Battlefield 2042

EA gambles on another roll of its DICE; wins big

- Luke Kemp

INFO

FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4

PRICE £69.99 (PS5), £59.99 (PS4)

ETA Out now PUB EA DEV DICE

PLAYERS 1-128 (PS5), 1-64 (PS4)

LENGTH N/A

ACCESSIBILITY Menu narration; voice-to-text; colour blind modes; controller vibration on/ off; subtitles (adjustable text size)

No, you haven’t missed over 2,000 prequels. 2042 is the year this game is set; that’s far enough in the future for new technology and an ecologically grim setting, yet close enough to the present to feel comfortingly familiar. It doesn’t rock the boat, instead setting the series on a new course by making a large number of small waves.

At a brief glance, this is Battlefield as usual. Two huge teams fight over objectives in enormous maps, the winner eventually decided when one team’s tickets have been depleted through a combination of kills and map dominance. You shoot people, you try to avoid getting shot, the tanks are still snapped up the second they become available, and so on. The closer you look, however, the more changes you will find.

There is no campaign mode. You can still play offline with bots (and we recommend you do to begin with if this is your introduction to the series, just to ease yourself into things) but in effect, this is a multiplayer-only game. Surprisingly, perhaps, the community doesn’t seem bothered by this. There has been some grumbling about the reduced variety of guns on offer, but the appeal of Battlefield doesn’t lie in having a huge platter of boomsticks to choose from.

ON THE PISTOL