The BATTLEFIELD HARDLINE review

Unlike most video game bad guys, these enemies actually respect the badge of a police officer, and that gives you options. If you can get the jump on a group of three or fewer, you can order them to freeze by pulling out your badge and shouting. From there, you can arrest them... or gun them down. If you can stay out of sight, cuffing them is usually the superior option because it earns you more points, which unlocks more weapons and gadgets.

If you’re really good, these levels are designed intelligently enough to allow you to sneak around arresting bad guys one by one until, finally, when you look around, all you see are handcuffed, knocked-out criminals. It’s not the kind of satisfaction I expected from a Battlefield game, but it requires patience and skill, and I was constantly delighted to see my enemies’ numbers dwindle while my magazines stayed full.

Again, you can also run around shooting everyone, and that works too. Part of Battlefield’s legacy includes realistic weapons that feel and sound great, and that’s no different here. When I forgot to disable an alarm and 10 enemies surrounded me, my rifle was a lot more effective than handcuffs.

Second, Hardline’s seven-hour campaign is – and I never thought I’d say this – just as fun to play in stealth as it is running in guns blazing. Before entering combat, you can scan an area and tag enemies, explosives, or alarm systems so they’ll appear on your radar. It’s rewarding to formulate a grand plan from afar before jumping into the action.

With proper preparation, enemies’ cones of vision appear directly on your minimap, Metal Gear Solid-style. If you can avoid detection, it’s entirely possible to make it through most areas without firing a single lethal round.

My biggest gameplay gripe is that the unlock system doesn’t appropriately award your playstyle. The best way to boost your level, which dictates the weapons and gadgets at your disposal, is to play stealthily. Strangely, mastering stealth mostly unlocks tons of big, noisy guns that made me want to shoot the place up. Likewise, if you want to shoot stuff all the time, you’re not going to get your hands on new guns as quickly as the stealth player who doesn’t need them. And there are very few unlocks that make stealth more interesting.

The third surprise was that I cared about the characters. My disapproving partner, my stern boss, and the motley crew of ex-cops, coked-up criminals, and more than a few traitors – all of them felt like people, thanks to good writing supported by strong voice and animation work. Make no mistake, Hardline’s drug-peddling plot is one you’ve almost certainly seen before, but it does such a fine job of making its characters funny, sympathetic, and believable that I wanted to keep playing to see what would happen to them.

Hardline has a few issues with some of its enemies though – specifically, a group of one-dimensional Tea Party caricatures in possession of a safe-cracking robot. They’re presented as over-the-top evil racists to give you an unambiguous sense of morality when gunning them down. They told my character “You look Mexican, so I’ll assume you’re a burglar.” An hour later I was facing off against their leader, who hooted and hollered as we engaged in tank-to-tank combat. It’s fun, but hard to take as seriously as the subject matter suggests it should be.

By comparison, the story’s main villain is devious and cunning. He’s not the most interesting or memorable bad guy, but he’s the kind of narcissist who keeps the secret switch to his penthouse vault inside a carved bust of himself. I can appreciate that kind of vanity, and going after him was less of a black-and-white decision thanks to a few shades of gray.

The last surprise Hardline’s campaign had for me was moments of comedy. Several laugh-out-loud moments make some self-aware fun out of its own crazy situations and mechanics. In one especially clever moment, after being flung into a room packed with enemies, the prompt to order enemies to put their hands up briefly flashes on the screen. In another moment, nearly $10 million worth of cocaine is ruined in an unfortunate forklift accident. It’s not forced, and those nods to Battlefield fans makes the campaign that much more enjoyable.

Battlefield has a history of looking and sounding excellent, and Hardline continues the tradition (though resolution is a disappointing 720p on Xbox One and 900p on PlayStation 4). Through gunfights, car crashes, and explosions, it all runs at a smooth 60 frames per second that stayed rock solid on PS4 and Xbox One.

Multiplayer

The tone of Hardline’s multiplayer is downright bizarre. If a smack-talking gamer kid grew up to be a cop or a criminal, this game would represent them. Through in-game emotes, the characters trash talk each other, recite internet memes, and blare loud, obnoxious music as they ride to war. I didn’t expect to hear my allies give their own takes on Oprah’s famous “You get a car” line, nor did I expect to hear “Woop! Woop! That’s the sound of da police,” moments before a cruiser ran me over. At least in the short term, the emergent comedy is unexpected gold – and sometimes you won’t see it until it literally flattens you.

New gadgets, like the grappling hook and zip line, add further options by letting you reach higher vantage points and move around quickly in a way we haven’t seen in a Battlefield game in 10 years. Plus, your team can use them too, so they can use their gadget slots on something else. The issue is that these mobility items don’t feel useful unless you grab both – a way to get up, and a way to get down – which limits your capabilities for what you can do when you’re up there. I often had to sacrifice body armor, breaching chargers, or some other useful gadget.

The most astonishing thing about Hardline’s multiplayer is how successful it is in trying to please everyone. If you want more capital-B Battlefield, like the iconic Conquest mode and its large-scale vehicular combat, 66 players, and tons of weapons and gadgets to unlock, you’ll find it here. Even Commander mode is back, now dubbed as “Hacker mode,” and it lets you hijack cameras, release tear gas, and disrupt enemies across the map. It’s a great way to be proactive without firing a weapon, if that’s not your thing. If you’re feeling franchise fatigue, its new modes and gadgets alleviate that.

Hotwire is Hardline’s fresh marquee mode, and it injects some much-needed mayhem into Battlefield’s 13-year-old multiplayer formula. Think of it as a special version of the traditional capture-and-hold Conquest mode, but, instead of holding structures, you have to keep control of moving vehicles; if you don’t drive them fast enough, you don’t get points. (It’s the sort of like the concept of the movie Speed, but gamified.) When the most contested combat areas are mobile, the flow of the fight itself becomes dynamic, and it’s difficult to skirt around the fight. A sniper might feel safe, for example, crouched on a crane near the edge of the map. Second later two vehicles might roar by, packed with thugs firing their assault rifles. Those cars might then attract the attention of a heavily armed helicopter, belching out bullets from both its sides.

Suddenly, your safety zone isn’t so cozy.

War can descend on you at any moment. You’re rarely comfortable, and you’re never safe. That makes Hotwire a great mode that forces you to move around and adapt to new situations quickly. I had some trouble adjusting because of my old habits of patrolling one area (it’s not camping!), but I had a good time learning to adapt to the new reality. After a few hours of getting my butt handed to me, I was back in business.

Some of Hardline’s other modes take everything Battlefield is known for and do the opposite: 5v5, round-based games that can be over in seconds. In one mode, the police must rescue a bound hostage and escort him to safety. In another, a VIP must be escorted from one side of the map to the other. In both modes, you only have one life. The action is quick and brutal, and the big, unfolding combat narrative found in typical Battlefield games is absent. It’s not missed, though, because, that “story” is replaced with awesome kills, tense standoffs, and plenty of amazing comebacks.

The payload of nine maps isn’t a ton, but because they’re so varied and change depending on the game mode, so I never felt like I was stuck in the same place for too long. Settings range from small, tight, urban areas to sprawling swamps, where an enemy could be prone behind any patch of grass or below any crippled dock.

Across both current-gen versions of Hardline, all of the multiplayer matches I played on launch day connected in literally two to six seconds. This includes both quick match games and games I connected to through the server browser. The connection stayed consistent too, and I was able to see them through until I won or lost.