Booting up Battlefield 6 on PC felt oddly nostalgic for me. It’s like returning to an old hangout spot that’s been renovated but still smells faintly of gunpowder and bad decisions. You can tell EA and DICE really want to make good after Battlefield 2042’s stumble, and it shows in how familiar everything feels: soldiers yelling, tanks rumbling, and chaos spreading faster than you can say “revive me”. It’s a reset of sorts, and while not quite a revolution it’s a clear attempt to remind fans what “Battlefield” used to mean before the series got too flashy for its own good.
From the first few missions, it’s obvious BF6 is stepping back from the over-the-top sci-fi setting. Gone are the hover-boards, robot dogs, and future-tech fluff, and instead it’s a grounded return to bullets, grit, and good old-fashioned squad-based mayhem. After a few hours in, it’s clear DICE is playing to its strengths again. And here’s the thing: for all the bad press surrounding studios that push out half-baked, buggy PC launches, BF6 actually feels stable from the get-go – frame rates hold and crashes are rare. It’s not flawless, but compared to the usual mess that accompanies a big PC launch these days, this one’s refreshingly trouble-free – and that says a lot about where we are with modern PC gaming.
The single-player campaign is a short one though, coming in at about five hours for most players – and it’s built like a greatest-hits medley of war-game moments. One minute you’re breaching doors, the next you’re rolling a tank through dust clouds or sniping targets across a sun-baked field. It’s cinematic and well-paced, but never really surprising. The larger-than-life plot revolves around Pax Armata, a shady private military company trying to strong-arm the world into a new order. You and your squad, Dagger 13, chase a defector through various hot zones, though the story mostly acts as scaffolding for the set-pieces.
Image: EA
It’s fine for what it is, just don’t expect much emotional investment. The characters blur together, the dialogue feels like it came from a war-movie generator (“We do what we have to, soldier!”), and transitions between missions sometimes feel abrupt. But when you’re inside the missions, the game looks absolutely stunning. One of my favourite is a countryside sniper level, where the wide open space allowed me to plan my own approach and strategy. And the spectacle is well worth the price of the game: Explosions have proper heft, lighting is gorgeous, and DICE’s Frostbite engine is surprisingly good now.
