Battlefield 1 is beautiful, and horrific, and I love it. Pushing up through a muddy trench, while rain and mortars fall from the sky watching, my friend shish kabob an enemy while tossing mustard gas canisters over the wall sums up my Battlefield 1 playtime.
That was the moment I realized that 100 years ago this was what people my age were going through to defend their country. DICE has done an amazing job of bringing one of the most disgusting wars to life better than history books and black and white photos ever could. The opening scene does a great job of setting the tone for the game and really needs to be played to give it justice.
With all Battlefield games the single player is just an extra with the main focus on the multiplayer. One of Battlefield’s signature modes is Rush, with attackers arming and defending a charge on two objectives to move up to the next area of the map. DICE realized that 64 players didn’t really fit the game mode that well so they added a new mode called Operations to handle 64 players while keeping Rush in the game with 24 players. Operations is almost like Rush, but instead of planting a charge and defending it there are two or three objectives that all need to be held at once to move up to the next objective. Instead of a single player needing to get the objective, you need to have more players on the objective than the enemy to capture it, promoting teamwork. Operations is my favourite mode so far, focusing on pushing through trenches. The rest of the usual game modes are also there, Conquest, Team Death Match, and The Pigeon Carrier which is just “defend the vip for a minute.”
My biggest issue with Battlefield 1 is that the game unlocks are missing. It took me about 30 hours to unlock everything for all classes and it got to the point where I didn’t know what to do with the war bonds that were given to unlock stuff when you level up. It still has the same unlocks from the beta even though the app and website show new unlocks, however trying to change anything resets your load out to default. They also made changes to the classes, Engineer is now called Assault and has almost all of the anti-vehicle items, shotguns and SMGs. The repair tool was given to the Support to go with his LMG and ammo packs. The BF4 Assault is now called Medic but keeps his revives and health packs with a collection of full and semi auto rifles. The Recon has been renamed Scout but keeps his tripwires, semi and bolt action rifles.
It’s nice to see the Assaults able to go full anti-vehicle without needing to worry about repairs. I’m really happy Battlefield 1 didn’t have a terrible launch like the past games because I went in expecting a mess. The gameplay and servers work perfectly, it was worth sacrificing the full unlock system to prioritize the gameplay. If you liked any of the older Battlefield games you will love Battlefield 1 and if you’re unsure, you can play for 10 hours by signing up for $5 a month of Origin Access.
Patrick Algeo – Medic-Only player, and Writer for AYBOnline; his thoughts and opinions are his own.
