Review of Battlefield 1

The thunderous roars of what must have been thousands of artillery pieces finally stopped. A loud whistle breaks the deadly silence with the order to "go over the top", accompanied by a harrowing cry of "Fix bayonets!" All hell breaks loose. The dreaded sound of not one, but many water-cooled machine guns springs into action, each clicking sound brings down one of the attackers. When the frenzy finally stopped minutes later, the defenders peeked over their gunsights and surprisingly find a deserted battlefield littered with enemy bodies, some still pleading for a medic or their mothers as they sank deeper into the mud. This is just another day in the World War I first-person shooter game Battlefield 1, produced by the Swedish game studio DICE under the American gaming giant Electronic Arts. I have to admit that Battlefield 1 is the first-ever video game that haunted my dreams. There has been more than one occasion where I woke up screaming at midnight, having just dreamt of being mutilated by showers of machine-gun fire while entangled by barbed wires. It is the scarier than all action games, including the series' archrival Call of Duty, while more action-filled than most horror games as Silent Hill or Resident Evil that resort to clichés of suspense and surprise to achieve their intentions. The entire point of video games is to create an alternate reality where the player can entertain himself or herself with a world view never experienced before. The immersive experience of Battlefield 1 is exactly what makes it great. Indeed, most games nowadays have great-looking graphics, and many have decent sound effects and musical compositions, but no game studio has exhausted the potential of modern animation and sound production technologies as DICE did with Battlefield 1. The map Verdun Heights, with entire hilltops set ablaze by German shells while the French desperately fight to hold, is surely impressive; yet witnessing scenic wheat fields and pastures in the Somme River map being gradually reduced to a quagmire of mud, blood, and dead bodies over the course of a game has been even more disconcerting. This, combined with sound effects featuring distorted battle cries, desperate calls of different soldiers, and deafening gunshots seems to have taken the player back in time a hundred years to this insane "war to end all wars." To add to all the drama, considerable effort are even put into the iconic music theme of the Battlefield series, with a dark mumbling sound beneath the symphonic arrangement, supposedly being the whispers of deceased souls on the very battlefields the players are headed to. Battlefield 1 would surely not such a historical game as it is without its exploration of World War I and of the nature of war itself. The game's most outstanding multiplayer game mode is the Operations, where opposing armies fight over control of contiguous sectors of the frontline spread through different maps and moving on to the next after one has been captured. Every exhausting, hour-long Operations campaign would fit inside a broader historical narrative, and players feel like they are writing or rewriting history by, say, successfully breaking through the deadlock of Gallipoli and seizing Istanbul for the British crown or standing fast to the onslaught of German aggressors on the Marne, only a few miles away from Paris as the capital of France. By constantly reminding the players of the destruction they unleashed in their last game, these historical perspectives add unprecedented depth to the chronicles of Battlefield 1, which, together with the graphic scenes of gameplay, convey a powerful antiwar message. To speak out against World War I and just about any wars in a video game title is a rare but welcoming scene in an entertainment industry dominated by glorifications of Rambo-style "one-man armies" and comical approaches to both real and hypothetical military conflicts. All the above deals with the multiplayer part of the game, which the Battlefield franchise has traditionally excelled at. On the other side of the coin, Battlefield 1's single-player campaign is too short and generalized to be too spectacular. DICE indeed tried to bring personal narratives to the greater conflict through six 30-minute long "war-stories," told by separate combatants of different genders, races, and nationalities, but there is only so much detail one could pack into what is even shorter than an episode of a TV series. In a nutshell, Battlefield 1 presents incredible and immersive scenes of the horrors of World War I and builds on concrete historical narratives, mostly through its multiplayer gameplay. Even with a single-player campaign that could be longer and better, the fact is still that Battlefield 1 would be one of the most iconic historical action games ever made. This game is a must-play for anyone seeking a truly thrilling journey through the Great War; however, drama-seekers and those obsessed with the plots of a particular game might not find it to be the most satisfying one out there.