Brooklyn’s on fire. The intermittent pops of muzzle fire are drowned out as tank treads grind the asphalt down Washington Street toward the East River waterfront, where a 100-year-old carousel lays in ruin. As U.S. forces lay waste to the tourist spots and halal trucks in a deadly skirmish with a fictional paramilitary cell, you can’t help but wince in horror.
Thankfully, the scene isn’t something pulled from the daily news, even if it’s nightmarishly close to a future many Americans fear. Instead, the violent upheaval of New York City is just one of the backdrops for EA’s Battlefield 6 (out Oct. 10), where 64 players are competing to be king of the hill in a shockingly realistic first-person shooter.
The phrase “realistic” is a little loaded; the sequences depicted aren’t exactly what anyone’s really expecting to see anytime soon. But they still hit close to home, and the heavy plodding of infantry and the high-tech physics of crumbling buildings make everything feel about as real as can be. While other games are trading in cartoonish action and power fantasy, Battlefield 6’s harrowing gameplay feels like a back-to-the-basics approach, even if it’s still this over the top.
After taking a backseat to the juggernaut success of competitor Call of Duty for the last decade or so, Battlefield is back as arguably the most-anticipated military shooter of 2025. And with a pretty solid single-player campaign and best-in-class multiplayer mode that makes the horrors of war into a digestibly addictive romp, Battlefield 6 is a welcome sight, even if it frequently makes you want to close your eyes.
Obama-era military machismo
Although it’s tried many times over the years with sub-series like Bad Company, single-player story campaigns have never really been Battlefield’s forte. The newest one isn’t revolutionary by any means; it’s mostly an excuse to show off high-fidelity, on-rails versions of locations used in multiplayer maps for some neat action set pieces. The paper-thin plot follows a group of U.S. Marines as they bounce around the world aiming to thwart the terrorism of a fictional private army called Pax Armata.
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The story is wall-to-wall clichés, with the playable bits serving as flashbacks to catch audiences up to the present, where the Marines are interrogating a shady government official about how the world went FUBAR. The core cast are forgettable, but the game pulls tricks from older-era Call of Duty titles like Modern Warfare and Black Ops by saddling players with alternating POVs of the events just long enough to learn someone’s name before you’re forced to live out their demise.
Battlefield 6‘s character are one-dimensional stands-ins that get the job done.
Electronic Arts
Mechanically, most encounters are just a series of shooting galleries, which doesn’t really play to Battlefield’s strengths. While some of the areas are relatively open, the forward momentum of the plot means there’s always a right and wrong way to go — although you’ll only find out which when an on-screen countdown yells to return to the combat zone.
The level design occasionally takes inspiration from the multiplayer, where the solution to smoking out a sniper is usually to bring an entire building down. But often, it’s confusing in the main campaign. Players are told to clear out a three-story apartment, but basic rifle bullets are bringing the walls down around you, with unknown enemies appearing like a jump scare.
The developers admirably tried to include the class system in the story, where each squad member serves a specific role like medic or engineer, but it mostly means that being shot will leave players laying around waiting for a somewhat dim AI partner to come revive them even while enemies are swarming the body.
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The speculative fiction plot remains politically neutral — there’s just good guys and bad ones.
Electronic Arts
The campaign is at its best when it’s showing off gorgeous destruction in scripted sequences. An early game HALO jump sees smoke and condensation caking on the player’s visor as they plummet in freefall toward a warzone in Gibraltar. Another has the squad sneaking through the alleyways of Cairo using night vision goggles while avoiding a protest that’s boiling over into a full-blown riot in the streets.
The big selling point from the marketing materials is the Brooklyn-based mayhem that takes up a big chunk of the plot in the game’s first act. Bringing the battle home for players to storm brownstones in Brooklyn Heights or desperately traverse a crumbling Manhattan Bridge is effectively scary — for most people. Despite its very clearly apolitical speculative fiction slant, it’s hard not to see parallels between U.S. Armed Forces occupying a liberal city in a video game and what’s happening daily on CNN.
The cognitive dissonance is handwaved by sticking the blame on a made-up, morally compromised private army, but it’s obvious that the experience works both ways regardless of your real-life political leaning. For a certain type of MAGA-minded American, tearing through Grand Army Plaza with a 50-cal is bound to be virtual Viagra. For others, it’s a too-close-to-home horror show, although with healthy dose of NIMBYism — it’s a relief to jump back to Egypt or Iran to engage in the same level of wanton carnage on foreign soil that pop culture has desensitized. The deft trick is convincing you that, no matter why you like it, it’s okay because you’re the good guy.
Domestic warfare leans into shock value, but is effective nonetheless.
Electronic Arts
At its peak, Battlefield 6’s story mode operates on the same wavelength as late-2000s military shooters, where morally gray acts of war are a dime a dozen, punctuated by the shock value of domestic threats played out with an immersive POV.
Multi-level multiplayer mayhem
Despite its surprisingly competent story campaign, the real draw of Battlefield is the multiplayer — and it’s rarely been better than in this new game. Stripping all the fat and gimmicks from recent entries like Battlefield 2024 (2021) and Battlefield 1 (2016), the gameplay style has gone back to emulate the design of the series’ best installments like Battlefield 3 and 4 (2011 and 2013).
Since its earliest entries, the defining factor of Battlefield’s competitive multiplayer has been its sheer scope. Originally 24, then 32, and now a 64-player assault on the senses, there’s really nothing else like what EA’s military shooter series offers. It’s an experience where users can start a match on foot, racing headfirst into a hailstorm of bullets, only to end up in a jeep, tank, or attack chopper raining fire on the roof of an apartment complex moments later.
The single-player set pieces go big, but the multiplayer can match it.
Electronic Arts
The class-based system encourages teamwork; the only way to successfully take control of a designated zone is to throw bodies at it, but it’s easy to get cut down by sniper and artillery fire. The smartest way forward is to coordinate and play your role — whether that’s Assault, Engineer, Support, or Recon. Each class has its own unique abilities: Assault lets players run point with heavy firepower and improved mobility; Engineers can fix friendly vehicles or do extreme damage to the opposition’s; Support can resupply ammunition and revive fallen allies instantly; Recon allows players to spot and mark enemies for higher field visibility.
Unlike Call of Duty, where everyone is essentially their own one-man Rambo, there’s more to Battlefield than just sprinting around endlessly killing foes. There is, of course, basic deathmatch, which is playable in both a classic 2v2 team setup or in smaller squads of four where the groups are all racing to rack up 50 kills for the win.
But the real Battlefield experience is the tug-of-war around capturing locations in prolonged battles of attrition. Modes like Conquest, Breakthrough, and Domination are all different variations on this concept with minor tweaks to the ruleset that defines each one. Conquest is a large-scale skirmish where two teams fight to control different flagged points around the map (labeled A to F) where holding each point for an extended period dwindles the opposition’s score until it reaches zero. Domination is the same, except with less points to capture and smaller arenas for more hectic action.
The modes aren’t that varied, but the core experience remains unparalleled.
Electronic Arts
Breakthrough is similar, but rather than having everyone on equal footing bouncing around points on loop, it’s a more direct attacker and defender scenario where one team pushes forward, and the other must hold the line. Rush mode is the same, but smaller, and focuses the push on destroying objectives rather than just flooding the areas to control them.
While most of the multiplayer modes are different flavors of the same idea, there’s a perpetually improvisational element that makes Battlefield 6 shine where other shooters falter. If a team is failing to take a point because their infantry is being bottlenecked into doorway that becomes a kill box, you can always just remove the entire wall with an RPG. Suddenly, the levy’s broken and everyone can rush.
While the slower speed and emphasis on physics, from the long-distance drop of bullet trajectories to the breakable foundations of structures, are a huge part of Battlefield’s DNA, there’s also just an inherent silliness to some of the tactics that stir joy.
Playing to your class strengths is the key to victory.
Electronic Arts
Playing as a Support medic means you can gain tons of experience and turn the tide of battle by just sprinting around a crash site defibrillating a dozen downed soldiers with a slap in the face, screaming, “On your feet, soldier!” As an engineer, it’s a thrill to ride shotgun in a helicopter just holding down the repair button as a simple blowtorch keeps the bird alive despite heavy fire turning its walls to Swiss cheese. It’s the balance of realism and gaminess that just neatly threads the needle.
Nowadays, everyone’s got a gimmick. In the arms race for audience’s undivided attention, both single-player and competitive games have become their own self-perpetuating ecosystems. Everything is bigger, louder, and packed to the brim with pop culture IP skins just to get people to bite.
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By comparison, Battlefield 6 practically feels quaint. It’s an all-meat and potatoes action shooter that sticks to a 20-year-old playbook, both in how it plays and how it blindly sidesteps any real point of view on its amoral militaristic jingoism. With how overwhelming the noise in both gaming and reality has become, it’s a frankly welcome distraction.
Battlefield 6 launches on Oct. 10 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
