Above: The sideways grip, a 1990s throwback that had its practical uses.
What you won’t like
Designers could dole out better weapons along the way
The criminals take a couple of bullets to bring down, even if they aren’t wearing body armor. Some weapons like the MAC-10 machine pistol seem so weak that you have to empty a whole clip at a suspect to hit them or bring them down. Meanwhile, you run out of bullets or you get taken out by someone coming at you from another direction. It makes me think that our police forces are certainly underarmed when it comes to weaponry.
Meanwhile, it has many missions where I could have used a silencer to take out unsuspecting guards or alarm boxes. Instead, since I only had noisy weapons, I had to sneak up on the guards and take them out in tricky assassinations. If they turned around, they could alert the whole enemy force to my presence. Oh, if this were just Crysis, I could have just used a bow-and-arrow.
My weapon of choice turned out to an assault rifle, but for some reason, I had to make this my secondary weapon, as my police-issued pea shooter was always my primary weapon. Of course, this is more realistic. But the criminals were coming at me with everything they had. Sometimes my best option was to shoot one of them and steal one of their weapons for the course of the firefight.
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Above: The Hollywood Hills house from Battlefield 3.
Repetitive levels that remind you too much of Battlefield
I am tired of fighting battles that I’ve seen before, like a struggle for a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The final level seems as if it came straight out of Battlefield 3, which also had a Hollywood Hills house. And in some of these levels, you fight an endless number of bad guys. You can dispatch them with some weapons that cops often don’t have access to, like a gatling gun mounted atop an SUV. That’s a little refreshing, but it feels a lot more like military action than police action.
But whenever the game designers throw a huge number of bad guys at you, they let you take them out using weapons from Battlefield, like the gatling gun, a cannon from a plane, or a tank. And when that happens, it takes the game out of the realm of police fiction and stretches it too far into the realm of modern military combat. As I said, I like the blurred line. But I don’t see military weapons as a good reason to have “Alamo”-like levels. In fact, one of the best levels is when you are trapped in a building, surrounded by crazed paramilitary soldiers from a meth organized crime group, and lightly armed against the soldiers who are shooting out your walls with gatling guns. In other words, it’s fun to be the underdog in a battle. But it’s a little crazy when the cops have access to their own giant arsenals.
The occasional level also just isn’t fun, like one where you have to escort an informant named Leo out of a hotel that is besieged by bad guys.
Above: Battlefield: Hardline has scenes in Florida’s Everglades.
The under-used Florida Everglades
I don’t know why the game designers went to the trouble of building the beautiful replica of the Florida Everglades without making enough use of it. You can use airboats in multiplayer combat, but all you get to do in the single-player campaign is ride them around from place to place. And for much of that time, you’re hunting around for airdrops of illegal drugs. Nasty alligators are all over the place, but they don’t come into story or gameplay much. I was hoping to see a spectacular level with some chase scenes in the fan boats, as you can see in the picture above.
But this design decision — to fully exploit a map in multiplayer instead of single player — makes me think that the team put too much emphasis on the importance of multiplayer in this case. I understand that most gamers go straight to multiplayer and many don’t even complete the single-player campaign. But this kind of design decision perpetuates that emphasis, and it makes it seem like the campaign commands less attention.
Above: Battlefield: Hardline’s Tap and Mendoza.
Characters seem too similar
Tap. Tyson. Stoddard. They all seem like they’re played by the same actor. They’re street-savvy white males who have a lot of swagger and attitude. They crack bad jokes and they behave in predictable ways. Considering the game has a relatively small cast of 10 characters who get a lot of airtime, this seems like an oversight. I regularly got confused about which character was in a particular scene, even though each plays a very different role. They either just look too similar or behave alike, and that just leads to some unnecessary confusion.