Above: You can make bad guys “freeze” with your badge and then cuff them in Battlefield Hardline.
Weapons aren’t always lethal
You don’t have to kill everybody you meet. Because you’re a cop, you have to act with restraint. Early in the first episode, you come upon two bad guys and get the drop on them. You can hit the left bumper control to make them freeze, and then you point your gun at either one. A meter appears above each bad guy. If it turns red, that means the bad guy is about to shoot you. But if you keep shifting your gun aim from one bad guy to the other, you can make the meters go down until you get close enough to cuff one of them. Your partner will watch the other while you cuff the first one.
The freeze mechanic works with as many three enemies at the same time, and it’s a good way for a police officer to use the power of his authority to control a wider group of bad guys. It really only works when you surprise those enemies, and before they resort to violence. You don’t always have a choice in how the levels end, but you do have a choice in how you take out the bad guys in each level. That adds to replayability.
You can also sneak up on rivals and knock them out with a fist or distract them by throwing out a shell casing. That lets you cuff them and ship them off for an arrest credit, which earns you points in a larger meta game. Papoutsis made it through the game with only two kills. I didn’t do that, but I liked having the choice of going lethal or nonlethal, and it makes Hardline different from many of the others in the shooter and crime genres.
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Above: Not everybody gets to have a rocket launcher in Battlefield: Hardline.
Cinematics and voice acting deliver authenticity
The gameplay in between the cinematic cutscenes is good. Most of the levels in Hardline’s single-player campaign are good. The first episode introduces you to Mendoza and his partner, a veteran detective named Khai Minh Dao, during a long car ride cinematic. Then you have to sneak up on some bad guys in a tough neighborhood that feels alive with ambient urban nightlife. As the officers patrol the neighborhood, a woman talks about a restraining order. Another bangs a garbage can with a lid and complains to the officer, “Lid doesn’t fucking fit.” The voice-acting is impressive, and it doesn’t get repetitive. That’s one of the small touches that makes you feel immersed in the experience.
Above: Battlefield Hardline’s scanner lets you overhear a lot of gossip.
Investigations akin to CSI
Battlefield games are grounded in reality. You don’t get too many sci-fi weapons. But the one piece of cool gadgetry you get to play with is your police scanner. This isn’t an old radio. It’s a tool that scans the environment for evidence. You can pickup a lot of clues that tell you about the story. And for completionist gamers, you can scour every scene until you find every bit of evidence and get a full picture of the story and earn points in a meta game.
The scanner also has a shotgun microphone built into it. So you can use it to listen in to the conversations of the people that you’re scanning from afar. You can identify them and figure out if there’s a warrant out for their arrest. The scanner tells you what kinds of chemicals you have discovered or the significance of a paper on a desk. And as you listen in on conversations, it lets you overhear the inane gossip of the guards in various compounds. You get a lot of ambient chatter, but some useful knowledge, too.
The scanner slows down the game’s speed (I view this as a negative), and you can’t do things like jump onto a dock while you’re using it. You also can’t shoot anyone while you’re scanning, so it is really a tool used while you are safe and casing out a target. You may not want to scour every scene for evidence. In one scene, you actually return to a crime scene in order to dig out something you may have missed.
Above: Khai Minh Dao (Kelly Hu) is the female lead in Battlefield: Hardline.
A strong female character
Khai Minh Dao isn’t somebody that you mess with. She’s a hardened detective, not a rookie. She’s not the boss, but she carries the authority of someone who knows Miami’s thugs and tough neighborhoods. She has depth, mystery, and isn’t just a throwaway sidekick character. She isn’t a playable character, as Nick Mendoza is the only person you can play in Hardline. But unlike many female characters in games, she wasn’t created just to be eye candy.
She’s got some good lines, too. “We’re here to play bad cop, worse cop,” she said at one point. “OK, worse cop.”