My hands-on preview of dying a lot in Battlefield Hardline: Criminal Activity

In the first round I played of Electronic Arts‘ Battlefield Hardline: Criminal Activity expansion, I came out with zero kills and lots of deaths. It’s not that the first-ever multiplayer expansion for Battlefield Hardline is particularly hard. I just didn’t realize that I was playing with some of the world’s best players of the cops-and-robbers shooter.

I went to a hands-on preview session at EA’s headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., and they neglected to say at first that I was playing with a bunch of YouTubers who were invited because they were so proficient at Battlefield. But it was still fun to play the expansion before everyone else got their hands on it and to talk to a developer at EA’s Visceral Games afterward. The expansion, which will be available soon, is part of EA’s usual strategy of extending the life of its Battlefield releases with downloadable content (DLC) that keeps die-hard gamers playing. And from what I saw in my session, those die-hard gamers are going to be quite happy. Since first-person shooters are a multibillion-dollar market, keeping the retention and engagement high in the face of competition from Activision’s Call of Duty are big priorities for EA.

I liked the combination of the new maps and gameplay because it made maximum use of features like destructible terrain. In a new map set in a ghetto, you could drive a car into a gas station and blow it up, setting off a glowing fire that illuminates a whole section of the dark battlefield. You could hop into a car, drive to an enemy’s cash pile, steal the loot, get back in the car, and return the treasure to your own team’s vault. Not that I accomplished this. But I tried.

This expansion pack comes with four new maps, three new weapons (including a Tommy gun), two new vehicles, two new ammunition types, a new gadget, six new masks, and a new mode called Bounty Hunter. You won’t find much of a backstory. EA says that police detectives have uncovered evidence of a secret crime ring that is terrorizing the population, and the cops’ job is to put an end to it. The maps are the real highlight, as they give you a new battleground to test your skills, and they show that Visceral has learned a lot from its first Battlefield shooter.

“For us, as a development team making our first competitive shooter, having the ability to continue working on it after it’s released is really valuable — not only for this game but for whatever we end up doing in the future,” said Zach Mumbach, multiplayer producer at Visceral Games, said in an interview with me. “Whatever we do next, we’ll apply everything we’ve learned from doing this.”

The new maps

The Backwoods map covered a huge area in an abandoned lumber mill in the Pacific Northwest. This location turned out to be a good one for vehicles. We played the Hotwire mode on that map, where the cops have to repossess vehicles, and the criminals have to steal them. Plenty of long-distance views were available for snipers. But the terrain was hilly, with a lot of paths such as riverbeds where you could lay low and sneak around. The action took place on the roads, the bridges, and in the buildings of the mill.

Code Blue was a lot of fun because it drew all the players to a central place, a nightclub called the Eclipse, with lots of flashing blue and purple lights. Techno music hit me as soon as I entered the club. In the center of the nightclub’s second level was a room where a pile of cash was located. In the Blood Money mode, we had to take that cash and return it to our own vaults. That room was a magnet for activity, where players waited in ambush and pulled out shotguns for close combat. The battle took place at night, but plenty of street lights and store signs illuminated the area.

The Beat was another large map in an inner city neighborhood that measured several square blocks. One street had a row of stores and a gas station on a corner. A huge housing project with three levels sat in the middle. Graffiti-covered concrete walls lined the streets for cover and ambushes. Weapons were sprinkled throughout the map. You could drive cars and use them mainly as ramming vehicles to hit other cars or run over enemies. You could also blast your car into a wall and create a new way into a complex. Every now and then, I had to stop and admire the graphics, like smoke billowing from a building, searchlights coming down from a helicopter, or neon lights flickering in the distance. Sometimes I heard music blaring or heard someone shouting, “F*** off,” from far away, followed by a gun shot.

Black Friday took place in an abandoned shopping mall with a couple of levels. You could hide in stores or back offices and move up and down the escalators. I had the most trouble staying alive on this level, as it always seemed the enemies were coming out of nowhere and getting the drop on me.

“A few years ago, there was this famous YouTube video of a bunch of guys on motorcycles robbing this mall,” Mumbach said. “They robbed a jewelry store in a mall, and it’s crazy how efficient it is. They roll inside the mall on these motorcycles, trash the jewelry store, and they’re out of there in a minute. We wanted to do a jewelry store robbery in a mall ever since we saw that. We also wanted to make a map that was a long, linear, enclosed space, a map that had a front that was going to push back and forth.”

Here’s some hands-on gameplay video with the new maps, where you can see me get slaughtered: Backwoods, Code Blue, The Beat, and Black Friday.

Weapons and stuff

Criminal Activity has a lot of nice touches for the Battlefield crowd. Players wanted a lowrider car, and they got one. It’s not really practical, as you bounce down the street, and it makes it very hard to aim at someone.

In some matches, weapons are sprinkled around the area for you to pick up. In the midst of the Black Friday map, I found a nail gun sitting on the ground. I picked it up and shot a bunch of nails into at an enemy at close range. But it didn’t seem to do much damage. Opponents, however, seemed to delight in sneaking up on me and pounding me with nails. I would prefer a submachine gun any day.

The Tommy gun, which EA calls the M1A1 (for licensing reasons) was also a crowd pleaser. It has a horrible kick that makes it very inaccurate, but it can spray a whole area with bullets in a short amount of time. I saw one guy carrying around a gold-plated one. My fellow players were also making use of the new masks. In this game, the criminals get to wear any kind of mask they want. One had a dinosaur head. Nothing is more humiliating than being killed by a criminal in one of these silly masks.

The Bounty Hunter mode was a lot like the Kill Confirmed mode in Call of Duty. In this mode, you had to shoot an enemy and then run over the body to collect a bounty.

Hands-on dying and embarrassment

It took me multiple rounds of Black Friday to figure out how to play. I was still getting my footing when we switched to The Beat. Then, we switched to Code Blue. In the first round on the Code Blue map, I had nine kills and 14 deaths. That was a little less embarrassing.

On the Backwoods map, we played Hotwire, where you have to grab some stolen cars and drive them off. The cops try to repossess them, and the criminals try to steal them. I wasn’t familiar with the woods, and I kept getting taken out by fast-driving cars. So, my score went down to two kills, 10 deaths. By the next match, my score went back to 10 deaths and 12 kills, and in the subsequent match, it went down to one kill and seven deaths. I switched to a high-powered sniper rifle and finally got a footing. I finished that match with 18 kills and eight deaths. That was anomalous, but I was happy to see that, even with this crowd of deadly shooters, I could get back to decent level of skill during the course of a morning on the new maps.

The game has a learning curve, for sure. I recall sticking my head out around a corner for a split second. A sniper that I could barely see nailed me in an instant.

The view from the pros

Mumbach said that you have to learn to be very careful about exposing yourself in Battlefield Hardline. The snipers in the real world are deadly. I peered around the corner once and was astounded to discover that a sniper had taken me out just like that. They don’t miss. If you aren’t very skillful, the odds are better that you’ll survive or be able to shoot enemies more easily in the short-range spaces of the maps.

Mumbach said that he believes the pros will like the new Enforcer shotguns and battle rifles. With these weapons, it basically means that both sides now have access to a similar arsenal.

Conclusion

If you haven’t picked up Battlefield Hardline yet, you might want to play through the single-player campaign and learn how to do multiplayer in a skillful way before you take on Criminal Activity. It is very rewarding, and, as I found, you can learn it in the course of a morning. It’s fun. It’s got action and variety, and it should keep the hardcore players happy until the next DLC arrives in a few months. If you don’t mind a little humiliation with your shooters, this is a good one for you.