Battlefield 6: the Cerf's unfiltered test

Hello pack! Today, we're putting away the joysticks for five minutes... no, actually, we're keeping them in hand, because we're going to talk about Battlefield 6. The game the whole community was waiting for after the monumental disaster that was Battlefield 2042. So, has DICE (well, “Battlefield Studios” now) managed to make up for it?

Spoiler: it's complicated. But make yourself comfortable, we're going to break it all down.

The context: after the storm, renewal?

Battlefield 2042 was one of the worst moments in the franchise. Empty, soulless maps, no classes, no single-player campaign, endless bugs... In short, it was like a deer caught in the headlights of a lorry.

Four years later, EA handed over the reins to Vince Zampella (the guy behind the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Titanfall) and the result is BF6. Released on 10 October 2025 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, the game promises a return to its roots: modern warfare, traditional classes, destruction, and above all gameplay that smacks of the Battlefield of yesteryear.

With a Metacritic at 84/100 and more than 7 million copies sold in 3 days, The launch was clearly a commercial success. But a good launch does not mean a good game over time.

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Gunplay: a pure delight

Let's start with what's loudest: weapons. The gunplay in BF6 is simply the best the franchise has ever offered. Every weapon has weight, recoil and a sound that makes your stomach churn. When you headshot a sniper from 200 metres away, you're going to be direction. When you empty an M4 magazine in a smoky corridor, it's visceral.

The new Kinesthetic Combat System brings a real physical feel to the gameplay. You can bend over behind blankets, throw yourself to the ground with the grace of a falling tree (goodbye CoD's dolphin dive), and above all... drag your team-mates to safety to revive them.

This drag-and-revive is an absolute game-changer. Your buddy comes under enemy fire in the middle of the street? Instead of foolishly sacrificing yourself for the rez, you grab him under the arms and drag him behind a wall while the bullets whistle around you. It's cinematic, it's tactical, it's Battlefield. The community is unanimous: it's the best mechanic added to the franchise in years.

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Vehicles and destruction

Tanks, choppers, jets: it's all back and it all works. Driving a tank through a ruined city while your gunner sprays everything that moves is exactly the Battlefield experience we were looking for. When you're on the ground and a jet flies overhead dropping rockets on an enemy position, you really feel like an ant in a gigantic conflict.

On the destruction front, BF6 brings back what they call the “Tactical Destruction”. You can smash walls to create new passages, take out the cover of a sniper perched in a window, or blow a building to smithereens with a tank. It's a mechanic we lost with BF2042, and it's great to have it back. A capture point that's impregnable at the start of a round can turn into open ground after a few exchanges of explosives.

On the other hand, destruction is more scripted than in previous installments. Buildings don't collapse freely like in Bad Company 2, they're always destroyed in the same way. It's more coherent, of course, but a little less spectacular than we remembered.

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Maps: the game's biggest problem

OK, now we come to the sticking point. And believe me, it really is.

BF6's maps are the game's biggest flaw. In a multiplayer FPS, the maps are all. You can have the best gunplay in the world: if the maps are bad, the whole experience suffers.

The main problem? They are too small and too crowded. It's like Swiss cheese: holes everywhere, entrances in every direction, shooting angles in every direction. Result: it's utter chaos. You're getting shot at from all sides, all the time. There's no time to think, no time to strategise, no time to breathe. It's not even flanking, it's just total nonsense.

Remember Battlefield 3? Those magical moments when your whole team fought their way down a narrow staircase to break through the enemy's defences? Or those intense front lines on Opération Métro where every metre gained had to be earned? These kinds of moments no longer exist in BF6. Instead, you've got 64 players running around shooting at each other in a totally random fashion. It's not like Battlefield. It looks like Call of Duty.

And that's not just our opinion down the rabbit hole. The EA, Steam and Reddit forums are full of players saying exactly the same thing: maps too small, too linear, with no identity. Battles dissolve into scattered skirmishes with no real front line.

What's worse? That was already the problem with BF2042. It looks like the same people who designed the 2042 maps are still in charge. The design of the maps alone is enough to spoil the experience of a game that could have been exceptional.

Fortunately, there are Portal, the creative mode that lets players create their own maps and game modes using an editor based on the Godot engine. On paper, this could be the game's long-term salvation. In practice, when we tried to connect to it, the servers were either empty or had such a high ping that it was unplayable. So maybe Portal will save BF6 one day, but for the time being, don't count on it too much.

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The interface: when UX makes you lose patience

The game's interface is an ordeal. The UI is visually overloaded: pop-ups everywhere, promotional banners at every corner of the menu, inserts constantly trying to get you to buy cosmetics or the Battle Pass. It feels like you're browsing through a shopping centre rather than a video game. DICE, we want to play, not shop.

And then there's the famous orange dot. That little notification dot that appears when you unlock something. In theory, a good idea. But in practice, absolute nightmare.

When you unlock a scope that is compatible with all weapons, the orange dot appears on the every weapon, every class, every loadout. To make it disappear, you have to go to the customisation menu for each weapon, one by one, and click on the accessory. We're talking 20 to 30 minutes of absurd clicking just to clear your menu. And sometimes it doesn't even work: the dot comes back after a restart or gets stuck on weapons you haven't even unlocked.

The community begs for a simple button “Everything marked as seen”, This is a basic feature that Battlefield V already had. That such a problem exists in 2025 in a €70 game with a budget of over $400 million is incomprehensible. Don't they have any UX designers at EA? It's a question worth asking.

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The single-player campaign: we've dropped the ball

Yes, the single-player campaign is back after its absence in BF2042. And yes, we tried to play it. But we quickly gave up. And the reason? The artificial intelligence of the enemies is catastrophic. Opposing soldiers just stand there in the middle of the field, shooting at you without looking for any cover. No survival instinct, no tactics, nothing. It's like playing against dummies on a shooting range.

When the AI is this bad, it's impossible to immerse yourself in the action or take the campaign seriously. We preferred to go back to multiplayer rather than waste time on that. In any case, nobody buys a Battlefield for the single-player.

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The Cerf verdict

Battlefield 6 is a good game. After BF2042, we could have ended up with another disaster, and that's clearly not the case. The gunplay is extraordinary, the vehicles are a pleasure, the destruction is back, and the drag-and-revive shows that the team still knows how to innovate in the right direction. If you're a multiplayer FPS fan, you should play it.

But it's not the Battlefield we deserve. With a budget like that and years of development, you'd expect maps that don't look like Call of Duty and an interface that doesn't look like an online shop.

The map problem is particularly galling because it's literally the heart of a multiplayer game. If you spend your time getting shot in the back because each position has 12 different entrances, the experience suffers enormously. We're talking about the franchise that gave us Caspian Border, Seine Crossing, Opération Métro, Strike at Karkand... What happened?

Hope lies in future seasons and in Portal. In the meantime, BF6 remains solid and fun, but with a bitter taste of wasted potential.

Our rating: 7/10 🦌 A stag that runs fast and hits hard, but bumps into trees a little too often.

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Technical data

Game	Battlefield 6
Developer	Battlefield Studios (formerly DICE)
Publisher	Electronic Arts
Release date	10 October 2025
Platforms	PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S
Metacritic	84/100 (press) / 6.9/10 (players)
Modes	Single player + Multiplayer (up to 64 players) + Portal
Type	Military FPS

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No deer were wounded during the writing of this test. On the other hand, we were shot 347 times in the back on the BF6 maps. Does that count?

The Gamer Deer pack 🦌