Above: Battlefield: Hardline multiplayer Crosshair mode is for the e-sports crowd.
Multiplayer has lots of new modes, maps, and weapons
One of the best parts of Battlefield: Hardline is the multiplayer, which is often the only part of the game that many players will play. Hardline has seven game modes, including the familiar Conquest and Team Deathmatch modes. The new modes are split between e-sports levels and clever takes on the cops-and-robbers genre. You can move faster as a foot soldier than you could in past Battlefield games — a nod to the fun of Call of Duty games.
Hotwire is a speed mode, where you steal cars or stop them from getting stolen. I kept getting run over when on foot on this map, and I found it hard to shoot accurately while a passenger, so you might as well be the driver. It’s the ultimate car chase multiplayer game, like a “dogfight on the ground,” according to EA.
In Heist mode, criminal players have to rob a bank or an armored car. The cops have to stop them before they take the heist to a getaway spot where a helicopter takes it away. This mode actually takes some coordination. Blood Money is a mode where you fight over piles of cash, spread through the map.
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Crosshair is an e-sports mode where five players challenge five players. One of the players is a VIP target, an informant, that a gang is trying to take out and the police are trying to protect. I enjoyed playing this map, and it reminded me that you really have to aim carefully or pick your shots wisely because you really only get one shot to take out an enemy. There’s nothing worse than getting in a gun duel with the last surviving player on the other team and then losing.
And Rescue is another 5-on-5 e-sports mode where the cops have to rescue hostages. In the e-sports modes, you face “permadeath,” where you only get one life during each round. It’s fast and it goes through four rounds. Destruction carries over from one round to the next. At half time, players switch sides and the destruction is reset. While the Growhouse map I played this on seemed simple, there were many different ways to win Rescue.
Like other Battlefield games, Hardline’s multiplayer has “Levolution,” where players can do something that triggers a change in the map, like a dust storm. And Hardline has 27 vehicles and 51 weapons for both criminals and cops. In a nod to realism, all of the players won’t have access to rocket launchers and other military-scale weaponry. But they will be able to find special weapons in the battlefield as prizes to fight over. You can use shaped charges or even a melee weapon to knock holes in walls and change the dynamics of a map.
The maps open up different tactics. The nine maps include Bank Job (a medium-size map with a big stone building that houses a bank); The Block, a downtrodden neighborhood map with a lot of destructible objects; Dust Bowl (a battle where dust storm blows through a town); Downtown (which came from visiting downtown Los Angeles during the E3 trade show); Derailed (a large map set in the Los Angeles River); Everglades (with fan boats that are great for hot wire and conquest); Growhouse (a marijuana warehouse that is good for Team Deathmatch and rescue); Hollywood Heights (with a lot of destruction where you can shatter big bay windows and take down a big building). There’s a wildfire in the hills as a backdrop; and Riptide, a map set in the beautiful beach houses of the Florida Keys.
The attention to detail is awesome in multiplayer, as it is in single-player. You hear, for instance, the muffled screams of hostages as you get near them in a hostage rescue mode.
Blurred lines
Video games often simplify matters of right and wrong into black or white. But not everybody is who they seem to be. While Hardline appears to have a simple cops-and-robbers approach to gameplay, the story blurs the lines between who is really good and who is in it for other things, like money, revenge, or something else. With 10 episodes and a prologue, Battlefield Hardline has a lot more time than a movie to explore these themes. It doesn’t give you so much choice about what kind of person you will be. It is really about what kind of person Mendoza is, and the choices that he will make along the way as his circumstances change drastically.
This isn’t a tame drama. The F-word is plentiful in the dialogue. The cops aren’t saints, and neither are the people who they lord over. Police supervisor Julian Dawes says, “You’re convinced you’re on of the good guys. There’s no such thing, son.” This is nowhere near like some of the old EA games of the past in that respect. And it’s no surprise it is rated mature.
Above: Battlefield: Hardline gets humor from Marcus “Boomer” Boone (Eugene Byrd).
Clever writing and tech
Battlefield Hardline has a couple of funny moments. It starts out pretty serious, but as the partners become familiar with each other, they banter more. And by the time game introduces Marcus “Boomer” Boone, a techie sidekick who plays the role of the clever but cowardly foil who makes the bravery of Mendoza and the meanness of other characters stand out. It is the modern writing and characters like this that keep Battlefield Hardline from becoming as boring as Dragnet. Instead, it’s more interesting, like The Wire.
The tech gadgets also keep the game from getting boring. You can use portable zipline and grappling hook guns to create your own paths through levels where the enemies on the ground are too hard to beat. But they’re not a cure-all. I tried to zipline over the heads of a bunch of enemies in broad daylight, and they shot me out of the sky.