It may seem pointless to review a game that’s not even properly released yet but when I picked up the controller to play the beta version of Battlefield Hardline on Playstation 4, certain thoughts instantly came to mind.
Thoughts like, “why is this Battlefield 4 with different cars?”, “how do the character models look even worse?” and “why is it still so damn enjoyable?”.
The premise of the newest instalment in the main series to rival CoD as the King of FPS games actually takes a leaf out of the competition’s book by trying to do what they did with Modern Warfare. By changing things up and trading settings from battle in a war-torn country to a Guns n Robbers mechanic, it looked as if the developers were trying to halt any sense of stagnation when Hardline was announced at E3 2014.
Shortly following its display at the expo, it was announced that players would be able to get their hands on the game’s beta before wide release later in the year.
When the game is finished laboriously installing and you crank up a match for the first time, you’ll notice that there are some blatant similarities between BF4 and Hardline and so many so that it’s as if someone at Visceral Games uploaded the wrong thing.
The avatars move in essentially the same way, the gameplay is jarringly similar and the overall presentation is nigh on identical. My first impression as an avid BF’er is that it might as well be a mod or an add-on rather than a full release. Considering how many of Battlefield’s fanbase were alienated by the bugfest that was BF4, why take the framework from it  and simply add on a few extra game modes? It reeks of laziness and the yearly churn out of games that EA are hated for.
Yet, I’ve still sunk hours into the game and will probably do so until the beta closes on the 26th of June. Why, you cry? There’s just something magic about getting the package back to your base on a game of Heist (one of the two new game modes open to players in the beta) that you often forget the glitches and lack of innovation. There are many glitches, which you would expect, and I managed to capture footage of my favourite one yet which you can see in the video below.
Aside from the bad parts, there really is a lot to enjoy about Hardline. The gameplay is the clinical and punishing Battlefield that we all know and love and there’s the same sense of satisfaction after a victorious round that there has been in all the previous releases in the series. It’s now Visceral Games’ unenviable task of appealing to the neutrals and converting but whether this game is enough to do that remains to be seen.
No matter the shortcomings of the beta, one’s things for certain when Hardline is released on October 21st.
The battlefield will never look the same again.
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