NEED TO KNOW
What is it The next mainline Battlefield with a full campaign and large-scale multiplayer
Release date October 10, 2025
Expect to pay $70/£60
Publisher Electronic Arts
Developer Battlefield Studios
Reviewed on RTX 5090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz, 64GB RAM
Multiplayer Up to 64 players
Steam Deck Unsupported
Link Official site
It says something about the state of the FPS that the hype for Battlefield 6 is mostly down to the old, not the new. Here we are, howling at the moon for decades-old modes, “grounded” character models, classic class setups, and a map from 2011. Series vets are gobbling up this sequel as if we haven’t eaten for weeks while patting DICE and its Battlefield Studios cohorts on the back for managing to execute a normal Battlefield game.
DICE’s last effort tanked expectations, but that’s not why Battlefield 6 has impressed me. It’s the wider multiplayer culture of 2025—wrung out by years of battle royale banality and meta-pilled ranked modes—that created the conditions for an ordinary Battlefield to be the most exciting FPS of the year.
Place your palm on the pavement, and you can feel the low rumble of a hobby yearning for what we loved 15 years ago: the spectacle of scale, the unserious chaos of vehicular warfare, red grunts vs. blue grunts, the permission to make your own rules, and an environment where the guy obsessed with metas is having the least fun.
That is the pitch of Battlefield 6, and it’s a bullseye.
At least, a bullseye where it matters most. Battlefield 6 multiplayer gets two big thumbs up, with caveats. A 64-player round of Conquest remains a spiritual experience that no other series can touch. My body vibrates with anticipation every time I spawn into a chopper in the heat of battle, hit the deck to revive a squadmate in a smoke cloud, or nail a 100-meter headshot from the safety of a mountain perch.
Those are all best experienced on Mirak Valley, the biggest and best map at launch, but as many worried would be the case after the open beta, the rest of the map pool can’t measure up. The Halo Forge-like Portal mode feels like a first draft. Attachments are boring, progression is too slow, and lots of guns are locked behind grindy challenges that suck.
I’m glad to have waited an extra week to fully review Battlefield 6, because these flaws weren’t detectable in the pre-launch period. They’re thorns in the side of what’s otherwise the most fun I’ve had with a multiplayer FPS in years.
Good to be back
The greatest compliment I can pay to Battlefield 6 is that it’s the only game I want to play right now. I’ve spent every night this past week bouncing between Conquest, my one true love, and Escalation, a new Conquest variant that shrinks the map over time as it piles on vehicle spawns. I wake up in the morning and play through the previous night’s highlights in my head—the unlikely revives, the resilient tank runs, the 30-minute rounds that came down to a handful of tickets.
The greatest compliment I can pay to Battlefield 6 is that it’s the only game I want to play right now.
It’s a game where a single 25-minute round can spawn a dozen storylines: Two ace pilots dueling over control of the skies, the slippery engineer who makes tank drivers’ lives a living hell, the squad dedicated to locking down a single flag no matter what, the guy who keeps driving the EOD bot around desperate to torch someone (anyone!) to death. Battlefield 6 confidently hands players a sandbox and lets us find our own fun.
The prevailing goal of territory control is the glue that keeps the whole operation on the rails, but the magic of Battlefield is the ability to disappear into the crowd—the freedom to play doctor for folks charging headfirst into the meat grinder, pick off snipers from a rooftop, or break off from the action altogether to play tic-tac-toe with blowtorches.
Other shooters spend truckloads of money on skyboxes and soundscapes that mimic the atmosphere of a true, large-scale battle. Battlefield 6 doesn’t have to pretend. The sound of a tank projectile shattering the sound barrier as it explodes eight feet behind me is enough to scare the camo off my soldier’s trousers. I still can’t get over the unbelievable sound work of Battlefield 6 vehicles: from the ear-splitting scream of jets as they tear up the sky, down to totally unnecessary details, like the rattling of expended shells piling up in a gunner turret.
The bite is as scary as the bark. It’s exceedingly rare for an FPS to have vehicles at all, let alone make them cornerstone power weapons that can turn losses into victories. The other night, I jumped into the gunner seat of an attack chopper with a friend piloting, and for two glorious minutes, we were gods among mortals:
