Visceral Games’ first-person shooter Battlefield Hardline is now available across consoles and PC. The reviews are out, and it seems like this cops-and-robbers take on the beloved Battlefield FPS franchise is pretty good, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Visceral games, developer of Dead Space, has a deserved reputation for strong narrative – and the story and single-player campaign of recent Battlefield games is one of the franchise’s most-touted criticisms. But the studio hasn’t made a multiplayer shooter of this kind before, and will be put under the microscope as a result despite close collaboration with DICE and the recruitment of multiple multiplayer shooter development veterans.
Plus, there’s the whole cops versus robbers thing, which hasn’t been done in this way before. Visceral was going for a Miami Vice kind of feel.
So did the gamble pay off? Below is a sampling of review scores and editor opinions from ur favorite gaming websites.
GameSpot gave Hardline 7 out of 10 stating, “You can spawn in a chopper, do your part as a gunner to take out valued targets on that ground, and then jump out with a parachute so you can capture a marked car. This isn’t Iwo Jima or an Arabian oil field–but it’s still pure Battlefield.”
Destructoid gave Hardline 7 out of 10 and noted, “While Hardline is tone deaf at times, mostly it is just deafening. Explosions and bombast are used not to distract from a troubling narrative as much as a stale one perfunctorily paced and reminiscent of network television emptiness.”
“Battlefield Hardline can be both more and less than its predecessors. In areas where Battlefield has always excelled and pushed forward, Hardline presents experiments, rather than refinements or fixes. The result is multiplayer that feels very familiar, very quickly. But its campaign, while feeling not completely sure about what it wants to be, is more interesting and certainly all-around better than the last few years’ worth of Battlefield games. The result is something that’s both less and more than its predecessors,” notes Polygon, giving it 7 out of 10.
US Gamer gave it 3.5 out of 5 and notes, “The single-player mode starts out promisingly, but bogs down into a rather weak stealth game whose action feels hit-and-miss. Multiplayer is where the game works best, especially on its smaller maps, which can deliver truly thrilling and intense action.”
VentureBeat doesn’t have an awards system, but noted, “It has some flaws. Along the way, I felt like multiplayer took priority over the main campaign. You don’t get to fly around in an aircraft in single-player missions, even though you actually escape in one at one point. In other words, single-player experiences give you a taste of what is possible to do in these big virtual spaces, but only multiplayer really lets you live out that fantasy.”
