Pucrettub

Let me start with my BF playtime: BF3 - 2 years, and would have played more if BF4 didn't come out BF4 - 1.5 years BF1 - 1 year BFV - 6 months. This is the game where my thoughts of DICE began to change. Wasn't terrible, but felt rushed in every way that BF1 felt like care an attention were paid BF2042 - 2 months. My friends and I, one evening in late December 2021, were uncharacteristically silent as we played a few rounds of this game. Then, one of us said "I don't think I'm gonna play this game anymore." And we all agreed, and shelved the game. I hunted for months for a PS5 just for this game. Not only was it terrible in so many ways, but it also signaled that DICE nor Battlefield would ever be the same. January 2024, and I have nothing to play. I heard this game "got better", so I re-downloaded it. I knew the big reasons why I disliked this game, but could really put my finger on the finer details. Sure, the map redesigns were an improvement, and the new levels were def better than the originals. I played for about two hours, but didn't really have fun. The next evening, considering if I should give it one more try, I noticed I had BFV still on my PS4 external hard drive. Now that game I never gave another chance, and I also heard it improved after I stopped playing it in like March or April of 2019. So I booted it up, and damn. I still prefer BF1 over BFV, but every thing came back to me as to why BF2042 was such a disappointment. The SFX alone was a night and day difference. BF was always top-notch for sounds and ambiance IMO, even through Battlefront. But BF2042? That whole SFX team must have retired, because it's subpar in this game. Just the shooting and battles, and level designs, and the way vehicles feel, and how guns feel: BFV did it miles better than 2042. I will 100% never play BF2042, and DICE will have to do a lot to earn my trust again.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I tip my hat to Respawn in many ways. But I'd still give this game a firm 7/10. Part of me felt like I was diving into another Mass Effect 2, but fell way short. Part of me felt I was diving into another Uncharted game, but this game fell way short. Part of me felt I was crashing into a Dark Souls game, but the combat felt much less solid than that. We all praise this game as the best Star War game in a decade, but I honestly believe Battlefront one or two had much better authentic aesthetics. As for the story and voice acting; it was solid, but Cal's comments quickly became annoying to me. And the story line was great until it ended about 12 hours in. Still one of the better games to come out this season, but still a thinly spread out game that is basically a "jack of all trades, but a king of none."

This game has a more "solid" feel than last years CoD: WWII. I think it's fairly well-known that Treyarch is now the king developer of CoD, and it shows. The game skips the single-player campaign and just offers some tutorial levels with all the specialists with little cut-scenes spliced here and there. CoD campaigns have just been a formality for me personally, so I wasn't affected by that choice. Blackout was pretty good to me. I haven't really gotten into the Battle Royal phenomena the last couple of years, but I did buy PUBG and have donated dozens of hours into Fortnite trying to force myself to liking it. The reason I give Blackout my thumbs-up is because it feels more like a legitimate shooter that both PUBG and Fortnite couldn't really do. Although I have now put in about a dozen hours into Blackout, it seems I will never fully feel passionate about a Battle Royal gamemode. It's fun every once in a while, but not why I play FPS games. Multiplayer is where I am conflicted. Ran into very few errors this past 6 days, other than network errors, but still ahead of most games in this league on opening week. Treyarch has completely ditched the wall-running and double-jumps, and that's how I like it. I got pretty competitive with BlOps3, so I got used to the movement there, but I now know this is what I prefer. As for the classes... meh. They really feel unfocused. To keep classes in a game like this balanced, you gotta be all in or not at all, and it felt like Treyarch went in half-way. It also feels like they are trying to add some "teamwork" and tactics in a game that is primarily a twitch-shooter. There is a game-mode like Counterstrike where you lose your abilities and just buy better guns and perks as the matches go on, but I kind of doubt there will always be a big pool of players lasting on that. Collision still seems a bit off, which makes me think this will never be a highly game for me as it's not sharp enough. But I had a good time. Just don't think I'll be playing this game at all in six months... So overall, do feel like a 7 out of 10 fits this game about right. I'll also be purchasing Battlefield V, so time will tell which one I will like more. I will say that buying this game on disc opening day really accentuates the growing problem with our modern physical game-copies: even with the disc, I had to download somewhere close to 90 GB over my internet connection. I imagine that size will grow as the game goes through updates. Since you can't pick what downloads first, I was only able to play Blackout that first night. I think it's almost time that physical game-copies need to start coming as some sort of solid-state drives that wouldn't require downloading the entire game to the system's SSD.