Battlefield Hardline beta: a tale of robbery gone wrong

I recently got a chance to check out the closed beta for EA’s latest shooter, the Visceral Games-developed Battlefield Hardline. Unlike previous games in the series, this is a cops-versus-robbers affair. I haven’t spent enough time yet with the beta to draw too many conclusions just yet, but while I’m playing it I thought I’d share a story that I think illustrates one of the issues I’m encountering with the game.

(See: Battlefield 4 review: a little acting goes a long way)

I spawn in an underground base stocked with muscle cars—the apparent jumping-off point for my crew of criminals. Our goal? To jack the cash locked in the back of an armored truck, and escape with our lives. Given the kind of weaponry we’re toting (this is military grade stuff) and the body count we’re about to leave, I’m guessing this is our crew’s last job. After this, we’ll all retire to small islands in the Caribbean, sipping cocktails and counting our bullet holes.

But first, we’ve got to get that money. I hop into a car, which drives like pretty much every Battlefield vehicle ever (sloppily) and careen my way towards the armored truck, smashing into most of the road obstacles on the way. My teammates have already crippled the truck, apparently, because it’s sitting on the street with a construction site of sorts to its immediate left. I smash into the back of it, and am instantly shot in the head by a police officer hiding in the construction complex.

Then, that happens like twelve more times.

I am not a good driver.

But Battlefield is a game about tactical freedom! The vehicles can be driven, the buildings can be destroyed! So says the EA PR campaign, anyway. The reality, of course, is different. I spot a large semi-truck that could solve all of my team’s problems. If we pull this thing between the construction site and the armored truck, it can serve as a kind of de facto wall that would allow us to approach and breach the armored truck’s vault before the police camping to its left could get a shot at us.

Of course, the semi-truck wasn’t driveable. It was just set-dressing, so I just ran back to the armored truck and got shot again.

You can drive some police cars in Hardline, but not this one for some reason.

Too often for a game that makes lofty claims about tactical freedom I found myself stymied by what I could do in this world. What vehicles can and can’t be driven, for example, seems totally arbitrary and is difficult to tell at first. You might walk up to a police car and hop right in, or you might walk up to a police car and discover that it’s just a prop. As far as I can tell, the difference is completely arbitrary.

And although it’s a cops versus robbers game, really it just feels like a regular Battlefield game with fewer objectives. Sure, it’s “unlock the vault” instead of “capture the control point”, but is there really a difference?

From a gameplay perspective, it’s essentially the same, and from an immersion perspective, the Hardline approach is far worse. The scenarios that play out in Hardline are closer to civil war than they are to bank robbery, and they take place in a world (in my experience so far, a city) where there are no civilians, no uninvolved cars on the road, and both parties are armed to the teeth. It doesn’t feel real at all. How much money could there really be in this armored car, traveling from one place to another in this completely-empty city anyway?

From my experience so far, there’s definitely fun to be had in Hardline, but to be quite frank I think most of it, perhaps all of it, can also be found in the previous Battlefield games in a more immersive setting.