If you have seen any marketing for Battlefield 6you know the fight is moving to New York. From the very beginning of its summer announcement, Battlefield Studios placed a ponderous emphasis on the campaign mission and multiplayer map, which had players wreaking destruction on the streets of Brooklyn. This announcement was received only with a note of concern. Could a military shooter series handle a terrorist attack on New York’s iconic landmarks sensitively enough, especially at a time when American politicians are doing everything in their power to portray major American cities as war zones?
It’s probably not a surprise to hear this Battlefield 6 he doesn’t exactly handle the loaded image gracefully, but his campaign’s Brooklyn missions are almost too ridiculous to get upset about.
Battlefield 6The story begins after a political assassination that causes division within NATO. As a result, some nameless countries withdraw from the alliance and all hell breaks loose. In the chaos, a private military group called PAX Armata is formed, whose goal is to brutally police the world. (Or something like that. PAX’s motives are intentionally arduous to determine.) America, in alliance with NATO, is deploying its troops around the world to fight PAX on multiple fronts, including Gibraltar and Egypt.
This brings us to the fifth mission of the campaign, No Sleep. Despite PAX threats, NATO decides to hold the summit in New York at a time when tensions are at their highest. PAX is sure to crash the party, so soldiers are called in to find where the group is hiding in Brooklyn and stop the suspected attack. Things move quickly, in the most over-the-top way.
The mission begins with tearing down fancy tenement houses in Brooklyn Heights in search of a secret terrorist base in the least intimidating corner of the city. The city has seemingly been evacuated, so you’re never in danger of encountering a civilian, but you may encounter armored terrorists in the narrow bathrooms and impeccably designed bedrooms. It’s a good excuse to stage some fights in tight spaces with plenty of verticality, but it’s all a bit silly if you’ve ever had a babysitting gig in Brooklyn.
This whole thing is kind of a silly city tour for Brooklynites. It turns the most peaceful areas of the commune into war zones. Prospect Park is full of drones! Military trucks roll through Grand Army Plaza! Dumbo’s adorable carousel is on fire! It’s basically my mother’s vision of where I live, based entirely on one news story she hears about a bizarre murder every few months. Brooklyn Bridge Park may as well be international waters!
It all culminates in a sequence so patently absurd that I can only laugh at it. Your squad eventually finds PAX underground, loading bombs into a subway car and sending it into the city. After the chase sequence, the unit firmly states: “Never again,” says one of my colleagues, referring to 9/11. “That means we’re not on our shift, got it?”
Smash cut to the crew firing a missile towards the Manhattan Bridge to stop the train car from reaching the city.
Look, I’m not going to pretend that as a New Yorker I find this offensive. My instinct is to scold Battlefield 6 for repeating the 9/11 panic in a affordable setting and playing up the risky narrative that large cities are lawless hellscapes that must be protected by the military. His bad moment. But to do so would be to ignore the context Battlefielda complicated story in which a sect of accelerators deliberately provokes chaos. It’s an artificial crisis in which Brooklyn becomes a political pawn for power-hungry factions.
It would also be to ignore the fact that this is all so stupid that it can hardly be analyzed with a straight face. That is, you shoot at soldiers on a playground in a park while hiding behind a gymnasium in the jungle. Battlefield 6 has some political underpinnings to mine (despite the developers’ insistence that it doesn’t), but ultimately it’s a silly amalgamation of shooter campaign clichés set in locations that Battlefield Studios thought would make good multiplayer maps. All I can do is laugh as I watch million-dollar townhouses turn into Swiss cheese. You’re doing it, Battlefield.
