"Dawn of a New Time": Battlefield 1 Review (single player)

Overall Score: 4.2

B

With a lot of effort being put into the game's multiplayer, why am I only focusing on the single player? Well several reasons. As of late, since Star Wars Battlefront at least, there's been more and more demand for better single player experience in FPS games. Doom (2016) is a perfect example of a well done single player that received a lot of critical praise. Since then, single player campaigns have been getting something of a renaissance in the genre. Titanfall 2 did a complete 180 from multiplayer only to including a single player campaign mode, that from what I hear is actually pretty good, more on that one after the holidays at some point. That and given that my old online squadmates no longer play, and I only really enjoy playing multiplayer when I'm with my friends, I don't get online enough these days to do a proper review.


Gameplay: 3
If you've played Bad Company 2, you won't really see anything new in this game. Which is a good and bad thing. Good, in that you can expect an established and solid gameplay experience. Bad in that you really won't see anything new. Back is the replenishing life bar, which personally I would have rather had the first Bad Company's health replenishment system, where your character sticks himself with a needle for full replenishment, but the needle has a reload time. On the same token though, you do take a bit of damage even on normal mode, and the health recharge is slower than what you'd expect in CoD, so you'd still need to be strategic, or you'd just get Swiss cheesed and die. But on the other hand, you now have the ability to bayonet charge when you have a gun equipped with one. You enter into this continuous dash (you don't have to push the stick while you dash, only to initialize the charge and to steer) and when you make contact with the target you go into an insta-kill melee attack. However, overall the gameplay is nothing new. I knocked off half a point for that.

Though I do have to give the game credit, that they did mix up the gameplay styling quite a bit. The Arabia levels are set up somewhat reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid 5. The first level of that scenario has more an emphasis on stealth (even though there is an FT-17 light tank at the edge of the map you can steal and go on a rampage with), the second mission is a large map, with three camps you need to raid, but it's a little bit of a sandbox in that you can raid these camps in what ever manner and what ever order you choose. You want to charge in Lewis machine gun blazing, you can do that. You want to find the scoped suppressed M-1903 and silently pick off Turks at a distance, then just waltz right into your newly made ghost camp, you can do that. You want to steal the FT-17 at one of the camps, you can do that too.  By contrast, a few of the levels in Though Mud and Blood, are pure action, you drive around this steel deathmobile, and you can hop out, grab a Lewis machine gun and spray some Germans. While the following level becomes more stealth based, with the player creeping though forest fog to scout ahead for the tank. Then you have The Runner scenario where it's pure action and urban warfare. Where I did need to knock a point off, was there was a lack of trench warfare levels. There was one level that has you creeping though German trenches and across no-man's land to get back to Allied lines. Trench warfare is something of a hallmark of World War I, and the lack of a level where you go over the top to storm enemy trenches and find out how combat shotguns got the nickname "trenchgun" is a bit disappointing.

Don't know about you, but I really like the moniker "Landship".

Now, given that this is Battlefield, there are vehicles you can control, and here is where I found the most egregious flaws in terms of gameplay. In the scenario Friends in High Places you take the stick of a Bristol Fighter in the service of the Royal Flying Corps, the predecessor to the Royal Air Force. Typically when you control an aircraft in a video game, you have more simplified novice control style where tilting the stick left and right turn the plane, and you have an advanced style where tilting the stick rolls the plane left and right, and turns are accomplished by rolling the plane sideways and pulling up on the stick. The problem here, is for what ever reason, in campaign mode, the air craft controls are stuck to the novice style. Doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but if you're someone like me, who's played nearly every Ace Combat game, and Birds of Steel, the flight controls in BF1's campaign are near unplayable when you've always played with an advanced setting. The other issue with the flight controls that makes things weird and awkward is that the default setting has the RIGHT stick as the flight control stick. In just about every other flight sim game the LEFT stick is the control stick. If you've ever played those NES games where the reversed the usual functions of A and B, then you'll know what this feels like. If you're younger than my crowd, then imagine if the gas and break in your car got flipped. I supposed I should be happy that you're not in a Nieuport or SPAD fighter in service with the Aéronautique Militaire since French fighters have the throttle controls reversed from what British fighters have (British style, what the US uses, has the throttle increase by pushing it forward, French throttles increase when you pull it back). The other gripe I have with the flight segments, is a lack of a cockpit view, instead you're locked into a third person view. Again this doesn't sound like a big deal, but from my flight sim experience, it is much easier to gauge distance from the cockpit view, resulting in more accurate shots and less crashing into the ground when doing low level strafing attacks. For something major like this, I had to knock a full point off. There's just no excuse for the lack of advanced style controls, and if this is fixed in a subsequent patch I will add that point back in.

Bristol Fighter F2B

The other thing I had to take a half point off from was the lack of other single player modes. Killzone had the Bot mode where you play though multiplayer maps filled with bots, which gives you a chance to learn the maps. CoD had some form of hoard mode, with the most well known (and the only reason I still give a crap about that franchise) being the Zombies. This was something of a missed opportunity, where Dice could have made a great hoard mode centered around holding your trench from waves of attacking enemies and getting gassed.

The last thing in gameplay that I have to talk about are the guns. I will say that a lot of the weapons you find in the game, you likely wouldn't see that often, if at all in the actual war. That's actually not a bad thing. Yeah it's bad if you're going for strict realism, but on the other hand these guns did exist and by doing this they get more exposure. How many of you people would know about the Mondragon rifle outside of this game? If you're a firearms or history enthusiast, this game would be the closest a lot of us would come to being able to shoot some of these guns. Sure I've seen and handled a Mauser C-96 pistol at a gun shop, but I've never even seen a C-96 carbine in person, except maybe at the Army Museum in Paris.

Mauser C-96 Carbine. These old guns have an elegance that you just don't see much today. 

If you want to learn more about the guns in the game, check out this video by Total Biscuit. He goes and shoots some of the guns in the game in real life.

Or check out Forgotten Weapons on Youtube.


Graphics and Visuals: 4.5
Graphics and visuals are great, graphic wise, the game looks really nice. The modeling of the weapons and vehicles are crisp, detailed and for the most part pretty accurate. I've actually fired some of these weapons from the era in real life, and the ones that I have handled that were in the game, they look pretty accurate.

I've done a bit of military history research on my own time, quite a bit actually, and the British "Landship" and the fighters in the game look accurate, though I can't speak for the interior of the tank. From the cut scenes it looks a little more roomier than it ought to be.

Though there are some small issues. There are little graphical issues, like if you're crawling around you'll see a plant suddenly pop-in if you get close enough. It isn't just with plants, but other small little detail things like that, you'll have a few instances where a little bit of detailing will pop-in or vanish depending on your distance from the detailing. It's not enough to detract from the game's immersion but it is enough to be noticeable.


Stability: 5
So far, I've yet to run into any crashes or show stoppers such as not coming back from sleep mode. Haven't run into any can't advance glitches either, where a trigger to continue to the next phase of the level won't activate. The game pretty much runs flawlessly.


Plot: 3.5
The plot has it's ups and downs. The approach Dice used was a series of vignettes, in different fronts of the war. We see Laurence of Arabia's Bedouin guerrilla army, we see the British landships rolling over German lines, we have classic aerial dogfights, we see lesser known (well lesser for an American audience) fronts like the failed invasion of Gallipoli, and the Battle of Vittorio Venetto.

Italian victory at Vittorio Venetto.

While I think this is a great way to show the war from multiple aspects, again I think there are a few areas where Dice missed an opportunity. For one, none of the stories take place on the Eastern Front, this could have been an opportunity to show the horrors that directly lead to the fall of Czar Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (which lead to the Soviet Union, which lead to the Cold War that shaped the latter half of the 20th century). Also given that the Central Powers, don't really have the same social stigma as the Axis Powers, I was disappointed to see that all the stories were from the Allies point of view. It would have been great to see both sides of the war, with scenarios centered around a German solider, an Austrian-Hungary solider, and an Ottoman soldier. This was a huge missed opportunity since you wouldn't be able to do this with WWII without kicking up controversy.

I don't think these these soldiers with the Deutsches Heer would have the same cultural/social baggage as soldiers with the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS would. Hey wait, is that guy on the right...?!

The other thing that disappointed me is that we don't see many historical figures in the game. We don't see top French ace Rene Fonck (75 confirmed kills and top scoring Allied ace) or the famed "Red Baron" Manfred von Richtofen (80 confirmed kills). We don't see a young Douglas MacArthur or George Patton, nor do we see a young Erwin Rommel on the other side. Personally I wanted to see a scene where you were chasing a German solider with valuable intel though a trench, but he manages to get away from you and someone remarks "he's going to cause us a lot of trouble...", then in the next scene you see him deliver the intel, and in that scene the solider is revealed to be none other than a young Adolf Hitler. While it was great to see Laurence of Arabia make an appearance, it would have really been nice to see other historical figures as well.

He's more than just the mascot for a brand of frozen pizza. 

The funny thing is, this was a big missed opportunity to integrate an educational aspect, in a fun and interesting way. It's one thing to read about Hitler being in WWI, it's another to chase the bastard down in those trenches, maybe even get gassed with him, and you miss your chance of killing him. It's one thing to read about how bad and horrible the Eastern Front was and how it helped set off the Russian Revolution, it's another thing to be cast into a virtual Eastern Front and see a recreation of it yourself. For the aviation fans, there's a missed opportunity to tell them about some of the original "knights of the sky", it's one thing to read about American ace Eddie Rickenbacker, it's another to fly his wing, and get your ass saved by him.

The other thing was, Dice didn't touch over on several of the major battles of the war. For example you don't find yourself in the boots of a French solider at the Somme or at Verdun.

While the approach was a good one, rather than one monolothic campaign, we can see various aspects of the first modern war. I can see a few missed opportunities to do something that no one has really done before in a war game. For that, I had to knock off a point and a half.


Music and art style: 5
The music is similar to soundtrack of Halo. The overall sound track style is orchestrated music with the sort of rousing/heroic feel. It's certainly good enough to stand on it's own, I don't know if it'd listen to it while driving, but I'd certainly play it in the background while doing other things. Rather than me talk about it though, since you're already here in the internet, just take a listen for yourself.

Now what is there to talk about in terms of art style on a historically based game? Well some of the sights on the rifles, I am a little suspect in terms of whether they actually existed or not. A few of them are essentially red dot sights. Sure there might have been some experimental sights that they were based on, but I'm a bit skeptical. Also some of the weapon configurations and uniforms aren't exactly period accurate. By that I mean some of them didn't come into use in that particular year.

On that note, less an art style and more gaming considerations, are things like reload animations, and a little bit of cheating on the guns like having bayonets when they didn't, to balance them out more. Having actually shot some of these guns and worked in the video game industry as a QA tester, I can see why they did what they did. Here's what I mean, lets take the British Lee Enfield Mk.III rifle that appears in the game.

The Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE) Mk.III. A real gem of a rifle, if you find yourself in possession of one, be sure to take good care of it and it'll never let you down. You do your part and she'll do hers. 

The Lee Enfield fires the .303 British (7.7x56mmR). A big beefy round that makes the 5.56x45 out of an AR-15 look like a Tic-Tac.

You see that rim there on the bottom of the casing? If you load the internal magazine incorrectly, you'll jam up the magazine in something called "rim-lock". What I tell people about loading rifles that used a rimmed cartridge like that is "when you load it, the rim always goes in front of the rim on the one you loaded before". What could happen is if the rim of the cartridge you loaded gets behind the rim of the prior cartridge the rim will keep you from loading in the next cartridge and you get "rim-lock" and depending on the rifle, rim-lock can be a pain in the ass to fix. It's one thing to be in a calm gun range while doing this, it's another to be in the heat of battle and trying to reload while taking cover, and if you're loading loose rounds individually, you have more of a chance of getting rim-lock, given that you also need to worry about the Huns not getting you while you're reloading. Now imagine if they made the game super realistic, how pissed would you get if you died because you were in the middle of clearing a rim-lock? I know I'd be pretty heated especially if I had the guy right in my sights and dead to rights, but he's able to bayonet me because I got rim-lock and didn't New York Reload quick enough.

If I was a history buff who didn't play video games, I'd probably take a point or so off for some of these gameplay considerations, but given that I'm a bit of both, I can see why these considerations were made.


Final Verdict: Must Buy... for the history buff
Overall the single player experience for Battlefield 1 is fun and enjoyable. There's a lot of fun to be had so long as you're not expecting some hyper realistic WWI combat simulatior. On the same token though, if this game was some futuristic shooter game about warfare in infinite space or something I probably wouldn't have even given the game a second look. The World War I setting was a big draw for me. But if you're not interested in history, then the single player aspect of this game might not really interest you since the gameplay isn't really anything different from other shooters.