Battlefield: Hardline – Beta Preview
Played on PS4
Much like the beloved (and maligned) Call of Duty, it appears that fans simply can’t get enough of EA’s Battlefield series. The latest instalment in the venerable franchise is Battlefield Hardline; a standalone entry with unique take on “cops and robbers”, a theme that has worked quite well for games such as the Pay Day franchise in the past.
Hardline has just had an open beta and the Player2 crew jumped on board to check it out. Essentially the beta was broken up into three game modes. The first everyone should be familiar with is the classic conquest mode, gaining control of multiple areas and holding them as long as you can. As we see it though, the main attraction here, are the two new modes, Hotwire and Heist.
In Hotwire the goal is quite similar to classic battlefield. There are numerous vehicles spawned across the map, your goal is to get inside said vehicles and drive them as fast as you can for as long as can, before the other team blows you up of course. Going too slow though won’t add to your team’s tickets forcing you to push the pedal to metal! This mode seemed less serious but more frantic which helped to up the fun factor.
The flagship mode however is clearly Heist. Similar to the Pay Day series, you either play as the robbers or the cops. The goal is fairly straight forward. As robbers you’ll need to infiltrate the safe, grab the cash and make it to the extraction point. As the police, it’s obviously your job to stop them any way you can. As much as the objective seems straight forward, completing them is anything but and requires a good mix of classes, strategy and especially team work. Quite often the team out for the highest kill / death ratio were the ones who lost when the game was completed.
Like previous titles in the series you can customise your character and load outs with different guns, appearance and traits. Playing more of the same class will level you up and unlock and purchase new equipment and options for your class to choose from. Fans of the Battlefield series will feel right at home here and easily hit the ground running.
With only one month to go (assuming the release date of March 2015 doesn’t get pushed back again), Battlefield Hardline is looking fairly solid. We played the beta on the PS4 and the game ran smoothly with no noticeable glitches and a very stable net code. There has been some criticism that the game doesn’t look as good as its counter part Battlefield 4. And those criticisms are indeed correct, there is an obvious decrease in quality here, perhaps to better the frame rate, we simply don’t know. This close to release date it would be naive and misleading of us to suggest this will be better by the time it’s released, but you never really know with these things. The final release should have additional game modes, a tonne of new maps and a bunch of other things we can only ponder and speculate about.
Bring on March!
Adam Rorke
