth noting: As of press time, an optional DirectX 12 toggle offers performance gains (about 5-10 fps) on AMD systems, while Nvidia card owners can expect either flat performance or losses with DX12 enabled. Those users should turn the toggle off. We'll update if anything changes after the next Nvidia driver update.

Blackburn is all cheese and swagger, bragging and tooting his horn at every turn before having a totally telegraphed coming-of-age moment by his story's end. Solid acting and snappy pacing make this traditional pulp storytelling easier to enjoy, but so does the fact that his missions are quite good. Blackburn's story begins with a gorgeous test flight above a snowcapped French mountainside, in which he's given full, unfettered control of a plane. The story continues up in the sky and down in the mud, alternating regularly between full-on airborne bombast and in-the-trenches stealth sneakery.

Not every story is this good; the worst is a boring slog alongside the Italian army, in which your character wears super-armor and mows down nearly 100 men in an open field while trying to find and save his brother. You pretty much cannot die in this armor, and the level is designed in kind, encouraging you to walk forward and kill with no sense of tension. At least in other levels, much of the killing is done in a one-against-all situation, where you're fighting against terrible odds. Compared to that, your Italian protagonist's open-field, invincible-suit killing feels less justified.

As for the rest, there are some gems, both in terms of pulpy story setups and mission variety. Each story lasts about an hour and a half (totaling seven hours in all), with that time being padded by a few particular mission choke points where the difficulty spikes with little reason and even less explanation as to what the heck you're supposed to do. The worst offender is the final task in the Lawrence of Arabia story, where players must destroy a monstrous, mortar-equipped train. They're guided to shielded, missile-shooting turrets, which can be used to shoot at the train, but that train apparently has laser-precise mortar accuracy and will instantly kill you at any turret that's been manned for more than a single missile shot. Your other option is to run up to the train and plant a short-range bomb or grenade, but attempting this can prove tricky, as the mission churns out endless waves of Ottoman Empire troops and train mortar shots.

I scoured this boss's map in search of better weapons, vantage points, hiding places, or strategies, but I found none—and that's the same with the other choke points I encountered. Luckily, the game's better missions don't pin you in with bad design and limited options; they open up the game's full gamut of firepower and open-field maneuvering, offering you tall windmill towers to snipe from, wooded paths to sneak through, or weapon-depot buildings to scour for blind "Leeroy Jenkins" rushes. Battlefield is at its best when players get some actual choices, so it's good to see that series element play out in this campaign.

Enemy-glutted choke points can be brutal, but they're rare enough that you can probably swallow them down—and in the process, you'll enjoy a BF1 campaign that very rarely feels like an overlong tutorial. Players' hands aren't held while they figure out how to stealth through an abandoned town-turned-outpost, how to simultaneously pilot a plane and shoot its guns, or how to navigate a crowded battlefield complete with dozens of troops on both sides.

What's more, these spread-out stories allow the campaign levels to jump not only from nation to nation, but also from gameplay style to gameplay style. Good stories, good pacing, and smart use of combat maps (some of which are borrowed from the multiplayer mode, along with others that aren't) add up to the kind of single-player offering that I don't regret playing. Compared to many other single-player games in the past decade's military shooters, that's (sadly) some very high praise.