We can’t in good conscience recommend this game at full price to anyone no matter how much fun we had in it. This game will live and die by how its development continues. If you really want to play then best to wait for the next free weekend to test it out and buy it on special. You won’t have to wait too long.
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Gunplay
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Maps
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Guns
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Performance
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Fun
From the amount of coverage we gave Battlefield 2042 leading up to its 19 November release date, it’s no secret that we, along with most gamers, were rather excited. However, come launch day, our excitement was quickly dashed. Countless errors either stopped the game from launching or kicked us before we could join a game. If we managed to join a game, several game-breaking bugs, the overall lack of polish and unbalanced gameplay severely hindered our enjoyment.
But if you cast your minds back to 2013 and the release of Battlefield 4, you’ll remember that it too was marred with bugs and unbalanced gameplay. The developers rectified those with post-launch updates and as a result, that game still holds up today. So we wanted to wait a little to see how much of the launch mess would be cleaned up with updates and how much of the mess was down to poor design choices. Let’s go over why this doesn’t warrant a full-price purchase just yet.
What you’re getting for your money
For the first time in a Battlefield game, the game is completely multiplayer-focused. If that doesn’t interest you then it’s not for you. Although if you’re buying Battlefield games for the story, maybe this is for the best.
“You’re only getting half a game, so it’s half-price right?” we hear you asking. Wrong. The base game retails on Steam for R1,000. For your money, you’re getting three different game modes that are distinct enough to set themselves apart but they all need some tweaking.
All-out Warfare is the standard game mode that lets up to 128 players run around on enormous maps playing game modes like Breakthrough and Conquest. Make friends with your sprint button because if you aren’t quick enough to secure a vehicle, you’ll be running a lot.
Hazard Zone has sometimes been compared to a more hardcore shooter experience like Escape From Tarkov. People saying that haven’t played either game. You and the rest of your squad drop in to retrieve hard drives and then extract. There’s no respawning and you earn credits that you can spend on weapons and gadgets. Ultimately, while it can be a lot of fun if you’ve got 3 friends to play with, the game mode feels unfinished.
Then you get Portal. This game mode is the most innovative inclusion in this game. The maps and assets from previous titles are available in a sandbox environment in which players can create their own game modes. But don’t hold your breath that you’ll find the specific game mode you’re looking for. Of course, you could always create your own but more often than not you’ll struggle to fill the server.
Good gunplay a gun game makes
Battlefield 2042 is a first-person shooter, so you’ll spend most of your time shooting at people. The mechanical aspect of shooting feels pretty good. Your shots feel and sound like they have real weight and feedback from successfully killing an enemy is rewarding.
The time-to-kill (TTK) can be just a tad too long with some players opting to use armour but that’s only an additional 20HP which means you can still spray down multiple baddies with a single magazine or just go for the head.
Speaking of spraying, the weapon spread system that’s used in 2042 is a random bullet deviation style, meaning in a spray-down bullets will randomly dance around your crosshair instead of being laser-accurate like in Call of Duty games or having a set spray pattern for each gun like in Counter-Strike. This system lowers the skill ceiling while also lowering the skill floor, reducing the skill gap between new and skilled players.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing. It makes the game more of an arcade shooter that casual players can jump into and still feel like they aren’t hot garbage without having to devote chunks of time to learn weapon spray patterns. Not that that would take too long given how many weapons there are, more on that in a bit.
Run, run and run some more
The map pool is another disappointing aspect of 2042. At the time of writing, there are only seven new maps. Of those, we only found three to be really enjoyable. The main problem here is that increasing the player count to 128 and increasing map size didn’t work as Dice intended. More players don’t spread out on a larger map, they are just all funnelled into the same congestion zones as a 64 player map making the experience a mess. A fun mess, but still a mess. This could easily be fixed in the future by adding a few better-designed maps to the pool and redesigning the worst offenders.
This wasn’t very classy
In 2042 it’s out with the classes and in with the specialists. Gone are the days of you playing the medic to your buddies you are playing engineer and support. Now, with the universal loadout system, you could all be medics, all with the same guns. Only your specialist ability and trait will set you apart. This would allow you to “build synergies within your squad” a lot more if the specialists were tied to the classes of old a little more.
They are nice in terms of variety and we are sure to see more in future updates but this comes with a new way for EA to sell you cosmetics. Small indie devs gotta pay the bills too, we guess. It would be nice if there was a clear way to visually distinguish between friend and foe without having to rely on the red dot above their head.
Development woes
From day one of playing the beta, this felt like a game that went through development hell. From what we understand there have been many personnel changes made to the Battlefield dev team. That coupled with switching to the new Frostbite 4 engine and trying to develop a game during the pandemic meant there was very little chance this game would release as a whole, finished and polished product.
If only EA had the balls to delay this for the year or so it needed, we would probably be writing a very different review. Unfortunately, the game released and of the 100,000 or so reviews on Steam, about 60% are negative making it one of the worst-reviewed games on launch. The game also lost about half of its player base after 2 weeks. The recent special and free weekend managed to elevate those numbers a little, but only temporarily.
It’s like watching your parents’ wedding video after the divorce
Battlefield 2042 verdict
We can’t, in good conscience, recommend this game at full price to anyone no matter how much fun we had in it. This game will live and die by how its development continues. At the moment. the number of bugs is so high that we couldn’t list them all in one review. Check here for an updated list of every little thing wrong with the game and watch the list patiently as your biggest gripe is (hopefully) eventually crossed off. If you really want to play then best to wait for the next free weekend to test it out and buy it on special. You won’t have to wait long.
- Battlefield 2042 was reviewed on PC
- A review copy was provided by EA
