Battlefield Hardline takes the venerable combat FPS series in some pretty new directions. Eschewing military combat for a cops-vs-robbers angle, Hardline works hard to make the most of it’s premise. If you’re reading this review, it’s probably to find out what the game’s multiplayer is like – Battlefield’s multi has long been it’s big draw. But for first-time Battlefield developers Visceral (best known for the Dead Space series), Hardline, it seems the multiplayer simply wasn’t the focus.
Its fair to say that Hardline features a series-best single player campaign. It’s tightly paced, satisfyingly executed and adds a few gameplay mechanics we haven’t really run up against in first person shooters before. It also plays like a cross between Bad Boys and Miami Vice which should tell you everything you need to know about the sort of lunacy you should expect from the plot.
You play as Nick Mendoza (played by Nicholas Gonzalez), a Lawful Good beat cop who has just made detective. He is put on the Vice squad and is partnered with Khai Minh Dao (played by Kelly Hu), and together they begin to untangle Miami’s escalating drug war, tracing the supply chain from the streets all the way back to its source. As their investigation deepens and they are given more and more assignments that could be considered “off-the-books”, Mendoza begins to uncover the corruption that runs rampant in the MPD and resolves to stamp it out once and for all.
The story plays out over ten stages laid out like episodes of a TV show. This is actually a neat mechanic and the “Previously on Hardline” clips when you boot the game back up after exiting really help to remind you of what you were doing. Similarly, when you quit the game gives you a little “Next time on Hardline” that teases events that are coming up in the story to make you keen to return. In terms of plot, there isn’t much here you haven’t seen before but the presentation is so slick and polished that it’s hard not to be taken in by it.
Though the campaign itself isn’t especially long, trying to play through the game as a decent cop – scoping each situation, looking for ways to take out guards without raising suspicion – means you can add a good few hours to the total play time. The game rewards you for this style of play as well with a 15 level single player XP system that pays out new weapons and gadgets for successful arrests. Arrests are actually one of my favourite mechanics in the game. Smartly implemented, arrests are performed by sneaking up on a guard with your gun drawn before tapping L1 to flash your badge. You can tell up to three guards in an area to surrender but you will need to keep your gun moving from person to person or they’ll get big ideas about taking you out. Moving closer to them allows you to tap R3 to arrest them – Mendoza throws the perp to the ground, cuffs them and they are effectively neutralized. You’ll need to be crafty about where you arrest people though as patrolling guards might stumble on them and give the game away. Drawing guards off to a nice quiet alley or something is often the better strategy.
Pulling up your scanner with the R1 allows you to mark guard positions, alarms and destructables like explosive barrels. It also lets you track any criminals with open warrants on them. Arrest these jerks and you’ll get a sweet XP buff and maybe a few extra goodies to boot. You feel like a real Robocop when you pull this stuff off and it’s a pretty good feeling when you sneak into a large warehouse area teeming with 25 guards and proceed to arrest the entire place without anyone making a peep.
Special praise must be given to the game’s cast who work hard to create interesting characters. There isn’t a weak link among them performance-wise and there’s even a few pleasant surprises like True Detective’s Alexandra Daddario, The Shield’s Benito Martinez and Adam Harrington (who I spent most of the game trying to remember what I knew him from before remembering in a rush that he played Detective Roy Earle in L.A. Noire) popping up.
So: the campaign is fun and rather dopey, filled with explosions and crazy violence but it feels like Visceral have missed a real opportunity to explore a serious social issue here. You won’t actually believe the lengths Battlefield Hardline goes to keep from having to talk about the constant examples of excessive force, police brutality and the obvious militarization of what is domestic law enforcement contained within it’s story. When you push past the Fast and Furious-esque action movie storytelling, the story reveals itself to be remarkably cynical. There isn’t a single good cop in Miami and every facet of the story deals in moral grey areas.
Alright, alright, let’s talk about what many of you are reading this review for: the multiplayer.
This is an iterative multiplayer package with no real major additions to speak of. Where Battlefield: Bad Company added in destructable environments and squads, where Battlefield 3 added in truly gargantuan maps and total player counts, Hardline doesn’t really feel like it’s bringing anything new to the table outside of it’s multiplayer modes which are all based around the heists and cops-and-robbers aesthetic.
The multiplayer modes themselves are generally changed up versions of existing Battlefield modes. Heist is a variant mode of Rush that asks the criminal team to break into a venue and flee with the loot inside while the cops must defend the vault at all costs. Hotwire cribs liberally from Conquest but rather than capping and holding map points, you have to pinch cars that are marked on the map and drive them about while maintaining a minimum speed to hang onto them. Blood Money’s focus is on a big ol’ pile of cash that both teams have to claim in order to fill their bank accounts. There’s also a few modes that involve hostages and VIP’s too. To be fair, some of these things are new to the series and quite fun to play through but there’s a sense of deja-vu here, particularly for anyone who’s spent time in CounterStrike or even Overkill’s PayDay 2.
Levels are smaller than what you may have gotten used to and weapons are bought using in-game cash rather than unlocking them through play (which I didn’t hate – I’m sick to death of having to grind my way to decent goddamned weapons in modern shooters). This does lead to some pretty awesome, heated shoot outs that see walls and cover being disintegrated in the hail of bullets.
Before I wrap this up though, I want to talk a bit about the game’s visuals. I reviewed this title on PS4 and was consistently blown away by how nice Battlefield Hardline looks. I mean, damn Visceral. Gun models are detailed and interesting to look at. Facial animations and mocap are perfect, textures are crisp and the lighting spectacular. The graphics fan in me can’t wait to get it running on my PC and crank it up to 11. These are some serious next gen visuals and the team are to be commended for their work. There is a sequence late in the game that involves escaping from a skyscraper while under fire that had to be one of the prettiest and most intense things I’ve ever seen in a game.
There are certain things that Battlefield has always been great at and every new iteration has always featured something, some new component that pushed the series forward in a meaningful way. What you’ve got in Hardline are a series of experiments, and the effect is that multiplayer feels really familiar and almost a bit stale. That said, the campaign – despite it’s unwillingness to look too closely at itself – is more fun and certainly better put together than any single player Battlefield title to date.
Review Score: 7.0 out of 10
Highlights: Enjoyable single-player; Battlefield enthusiasts will eat up the multi
Lowlights: Doesn’t feel like it brings anything truly new to the table
Developer: Visceral Games
Publisher: EA
Released: March 17, 2015
Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Reviewed on PlayStation 4
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