It says something about the state of the FPS that the hype for Battlefield 6 is mostly down to the old, not the new. Here we are, howling at the moon for decades-old modes, "grounded" character models, classic class setups, and a map from 2011. Series vets are gobbling up this sequel as if we haven't eaten for weeks while patting DICE and its Battlefield Studios cohorts on the back for managing to execute a normal Battlefield game.

DICE's last effort tanked expectations, but that's not why Battlefield 6 has impressed me. It's the wider multiplayer culture of 2025—wrung out by years of battle royale banality and meta-pilled ranked modes—that created the conditions for an ordinary Battlefield to be the most exciting FPS of the year.

Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun.

That is the pitch of Battlefield 6, and it's a bullseye.

At least, a bullseye where it matters most. Battlefield 6 multiplayer gets two big thumbs up, with caveats. A 64-player round of Conquest remains a spiritual experience that no other series can touch. My body vibrates with anticipation every time I spawn into a chopper in the heat of battle, hit the deck to revive a squadmate in a smoke cloud, or nail a 100-meter headshot from the safety of a mountain perch.

Those are all best experienced on Mirak Valley, the biggest and best map at launch, but as many worried would be the case after the open beta, the rest of the map pool can't measure up. The Halo Forge-like Portal mode feels like a first draft. Attachments are boring, progression is too slow, and lots of guns are locked behind grindy challenges that suck.

I'm glad to have waited an extra week to fully review Battlefield 6, because these flaws weren't detectable in the pre-launch period. They're thorns in the side of what's otherwise the most fun I've had with a multiplayer FPS in years.

Good to be back

The greatest compliment I can pay to Battlefield 6 is that it's the only game I want to play right now. I've spent every night this past week bouncing between Conquest, my one true love, and Escalation, a new Conquest variant that shrinks the map over time as it piles on vehicle spawns. I wake up in the morning and play through the previous night's highlights in my head—the unlikely revives, the resilient tank runs, the 30-minute rounds that came down to a handful of tickets.

It's a game where a single 25-minute round can spawn a dozen storylines: Two ace pilots dueling over control of the skies, the slippery engineer who makes tank drivers' lives a living hell, the squad dedicated to locking down a single flag no matter what, the guy who keeps driving the EOD bot around desperate to torch someone (anyone!) to death. Battlefield 6 confidently hands players a sandbox and lets us find our own fun.

The prevailing goal of territory control is the glue that keeps the whole operation on the rails, but the magic of Battlefield is the ability to disappear into the crowd—the freedom to play doctor for folks charging headfirst into the meat grinder, pick off snipers from a rooftop, or break off from the action altogether to play tic-tac-toe with blowtorches.

Other shooters spend truckloads of money on skyboxes and soundscapes that mimic the atmosphere of a true, large-scale battle. Battlefield 6 doesn't have to pretend. The sound of a tank projectile shattering the sound barrier as it explodes eight feet behind me is enough to scare the camo off my soldier's trousers. I still can't get over the unbelievable sound work of Battlefield 6 vehicles: from the ear-splitting scream of jets as they tear up the sky, down to totally unnecessary details, like the rattling of expended shells piling up in a gunner turret.

The bite is as scary as the bark. It's exceedingly rare for an FPS to have vehicles at all, let alone make them cornerstone power weapons that can turn losses into victories. The other night, I jumped into the gunner seat of an attack chopper with a friend piloting, and for two glorious minutes, we were gods among mortals:

When Call of Duty fans say Battlefield could benefit from killstreaks, they forget that Battlefield is about being the killstreak. Wanna carpet bomb the entire map? Learn to fly. Want an all-seeing UAV scan? Play Recon, jump in a dumpster, and remote pilot a flying drone.

Balance is imperfect, of course, but not ruinous. Tanks are too flimsy against engineers packing three-to-five RPGs in their pockets, and I submit that "land mine spam" is getting out of hand. But largely, the sacred infantry-armor-air hierarchy is as smartly considered as you'd hope after 20 years of these games: tanks bully infantry, helicopters bully tanks, jets bully everyone, and infantry are persistent little roaches that are easy to squash individually, but impossible to rid yourself of completely.

Workshop

If Battlefield 6's best quality is that it's a lot like older Battlefields, the upgrade that justifies the new package is its gunplay. Gone are the moments in Battlefield 2042 where aiming directly at an enemy resulted in bullets landing just behind them—Battlefield 6's guns are loud, frightening machines with lightning-quick ballistics.

Up close, guns behave like hitscan weapons, with distance and drop only coming into play if you're shooting at something a football field away. Combined with some generally excellent sound work, brain-pleasing celebratory "clicks" on kills, and detailed reload animations, it's clear that Battlefield has finally caught up with Call of Duty in the field of satisfying gun-shootin'.

The renewed emphasis on punchy, reactive firefights in close quarters is part of a larger Battlefield 6 aim to out-Call of Duty Activision. EA is trying very hard to bring a new audience into the fold—so hard that some of Battlefield 6's design changes come off as bending over backwards to lure a type of player who expects a billion guns, hundreds of hours of grind, and smaller maps. Battlefield 6 has Call of Duty's Gunsmith, its gunplay, its firing range, and its vehicle-less modes.

Some changes are ultimately wins, but with others, Battlefield Studios has stumbled into the same bad habits. Battlefield has inherited CoD's "every assault rifle is kind of the same" problem. The weapons screen is a wall of brushed metal distinguished only by stat variations, with the odd gun here and there setting itself apart with its copious attachment options or extremely low recoil.

The attachments themselves are boring: grips that lower recoil, muzzles that lower recoil, lasers that lower spread, stocks that lower recoil, and a dozen-or-so scopes. It's a novel idea to trade arbitrary attachment limits for a pooled point system, but to hone in on a bigger issue, in 30 hours I've unlocked so few attachments that it hasn't come into play.

It's an indictment of the whole system that vehicle customization is way more interesting despite fewer options. I can equip tanks with other types of rockets with different specialties (air-controlled, manual, lock-on) and make a tough choice about which support tool is best—the smoke that also counters lock-on missiles is clutch, though a self-repair is arguably better for survival.

Slow learner

Battlefield 6's progression is slow. The first 20 levels are particularly grueling as you unlock gadgets and guns one rank at a time, unable to focus on your preferred class' gear. That changes at rank 20, but also gets annoying in a new way: some guns and gadgets are tied to class-specific challenges that currently range from totally broken to mind-meltingly tedious. For the better part of a week, I've been working my tail off to unlock the KTS100 LMG (the gun that caused a stir during the beta for its extremely low recoil) and my will to live is slipping.

The challenge calls for a whopping 10,000 hipfire damage with LMGs—doable but not fun—and 300 enemy suppressions with LMGs. What counts as enemy suppression? I'm glad you asked, because I've been forced to become something of an expert. Healing is paused while you're suppressed, but how to trigger such an effect on purpose is a black box. I've surmised that you have to be far away from the target, the target seems to need to be injured, and unintuitively, you have to miss your shots.

Killing a guy, arguably the ultimate form of suppression, does not count, so for the past five nights I've begun gunfights by intentionally shooting around bad guys, crossing my fingers that a "+10 suppression" bonus pops. Miserable stuff.

Battle fields

Mirak Valley, New Sobek City, and Operation Firestorm deliver the wider battlefields I craved in the open beta. I have qualms (especially with Sobek's restrictive boundaries and bad spawns), but in Mirak and Firestorm especially, DICE flaunts its mastery of the format it created.

They're slick, gorgeous landscapes with all the ingredients that make a map click—urban cover, rolling hills, open skies, room to breathe—while managing to feel natural and lived-in. DICE's spaces stand in contrast to the maps offered in the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beta, whose strict three-lane structure makes every match feel like the same sitcom set with slightly different furniture.

The problem is that there simply isn't enough peak Battlefield in Battlefield 6. The launch map pool of nine is overstuffed with maps that have drastically fewer vehicles and cramped bottlenecks that guarantee you'll either kill or be killed every 10 seconds.

Iberian Offensive, Empire State, Saints Quarter, Siege of Cairo—they're intense, they're something different, and they can be a welcome side dish after a 30-minute blowout on Mirak Valley, but they don't represent what Battlefield is best at, and it's disappointing that they outnumber the maps that do. There are just some obvious wins for a shiny new Battlefield map pool that EA chose to ignore at launch. Naval warfare is a staple of the series responsible for beloved island maps like Wake Island, and somehow nothing like it exists at all in Battlefield 6. It's coming someday, but not soon enough.

Thinking with Portal

At the top of my list of "disappointments that will probably get better at some point" is the server browser, initially billed as a convenient tool that lets us play Battlefield 6 however we want. The reality has been the opposite: nobody has been able to create new custom servers because of a "global server quota" caused, in part, by all the people grinding XP in bot matches.

I guess the promise that every Battlefield 6 owner would be entitled to one "persistent" server was a lie. Of course, EA wouldn't need to overload its dedicated server clusters if it'd included a third-party server support or a proper rent-a-server program, but modern publishers would rather poorly mimic the decentralized server browsers we had 20 years ago than cede an ounce of control over where people play.

The light at the end of the community tab's grim tunnel is Portal, Battlefield 6's evolved toolset for modifying maps, creating game modes, and publishing them for anyone to play. In a surprising move for a 2025 videogame, the Portal editor comes packaged as a branch of the open source Godot game engine, complete with all the map files and assets needed to, for instance, recreate Call of Duty 4's Shipment within a day, make a floating parkour course, or a zombie survival mode. While Battlefield 6's discoverability tools are currently a mess, the potential of Portal itself is unbelievable.

I do think it's a mistake to not include a basic custom mode creator in the game client itself—you can't even throw together a basic private match without a web browser at the moment—but when I see folks doing absurd stuff like using custom UI logic to run Snake, it gets easier to tolerate its rough edges as well as EA's cringey rebranding of a level editor as Portal and a custom mode as an experience. Come off it, you corpo dorks.

Performance

DICE kept saying that Battlefield 6 is obsessively optimized, and by golly, it meant it. In a time when PC performance standards have taken a nosedive, it's remarkable that an FPS that looks this good also runs this effortlessly. Much like Call of Duty, you can fire up Battlefield 6 and probably get by on whatever it defaults to.

I split my play time between two machines at 1080p (my monitors need some updating): One running an aging 2080 Super/i9 9900KS and another with a 5090/Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Both ran Battlefield 6 like a dream, and I was surprised at how subtle the improvements were at ultra vs. medium presets (with upscaling off!). It's hard to make this game look bad no matter how you slice it, a feat accomplished by foregoing costly techniques like raytracing and global illumination that tend to create more problems than solutions.

As Andy said in his full Battlefield 6 performance analysis: "It's truly refreshing to test something that feels like it's been designed from the ground up with smooth frame rates in mind."

Campaign: Don't bother

It took me almost two weeks to complete Battlefield 6's campaign, not because it's long or particularly challenging, but because every mission is about as fun as chipping a tooth. I had low expectations for the pillar of Battlefield 6 that reportedly suffered the shakiest development period, but I still hoped for better than this.

Instead of thinking long and hard about how to harness Battlefield's special ingredients—classes, big spaces, destruction, vehicles—into a singleplayer context, Battlefield Studios instead opted to copy Modern Warfare's homework (and still get the answers wrong). The adventures of spec ops unit Dagger13 play out in a gauntlet of linear, placid run-ins with Pax Armata goons broken up by the drywall chatter of battle buddies who will never be Captain Price no matter how hard they try.

It's as if the campaign isn't aware that it exists in Battlefield, a game with tanks, helicopters, and planes that you can actually fly. One early mission has the squad escorting a tank through a town. At no point can you drive or even mount up in the turret—you just run next to it, occasionally hitting it with a repair torch.

A few missions later, a helicopter picks up Dagger13 from a crumbling Brooklyn apartment building, only to drop them off 60 seconds later on a bridge via cutscene. If you're one of maybe 10 people primarily eyeing Battlefield 6 for its campaign, I suggest you turn around and run.

Next gen

But Battlefield is a shared pastime at its core, and grading on that curve, Battlefield 6 is an imperfect success. It isn't especially innovative or surprising if you've been here a while, but its refinements in gunplay are a major leap for a series that's lagged behind where it matters most.

Battlefield 6 is also the strongest piece of evidence yet that the casual FPS is cool again—people want to curate, create, and modify their fun. They want community more than competition. Battlefield 6 understands that the best FPS is a place, not just a service. The execution isn't perfect, but the heart is there.