It doesn’t take long until everything starts blowing up in Battlefield 6.
After a lean introduction that outlines the collapse of international order in the late 2020s, you assume the role of Gunnery Sergeant Dylan Murphy, an American marine on a NATO base in Georgia. Murphy and his squadmates are about to evacuate this base ahead of its transfer of control to a giant private military company called, bleakly, Pax Armata. Within minutes, the base comes under a surprise attack from the impatiently aggressive PMC. Soldiers scream and die, gouts of flame blossom on the tarmac like nasty orange flowers. Gunfire rattles. Here are the explosions, ahead of schedule.
Battlefield 6’s opening plays out as a statement of intent. You are here, it knows, to shoot enemy soldiers and watch the vehicles, buildings, and natural world all around your character fall apart or combust in spectacular fashion. The point of the game, whether in its single-player campaign or multiplayer mode, is to make you feel like you’re an agent of small change within the overwhelming chaos of a warzone.
To that end, the game’s first mission is a kind of Disneyland ride for the Guns and Ammo set. As Murphy, you grab the turret of a Humvee and rattle off hundreds of bullets at Pax forces as a landscape of greenly forested hills and concrete military installations flies by, speeding past exploding buildings and burning vehicles until there’s a chance to catch your breath on the lip of a cliffside overlooking an office building in mid-construction. From there, Murphy and his squad rush into a gunfight. You’re introduced to the on-foot rhythm of popping in and out of cover to shoot enemies, order a teammate to throw a grenade, and set charges to blow up the office, destroying data servers before Pax can capture them. The evacuation goes wrong and the level ends with Murphy and his team shot down in a helicopter, fighting off overwhelming forces in a heroic last stand.
There’s a saccharine series of death scenes. Murphy reminds his friends that their motto is “unconquerable spirit” as their life drains, messy and red, onto an American flag conspicuously dropped onto the mangled floor of the helicopter. He alone is rescued in the nick of time. Murphy drapes the flag on a corpse, presses his hand to it, and watches blood spread out through the fabric and onto his gloves.
This is hardly subtle stuff, but it is invigorating in a retrograde sense. It’s also, to Battlefield 6’s credit, something of a false indication of what’s to come. Over the eight missions to follow, the game tries–and sometimes succeeds–in subverting its players’ expectations of what a modern military shooter should look like, both in the direction the plot takes and in the ways that many fights play out.
The campaign takes place over the course of nine missions, bookended by cinematics that show Murphy confronting a CIA agent sometime after the past-tense levels have taken place. Though the scope of the game is global, it’s told almost entirely through the perspective of Murphy and his fellow Americans in a special Marine squad dubbed Dagger 13. This means that the NATO allies encountered throughout the game serve only as backdrop for an international conflict that ends up largely centered on the United States.
The exception is the primary villain of the game: a British Pax leader called Kincaid. Battlefield 6 places its world-changing action within the context of personal relationships and so Kincaid is an embittered soldier formerly betrayed by an American comrade, a foil for Murphy’s doubting patriotism with a massive chip on his shoulder and a gruesome acid burn scar on his face to match.
Much of the first half of the game sees Dagger 13 hunting down Kincaid for more information on his involvement with Pax Armata’s mysterious access to advanced technology. It’s a simple enough way to propel a plotline forward, and it works—though the campaign also moves between set pieces at such a breakneck pace that it could hold a hamster’s attention. The player is tossed between a variety of scenarios that break up the gunfighting formula, like one in which you lead a tank column between the wrecked cars and cracked roads of a bombed-out Egyptian highway, or another that sees you hopping across the wrenched-apart steel and concrete of a collapsing bridge.
There are also mission introductions that involve parachuting through the clouds and down past glowing tracer fire toward the cramped, sun-soaked streets of a war-torn Gibraltar. And, later in the same mission, a beach landing on a heavily defended shore where you rock along on an amphibious tank, battleships sinking into the waves behind you and artillery raining down on vehicles ahead. There’s a sense of choking dread in both cases, and especially in the latter, when crashing through the roiling sea and onto a beach defended by mounted guns, an inferno of oily black clouds of smoke and raging fires obscuring the view.
Unfortunately, the finer points of each enemy encounter aren’t nearly as engaging as their presentation. The shooting is finely tuned, with the basic act of pattering bullets into a Pax soldier or punching a hole through the side of a wall with a rocket launcher gratifying. The enemies just aren’t very interesting to fight. Despite solid level layouts that facilitate basic, on-the-fly tactics like flanking or dodging into cover, enemy infantry typically arrives in waves of dopey soldiers running directly onto the battlefield from some hidden corner in lumped-together masses. Your AI squadmates, who can be ordered to shoot, toss smoke or frag grenades, and mark enemies, are pretty braindead, too. Though the trappings of just about every battle are vibrant and creative, they’re let down by a sense of artificiality at their center.
The sound design in Battlefield 6, as in past entries to the series, goes a long way toward keeping the illusion of real danger present. Regardless of how pedestrian it might be (in video game terms) to shoot through encounters with one group of enemies after another, the crack of an overhead sniper shot or boom of a nearby explosion, bits of gravel dropping down like hailstones, provides a sense of deadly chaos.
It’s also one of the highlights of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer. Freed from the confines of its story, the narrative reduced to a backdrop for eternal battles between NATO and Pax forces, the game comes alive as a lavish digital toybox. Over the review period, the multiplayer was mostly made available in two- or four-hour sessions, the servers filled with other reviewers and too many bots. While this makes it hard to gauge exactly how matches will feel once the game is properly live, a limited tour of the various modes and features represents, along with the beta test period from this summer, a worthwhile indication of what to expect.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“It’s like World War III, but fun.”
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Developer:
Battlefield Studios
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Type of game:
Single-player and multiplayer military-themed first-person shooter.
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Liked:
Appropriately nihilistic campaign, great sound and visual spectacle in campaign and multiplayer.
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Disliked:
Dull enemy AI and underdeveloped cast of characters; smaller maps and stripped-back modes are underwhelming.
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Platforms:
PC (played), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5
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Release Date:
October 10, 2025
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Played:
Just over six hours to complete the campaign; roughly 10 hours of multiplayer.
The maps are largely very good, especially in the case of a valley in Tajikistan, its ruined houses dwarfed by snowy mountain ranges, or the stretch of muddy ground surrounding a construction site outside of Cairo. In each of these, Battlefield 6 shines by providing lots of room for grand engagements between infantry and tanks, helicopters and jets either attacking ground forces or fighting their own battles in the sky.
The classic Battlefield frustration of spawning in and either immediately getting shot or blown up, or sprinting toward the center of the action only to get sniped from an unseen shooter, remains. But so, too, does the controlled chaos of large-scale combat between squads, all working toward the same objective in different ways. Fighting on-foot in a dilapidated house while tanks roar by outside the windows remains one of the most distinctive, exhilarating experiences in a multiplayer shooter. The smaller maps are less successful. While serviceable as a stripped-down infantry-on-infantry shooter, Battlefield 6’s combat works best when it’s augmented by other factors, like needing to mine routes that tanks might take toward an objective or shooting rockets at enemy helicopters. In comparison, close-quarters fighting just isn’t as strong of a draw.
There’s a lot to do in multiplayer as well, and a good amount of flexibility in how to do it. After every match, across a wide variety of game modes, a confetti blast of new weapon attachments and vehicle customization options fills the screen, providing incentive to continue customizing your approach to combat until, in coming months, the real obsessives kill the joy of experimentation by locking down a mathematically superior loadout for every class. At its core, though, the focus on objective-based modes and the enjoyment that comes from taking any part in such large-scale matches means that even the lousiest player can get something out of the multiplayer.
Battlefield 6’s general look and feel is easier to appreciate when playing online, but its campaign is still worthwhile as tone-setting and a piece of modern military fiction in its own right. The characters are too flat, and the plot fails to dig deep enough into its richest elements, but there’s a bitterly nihilistic edge to the story that speaks to something truer than its paranoiac World War III premise might suggest. As the plot progresses, the instances of patriotic heroism its characters try to engage in ring hollower and hollower. The flag-centric last stand from the opening mission seems like a cruel joke to the Americans of Dagger 13, who begin to see, in the nakedly monetary goals of Pax Armata, an unintended reflection of their own nation and the crumbling goals of Western hegemony.
There’s an honesty to this tone and narrative. Like the climate apocalypse backdrop of Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 6 is a game that acknowledges the doomed trajectory of the current Western political landscape and, rather than offer a hopeful alternative, figures we all might as well enjoy the dramatic thrills of its take on a world order falling violently apart. It points very directly to America’s stewardship of this process but assigns real blame to a Hobbesian understanding of human nature—one in which survival, in the form of moneymaking, is an eternal guiding principle that will send us all to ruin.
At one point, the villainous Kincaid poses a question to one of the Dagger 13 heroes: “Don’t you want to die for something real?” And the answer, by then, is clear. There’s nothing worth dying for when these characters can no longer believe in their country or its allies.
Battlefield 6’s campaign is too unevenly executed to make its vision as compelling as it ought to be, but it still works well enough to inflect the entire game with a healthy cynicism unusual for the genre. Though every multiplayer military shooter feels at least slightly callous when viewed from a distance, unending war modeled with a twinned desire for both realism and the rendering down of martial violence into sport, Battlefield 6 manages to make a natural home for its design ethos in that discordance. It finds the road to global ruin pretty exciting, and believes that you will, too. For the most part, it’s right.
