The Battlefield Hardline beta ran for 5 days last week, with the full game being released in March. I got a bit of carnage in… when I was actually able to join a server. I thought I’d quickly share with some of my thoughts and impressions on the game so far.

I don’t want to be too harsh, because as we all know, betas aren’t the finished product. I can do that when the full game is released. I’ll just cover what I think were the most important things to note. Either way the game seems cool, but perhaps not the ‘game to redefine the Battlefield series’ that was being hyped. Saw that coming though.

Before I start, I will point out that the Cop vehicles and the soundtrack were pretty sweet. This song was pretty badass cruising around in a police van through the desert to. Woop woop!

 

 

Controls, Movement and General Gameplay

Overall the gameplay itself and controls and movement reminded me immediately of the previous Battlefields, which is a good thing. I mean it’s basically Battlefield 4, but cops and robbers.

I’m still slightly unimpressed as I always am with the BF games at my characters inability to climb a wall or fence any taller than hip height, causing me to run the length of fences to find gaps whilst traversing the large, open, derelict neighbourhood setting of the Dust Bowl map. I got sniped often.

Also there’s something super weird going on with the melee (non-lethal takedown?). Most of my melee attempts failed miserably, but I’m on BF4 autopilot and they’ve definitely changed how this goes down… it couldn’t have just been glitching out.. right? Unless I stealth killed enemies from behind without them realising, rather than a super quick takedown, I just seemed to swing the giant machete I was carrying super slowly and awkwardly. Once or twice actually hitting the enemy but it wasn’t an instant kill.

I didn’t enjoy this at all. Melee used to be super efficient in Battlefield if you were caught by surprise. I found I was just better off blind firing straight into the enemy’s crotch if we caught each other off guard in Hardline.

 

Controller Options

I love that the look sensitivity in your controller settings ranges from 1%-100% and can be adjusted by a single percentage at a time. That’s like… crazy customizable and something that is extremely important to a game like this. I wish more FPS gave you this much control over look sensitivity.

Sadly I’m really unimpressed with the lack of button configurations available. Again, for a game like this I would expect far more layout options. I’ve been playing Destiny which is brilliant in this department and wanted so badly to set my melee to the right bumper for this beta. It’s become second nature. Not an option. At all. Therefore I found myself spotting enemies or ducking instead of machete-ing them in the face. Ugh…

 

 

Multiplayer Game Modes

The beta consisted of three multiplayer game modes to try out:

 

Classic Conquest

Exactly the same as regular Battlefield Conquest. Capture and hold objectives and do it better than the other team. This was great, but there wasn’t a lot of new stuff to add here.

Dust Bowl was the map – a large deserted town with empty buildings, gas stations and a LOT of open areas to battle it out in.

I liked this map. I didn’t like most of the spawn points on most of the objectives, particularly if enemies were trying to take over. I found myself spawning a couple of metres from an enemy and getting killed before I could even aim.

I was pretty upset about having to pick up things like the Stinger from a random spot on the map. You couldn’t have one equipped in your loadout and spawn in your mate’s chopper. I found myself not bothering after a while. This was kind of disappointing as chopper annihilation is one of my favourite BF4 past times.

 

Heist

Similar to Battlefield’s Obliteration game mode but with a twist. Be the first team to find and crack safes in buildings around the map, steal the contents, then take them to an escape point before the enemy finds you and takes your shit. I didn’t play as much of this as I would have liked, but this game mode seemed super cool and original.

The map was Bank Job. I must say I didn’t play enough Heist to learn the map very well and was pretty fucking lost for most of the game.

The safes you were trying to access were normally deep in a maze of connecting rooms in these extravagant bank buildings. I liked how it would take a while to find your enemy in here, but when you did it turned into a close quarters combat arena. Epic carnage.

Cant think of too many negatives for this, but I didn’t get to play too much of it, so I might be missing some stuff.

 

Hotwire

Terrible. This game mode, from what I could gather… was not good. I hope they pump this up a bit before the release because it seems super lazy, as if they needed another game mode a couple of days before the beta and whipped this up quickly.

The goal: both teams are trying to hotwire cars that appear on the map, then drive them around at high speed to drain the enemies tickets while they try to stop you.

The actuality: drive a car around at high speed for 20 minutes whilst no one tries to stop you. Maybe get blown up once. Get in another car and start again.

Map: some boring high rise city.

Not only were you not properly equipped to stop cars via your loadout weapons, even if you tried, it was super boring just standing around waiting for cars to drive over your mines.

Being the driver was equally as boring. After playing Grand Theft Auto where driving at high speed requires a bit of skill, this was just ridiculous. In the entire 20 minutes I did not once have to brake or decelerate. Steering around corners was unnaturally easy to control and provided no challenge whatsoever. Yawn.

I hope they make this better!!! It was so boring!! KEYWORD: BORING!!!!

 

 

Quick Thoughts On Single Player

The only thing I’m curious about that wasn’t part of the beta is the single player campaign. This has always been pretty average in the past Battlefield titles, but then again the Multiplayer element is the main reason people play.

I think they could do a LOT with the campaign for Hardline. I mean, Cops and Criminals? There’s so much cool shit there, dudes. Don’t let me down. You can’t NOT put a Breaking Bad mission in there. That’s gotta happen.

 

 

And That’s It!

That’s about all I got out of my five days of playing/getting kicked from servers. Looking forward to the full game but hoping there’s going to be some pretty epic new shit added to it. So far I just want to go back to BF4 after this.

I’m not sure this will necessarily be the ‘game that redefines Battlefield‘ which is a bit of a call… I mean, Conquest mode was basically Battlefield, guys. All the things I like about this game… are the things that are similar to all the other Battlefields. Adding one sick new game mode? Not redefining enough.

I think the only thing this game can redefine in the series is the single player campaign… which most people won’t give a shit about anyway 🙂

 

 

– Geek and Gamer Girl xx

 

 

[Images via Dice/EA]