Battlefield 1
Electronic Arts
PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Four stars
Why doesn’t the First World War get more attention in popular media? Perhaps because it is complicated.
Sure, we all know it started when some archduke got assassinated – but most non-history majors would be hard put to explain why this event subsequently plunged the world into conflict. There are no black-and-white good guys and villains, just a lot of mayhem that led to 17 million deaths.
Battlefield 1 takes that ambiguity and builds a surprisingly effective narrative around it. The latest war game from Electronic Arts' Sweden-based Dice studio offers few rah-rah moments of triumph – most of the time, you are just relieved to make it out alive.
Dice has taken a savvy approach to the story: rather than following an unlucky grunt through an unlikely gauntlet of the war’s most renowned engagements, you get an anthology featuring different characters in each location.
You begin as a member of the Harlem Hellfighters, hopelessly trying to stave off a relentless German invasion in French territory. After that, you take the roles of a tank driver in France, a British fighter pilot, a desperate Italian soldier in the Alps and a wily old Australian veteran in Gallipoli.
The final story ventures into the Middle East, where you are a Bedouin fighter in Lawrence of Arabia’s guerrilla campaign against the Ottoman Empire.
The anthology approach gives DICE a chance to show off its flair with gorgeously rendered landscapes, as well its skill in building a variety of weapons and vehicles that feel like they have genuine weight. This is the 1910s, so you are stuck with sluggish rifles, clunky grenades and a temperamental tank that tends to get stuck in mud.
As a result, Battlefield 1 feels much different from most contemporary war games. Unlike, say, Gears of War 4, you can't just run screaming into the fight and expect to make it out alive. Most scenarios demand a tactical approach – you must find a way to quietly eliminate enemies one at a time before breaking out the heavy weapons. It is the rare war game in which I have felt compelled to retry scenarios to look for more subtle ways to complete missions.
There’s a full suite of online multiplayer contests, highlighted by Dice’s signature Conquest mode, in which up to 64 soldiers fight over a sprawling wasteland. There is also the new Operations mode, a tug-of-war between offensive and defensive troops that grows increasingly tense as you move from map to map.
From Call of Duty to Halo and countless others, the market for war video games is saturated. Battlefield 1 is the first in a while that feels like it has some fresh ideas – and one of the few I would recommend to people who do not normally care for the genre.
artslife@thenational.ae
