The folks at EA DICE decided the best way to freshen up the market of first-person military shooters was to go backwards, to World War I. The entertainment industry has never quite fallen in love with the War to End All Wars like it has with World War II, and it makes sense. Not quite as massive (though fighting occurred on most continents), primarily trench warfare, the technology wasn't as good, and there wasn't exactly a clear case of who the "bad guys" were, given so much of it was nationalism driving nations to war as imperial Europe came crashing down.
Not many games take place during World War I for those reasons. Off the top of my head, I can think of Red Baron, Sky Kid, Valiant Hearts, and Wings of Glory. Of that list, none are first person shooters, and for good reason. It is hard to turn World War I into a fun, action-packed shooter when the most common weapons of the conflict were slow, and enemies often fought hand-to-hand in muddy trenches.
DICE managed to get around that issue by effectively making it a World War II game. The speed and pace of battles is fast and furious, almost no different than previous Battlefield or Call of Duty games. Often, you find yourself running and gunning from checkpoint to checkpoint, just the same as any other military shooter before it. It feels a bit like a missed opportunity to try something wherein anxiety in combat stems from weapons that do not fire in rapid succession. It would be a complete change to the formula, but imagine a FPS wherein movement and accuracy were significantly more important than just wildly spraying shots after popping out of cover?
To be fair, they do add a little bit of that thanks to a key upgrade for the genre: larger, more open maps. There's so much space to maneuver, and because of that, more opportunities to flank or be flanked. The addition of artillery off in the distance of the map encourage motion. Staying in place too long can get you shelled. Additionally, they at least attempt to give players the choice to approach a level as they would like. Some campaign missions allow you to choose the order of checkpoints to take, for example. The size and space of the maps goes a long way to increasing the sense of scale of each battle.
Even more, stealth is encourage from time to time as well. During missions wherein you are completely alone, rushing into an area can be a horrible idea. The trenches can be filled with well-armed enemies, and the artillery and machine gun nests will make quick work if you're not careful. It isn't always the easiest, and first-person stealth can be a bit clunky, but this also works to give players more control. There are missions wherein you get to choose which outposts to take first and how exactly you want to go about it: quietly, or guns blazing.
The addition of stealth gameplay enhances the World War I setting somewhat. Given that you are frequently pressing on established enemy outposts, it makes sense that you would be at a huge disadvantage with just a bolt-action rifle while the enemy has fortified positions. Taking out some guards quietly makes a world of difference even if you get caught and the alarm blares.
That said, there are also plenty of missions that essentially betray the setting. The finale of T.E. Lawrence's campaign devolves into a chaotic event that is tedious and, at times, unfair. Artillery shells you from a distance while airplanes drop bombs above. Yet there isn't always adequate warning that you are in danger of being hit. Because the only way to damage the armored train is to shoot it with heavy weaponry, you are constantly running from one cannon to the next. When the game is at its most action-packed is when it decides to introduce more of a slow-loading element to the play. Every shot you take requires a time-consuming reload, which leaves you vulnerable. Getting out of the reload animation can itself take a moment as well, so you are liable to die before you even realize anything is headed your way. The slow loading makes sense, of course, but is an element completely absent from the game except for that point.
It feels a bit like the stories within the campaign are a bit try-hard as well. They're brief and not super compelling, often attempting to be emotional or profound without actually doing the narrative leg-work to earn it. The very first mission is great! You can't win it. All you can do is keep fighting until the game decides you get the point. Players jump around from soldier to soldier, fighting off a charging wave of Germans. When you finally get killed, a name and the birth and death year appears on screen. Then, the game thrusts you into the next soldier where the process is repeated. It is a shockingly powerful moment in a military shooter. Suddenly, these people who are dying on screen aren't nobodies. They aren't just avatars. The names and the continued failure really highlights the sense of futility soldiers must have felt during the Great War!
One can't necessarily fault DICE for not continuing that throughout the campaigns, but it would have been so much more meaningful if every time the player dies, they essentially transport into another soldier. Imagine if, rather than having death represent the player failing, each one represented another soldier dying. And imagine if after players clear the objectives, the game informs players of how many soldiers they got killed. What a profound statement that would be from a military shooter!
Instead, we get single-person stories that are too brief to earn the emotion they try to hit at the end. There's a bit of ludonarrative dissonance when you are playing a story in which the character you control is recounting a story from the war. Thus, players are playing an event that has already happened, yet the name and life dates show up whenever you fail. It feels extremely "gamey," and takes you out of the moment. Seeing the same name show up with their years of life really loses its power after the third or fourth time it pops up. In that way, the campaign stories all miss an opportunity to highlight the futility of WWI, or say anything meaningful about war itself.
The game is fun to play, with the maps and stealth elements key to improving the genre. That said, it fails to offer anything interesting as a result of its setting. It's really a WWII game. There are more automatic weapons than bolt-action rifles. The action is really fast-paced. And, when all it said and done, the Germans are still presented as the "bad guys." While not every member of the German national military was a Nazi, Call of Duty games largely presents battles with SS troops. The evil associated with that makes killing them almost cathartic.
This becomes a bit more problematic in a game set in World War I. I have no reason to feel satisfied killing German troops in this setting. They had no more desire to fight the stupid war than the Allied troops. There really could have been an interesting element wherein players control, say, a British soldier in one story, then a German in the other, to really get a sense of how bleak and futile and awful the war was. Instead, we are presented - yet again - with Germans and the Ottoman troops as the only bad guys. In one campaign, they are comic book villain-type evil.
Perhaps the best thing to say about Battlefield 1 is that it is fun, but could have been so much more than what we got. It's a solid military shooter to pick up if you are like me and haven't played one in a long time, but otherwise, completely fails to do anything half as profound as they appear to want to do. In some ways, it's the perfect game for World War I: a forgettable game centered on the Lost Generation.
Reductive Rating: It's fine.
Available On: XBox One, PS4, PC
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