Just over a year ago I played through my first Battlefield game - the World War I one, Battlefield 1 - and liked it a great deal. First person shooters have never been my favorite games, but I appreciate a good campaign in a war game, and I really felt like Battlefield 1 nailed it with four or five short stories taking place all over Europe. When I heard Battlefield V would be a spiritual successor, albeit one that took place during World War II like so many other first person shooters, I was on board.
And yeah - this was fine. It scratched exactly the itch I wanted it to scratch. There were four little three-act campaigns here, and all felt extremely by-the-book. There was a "Brits in North Africa" level, a "Norwegian resistance" level, a "Senegalese French soldiers storm Southern France in history's forgotten parallel to D-Day" level, and a "Nazis make their last stand in Germany" level. Yeah, you heard that last one right - Battlefield V has a level in which you take control of literal Nazi soldiers, killing at least two hundred American troops pushing forth over the Rhine into Germany. And yet, for the second straight Battlefield game, the Eastern Front is entirely absent. Come on! Give me Leningrad, give me Stalingrad! Give me a glimpse of the side of the war where 15 million soldiers died instead of a fourth chapter from the Western Front where I play as the goddamn Nazis! Sheesh.
Anyway, I'd love to see more dumb war games with campaigns like this one. Simple little vignettes that highlight forgotten or underexplored chapters from history.
Oh, and what a gorgeous game. Just an impeccable level of detail put into all the environments, be they ruined cities or French farmlands or semi-arid North African landscapes. Beautiful.
