Thought this looked fun to play here and there, ended up dropping 45 hours in a week.

Excellent gameplay, excellent gameplay loop, multiple solutions for the same problem and best of all, random mission generator to keep your playing experience fresh. Both in campaigns and standalone missions. Simply excellent. Love it.

A shooter game that has the potential to be amazing, but requires some additional tweaking to be the best.

Been looking for a PVP shooter game to play for a couple of years now after abandoning Warzone and this is a worthy replacement.

==== The Bad ====

1. Bloom. There's random bullet spread when continuously firing the weapon. Especially while ADS moving. No, I am not referring to the bug. I am referring to bloom. Bloom does not belong in any arcade shooter game ever. It's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥, stupid, frustrating mechanic that only exists to make sure mechanically unskilled players can sometimes kill better players. Any person who tells you otherwise is probably your 3/18/9 squadmate who has spent his entire game time walking into points and immediately dying to the first enemy that appears to contest it.

2. [Fixed] Severe lack of replayability. You get few maps which all lack the same thing. Replayability. Every game, you run from one point to the next, killing people in the process. This gameplay experience by itself is fine, and I like it but currently, Battlefield 6 doesn't offer anything else except that. You get no tight map like Metro, no chokepoints like Port Valdez, no total vehicle combat like Heavy Metal e.t.c. All maps play similarly. Run, gun, win/lose. The only exception could maybe be Siege of Cairo, but I'm stretching it. [Fixed]

[Fix]: Battle Royale and Gauntlet have been added. Infinite replayability for when you get bored with multiplayer. Hell, they've become my primary modes.

3. Lack of progression. There's nothing to really play for. You don't get a kill/revive/assist counter to display on your name or dog tag for example. You get skins by leveling up guns instead of counting something like kills, headshosts or even revives. Who really wants to level a gun they don't like playing? You don't get unique badges or anything of the sort for ranking up.

4. Lack of weapons and attachments. Yes, you get quite the nice selection of weapons but the actual list of weapons is much smaller because some are statistically much worse than an equivalent. Therefore, there's literally no reason to use them. Nobody is going to use the M417 A2 or M277 when then QBZ exists. As for the attachments, if you look at their stats you'll quickly discover that while there are 10+ grips available, only 4 are actually viable and provide a boost to stats without taking anything away. Therefore, why EVER use a grip that reduces recoil but noticeably reduces accuracy?

Here's the list of weapons to use in Redsec that are statistically superior than any other choice.

[Short range] 0 - 30m
1. M4A1
2. SGX (If you want something with less recoil than M4A1.
3. MP5 if you're inaccurate and eat through a lot of ammo with the SGX/M4.

Anything else does too little damage, has too little ammo or has too much recoil to effectively use and win gunfights.

[Medium range] 30m - 60m.

1. M4A1 (With Extended mag)
2. KORD (With Extended mag)
3. QBZ (Alternative to KORD with extended mag)

At this range, SMGs are inferior to ARs/Carbines due to bullet velocity. You want something that still hits hard and retains at least SOME accuracy but using an extended magazine is a must. There's so much bloom that you're guaranteed to miss at least 10 shots for each magazine you fire. Anything under 30 rounds is not enough to kill 1 person nevermind 2.

However, you can still use SMGs because they have less bloom. Meaning, you'll hit more shots but at lower damages. Choice massively depends on what you're comfortable with but bloom is what makes or breaks your weapon choice.

[Long Range] 60+ meters.

1. AK-205
2. KTS - 100

At these ranges, every other weapon is extremely inaccurate due to bloom. It already is a waste of ammo engaging at those ranges but hey, these two weapons can actually hit some shots when continuously firing.

For attachments, you get the grip that slightly reduces recoil, extended barrel and either suppressor or compensator depending on your playstyle. A basic sight + any extended mag that you can. That's it. That's all the attachments you can use without getting downsides. Why ever use something else?

There is no variety in weapons or attachments. And this is primarily because of bloom. Weapons have so much random spread that there's no reason to use them.

You can't use low DPS weapons because you obviously miss out on damage, you can't use high-recoil weapons because even if you control the recoil, bloom makes sure you miss anyway, you can't use any weapons with high bloom values because obviously you'll miss all your shots and you'll never even consider sub-30 round weapons because again, bloom will have you missing half your shots meaning there's not enough ammo to kill what you're shooting at.

As you can see, bloom is the deciding factor on literally everything. It makes or breaks every single gunfight at all ranges. Each gunfight at 30+ meters is a roulette round with your enemy on who will have most luck with their bloom to win.

What a piece of ♥♥♥♥ mechanic.

5. Vehicle dynamics. By god, driving vehicles and flying the choppers has been one of the worst experiences I've ever had in a Battlefield game. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell the driving is extremely bad. The jets are fine.

Out of all these, the biggest issue is bloom. Bullets should go where the reticle is at. Simple as that. All engagements past 70 meters are essentially a waste of ammo. Especially in BR. You simply can't hit ♥♥♥♥ even with the most accurate weapons. If bloom is removed or MASSIVELY toned down, this review will be switched to positive.

==== The good ====

1. Gunplay. The gunplay, outside of bloom is AMAZING. The weapons feel and sound amazing. Attachment tuning is great, recoil is great, animations are incredible, the hitmarkers, the sounds of kills, headshots and critical headshots. Amazing. Just incredibly joyful to use.

2. Movement. The movement feels SO.DAMN.GOOD. Sprinting, strafing, walking, crouching, going prone, diving, scaling obstacles. Really feels absolutely great. They tuned the slide/jumping after the Beta and I gotta say, it was the right thing to do. It just feels great navigating maps.

3. Sound. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is the sound design incredible. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, sound designs I've ever experienced in a shooter game. Really puts you on the battlefield.

4. Empire State. This map is simply incredible. The verticality, different pathways and obstacles, different areas, POI objectives, scenery, everything really. Possibly the best "chaos" battlefield map ever made. Could play there for hours. Shame that all other maps basically offer the same experience but with a different aesthetic.

=== Overall ====

I wish I could give a 5/10 or neutral review. EA has an amazing game on their hands and they just now need to capitalize. More variety, different experience and progression are desperately needed. Bloom needs to be removed or at least reverted to beta state. After dropping 20 hours in one weekend, and another 30 over the span of a week, I now find myself without any real reason to play. Sure, I'll play maybe a couple of games to kill time, but that's it. No real reason to return for more time than that.

At the current state of the game, I'd say it's not worth the 70 bucks. Especially if you dropped 30 hours on the beta like I did.

I wish I could give this a neutral review.

== The Good ==

Gameplay is excellent. Is plays really well, is fun and well designed. Every unit serves a purpose and all of them feel good to pilot and use. The pathing is sometimes weird, and there's the occasional bug but nothing gamebreaking.

You have a HUGE amount of freedom to create decks and customize your army. Really awesome. You can go for multiple different playstyles and they all work out one way or another.

The balancing is excellent in my humble opinion. No side feels OP. Russia I believe has a very minor advantage over the US but it's so minor, it shouldn't be an issue. This ties to the previous point where you really can play whatever you want and you can make it work. There is no "standard meta" (looking at you COH 3)

Multiplayer is great when you get into a good match. The 5v5 grand battles are amazing and there's so many things to do.

== The Bad ==

Pretty much everything else except the gameplay is... bad.

Regarding multiplayer, there is no punishment for leaving/abandoning a match. Therefore, you can do it freely and people do it; ruining the MP game in the process.

Performance is here and there. I had to drop graphics quite a bit to sustain stable 70 FPS on i7 13700k, RTX4060 and 32 gigs of ram.

The worst part about this game is the almost total lack of singleplayer.
There is a campaign which IDGAF about so I'll talk about the rest.

You can't get friendly AI to do 2v2, 3v3 et.c. Only 1v1.
You can't save in Skirmish AI battles.
The AI is wildly unbalanced. Feels like it's cheating. Constantly spamming units everywhere and going full zerg on you. Nightmare to play against.


== Overall ==

Great core gameplay, great balance, very fun mechanics and good multiplayer but held back by abysmal singleplayer, lack of leaver punishment and missing quality of life features.