I played three missions of the Battlefield 6 campaign, and I wasn’t ready for how much Battlefield-y it is

Battlefield 6 is one of the rare triple-A games whose developers were happy to let the public – some of them, at least – play the game well ahead of its release. This wasn’t as part of a beta/demo three weeks from launch; it was a conscious effort to get the community involved months in advance, and give the developers enough time to actually iterate and implement whatever feedback they felt would help make a better game.

Understandably, that experiment was strictly limited to the game’s multiplayer mode, which ends up making Battlefield 6’s campaign its most mysterious – and least seen – component. We’ve not been able to play the single-player mode, or really examine it in any way. Until now.

As part of a digital preview event, I got a chance to spend a few hours with Battlefield 6’s single-player. We had access to three full missions from the campaign, complete with cutscenes, a little bit of setup for the state of the world, and a brief introduction of the thrust of its events.

One of the first things that quickly became apparent was how much the structure of the Battlefield 6 campaign builds upon that of Battlefield 4’s. At almost every moment, you’re accompanied by at least one squad member. Most of the time, you have a full squad with you, which you can command to use smoke for cover, spot enemies, throw a grenade/use explosives, or simply engage the enemy.

These commands are easily accessible through a simplified commo rose (the wheel where you issue commands), and the game assigns each role to the class it would correspond to in multiplayer (Assault, Support etc.), which is a nice touch that definitely creates a sense of continuity with the bigger half of the game.

Much like it did in BF4, however, that squad play dynamic gets old pretty quickly. Even on Veteran difficulty (one below the highest), encounters were easily manageable if you take your time and pick your targets. My most used command was spotting, and occasionally smoke when crossing open areas.

These commands are useful, so I can see someone relying on them more often than I did. In the case of spotting, it’s downright broken, as it highlights every single enemy in the vicinity at the press of a button, which really robs some encounters from the stakes they could otherwise have if, for instance, you needed to find the sniper pinning down your squad. Even though my time with the campaign was limited, I intentionally stopped using spotting because of the advantage it offers.

It’s possible the main campaign has more traditional (read: linear) missions, like the sort that’s common in Call of Duty, where these elements wouldn’t be as present. Those elements shine, however, in the open missions that go the opposite direction. On such mission lets you loose in a large open space, and you get to pick which objective to tackle first, and how to approach them. These sandbox-y missions are starting to become more common in this space, but they belong in Battlefield more than any other game that uses them because of the series’ inbuilt focus on squad play.

The narrative remains one of the campaign’s most intriguing aspects. Because the missions we got access to were picked from across the timeline, I couldn’t quite get a feel for how it’s going to flow, or the dynamics between its core characters.

The setup, key players and some of their actions, however, are incredibly believable. In this story, the world is on the brink of war as NATO begins to collapse; with some member states leaving the alliance to join forces with other nations and form an alliance of their own. This is not simply an East vs West affair, and it’s these complications that make things interesting.

I’m very intrigued to see whether the rest of the campaign will weave these events into the narrative or simply use it as a backdrop. Some of the dialogue leads me to believe it’s going to be more serious and relevant than you might expect.

The build we had access to was very clearly work-in-progress, but considering how close to launch we are, I’m a little concerned about how clunky and underbaked certain elements of it were. The moment-to-moment action remains sharp, but the way things flow into and out of scripted sequences is a little amateurish.

Cutscenes, for instance – even real-time ones – don’t show the weapon you’re using in gameplay. Regaining control after a cutscene ends takes a little too long, and there were multiple instances of enemies essentially waiting for the heroes to “activate” before they get on their marks. It made it look staged.

It’s unfair to compare this to the work of the – vastly more – experienced teams making Call of Duty campaigns year after year. Battlefield Studios simply doesn’t have institutional knowledge to be able to stand toe-to-toe with Modern Warfare or even Black Ops. Nevertheless, these sorts of production quality failings can make it harder to take its characters and world seriously.

What I played of the BF6 campaign has certainly been fun, if serviceable. There’s no Clean House moment – even if one mission clearly tries. Battlefield gameplay remains the draw, so if the narrative can hold its intrigue throughout and doesn’t fumble the bag, I can see this being a pretty good time.