Objectives topple and fall under my control in one concerted push. But against 2042’s easy bots, I can and I have. I’m not too proud to admit that I will never, never ever, not even if I devoted the next five years of my life to it, get 92 sniper kills in a single round of Battlefield against other humans. If you play against bots, the game gives us all the keys to the kingdom. Bots have been enlisted to make up server numbers, and they’re available to spar against in solo and co-op versions of the game’s multiplayer battles. There is a silver lining around 2042’s storm clouds. It doesn’t offset the broader disappointments, but is a worthy diversion. That persistence gives your team a reason to specialise, and there’s joy in cultivating co-operative efficiency. Rather than the treasure hunt itself, the rewarding loop of earning points and spending them on better kit for your next try proves most engaging. Here, a squad of up to four players hunts down data drives from satellite pods dotted around the map and then extracts them, fending off waves of disconcertingly ferocious AI soldiers. There’s no single player campaign this time, so it falls to the new Hazard Zone mode to provide light relief from the large-scale fracas. At present, it’s not unusual to see soldiers in endlessly looping death throes, like some interactive anti-war art installation, or vehicles that appear to be obeying lunar physics, or bullet spray so wild that you might as well brandish an aerosol at your foe instead. I suspect, like many other shaky big-budget games of the recent past, it will eventually evolve into something more stable and feature-rich.
Since Battlefield 2042 was released last week, players have complained about wobbly netcode, bugs too numerous to detail and missing features from previous games. That’s always been the difficulty for Battlefield as its player population has grown: how do I feel as if I’m effecting change within a vast conflict? The scale only serves to dilute individual accomplishments, not to mention increase the odds of a random death at the hands of remote unseen opponents. On a server filled to capacity, there’s simply too much chaos to carve out a satisfying personal story.
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