Battlefield Hardline review

Anger management

In Hardline’s single-player campaign you play as Nick Mendoza, an angry hispanic man, which makes a slight change from the usual angry white man you play in games like these. To be fair, Mendoza has every reason to be angry because he spends most of Hardline being double-crossed.

And that’s a recurring theme: everyone’s a back-stabbing charlatan – even the ones with a badge and a big desk at Miami PD with their name on it.

Be quiet and die

Despite a bullet-heavy first sequence, you’ll learn very early on that Hardline is quite keen for you to keep casualties to a minimum. The more people you arrest rather than killing, the quicker you level up, gradually unlocking new weapons, equipment and ways to customise your arsenal. You get points for doing other stuff too, but non-lethal attacks are the most lucrative. If only there were an option to get the word ‘irony’ plastered down the side of your assault rifle.

That pushes you towards non-lethal takedowns and a generally stealthy approach. To help you can scope out locations with a special scanner – a kind of supercharged version of the camera in Far Cry 4 – that tags enemies for you and can be used to identify particular perps who can be arrested in order to bag a big bonus.

What’s different to most stealth games is that you don’t necessarily have to sneak up behind people in order to take them down. Holding L1 when prompted flashes your badge and gun at an enemy, which, as long as you’ve caught them by surprise, is enough to convince them to reach for the sky. You can do it on up to three bad guys at once, but you’ll need to keep your gun moving from one to another or they’ll start to fancy their chances in a bullet-swapping competition.

Bad Guys for Dummies

For a while this is a fun, interesting twist on stealth gameplay, particularly for a first-person shooter, allowing you to live out those dormant Miami Vice fantasies but the process never really seems to change or get any harder, so eventually it gets a little monotonous. Nobody ever attempts to call for help, and if you hold two or more at gunpoint, moving your iron sights swiftly from one to another, they’ll all wait politely while the game goes through the handcuffing animation each time. They’re the politest, most obliging criminals you could ever hope to arrest.

They’re also frequently total idiots. Most of them could do with reading their copies of Bad Guys for Dummies a few more times, not to mention seeing a doctor about their poor eyesight and hearing problems. I lost track of the number of times I arrested a chap in earshot of one of his buddies without so much as an inquisitive head turn to see what was up.

Leaving a trail of trussed-up dudes in your wake would normally present its own set of problems, usually solved by hiding the body of each incapacitated goon, but Hardline doesn’t offer that option, you just have to leave them snoozing on the floor with a slightly comical row of zeds emanating from their heads. Tonal issues aside, that means it’s down to pure luck whether they’re discovered or not, meaning your choice to keep the gun holstered can easily be taken out of your hands.

Gunny business

When the guns do come out you’ll find yourself in some fairly exhilarating firefights, helped by brilliantly destructible environments. You won’t have buildings falling down around your ears but the way some rooms get eaten up by gunfire is hugely satisfying. You’ll blow holes in wooden crates as bad guys duck just in time, pillars will gradually turn to dust as you crouch behind them and furniture torn into clouds of stuffing as it gets caught in the crossfire.

Every time you die you can change your loadout before trying again, so you can alter your approach each time with grappling hooks, stun guns, trip mines and the like. They don’t all feel like standard issue police equipment but then none of these police officers seem to play by the rules anyway.

It would’ve been nice to see a few more innocent bystanders if only to force your hand in how you approach a situation. Resorting to your gun only ever puts Mendoza in more danger, but if you had to safeguard the lives of some civilians it might give you more reason to keep it holstered.

Let’s get physical

Mendoza’s biggest problem often isn’t the swathes of people trying to kill or catch him it’s the fact that he seems to have all the upper body strength of a toddler. Time after time you come up against a chest-high obstacle that he’s unable to clamber onto, forcing you to take the long way round.

He does, however, have a magic crowbar in his possession that’ll open any locked door he finds, but only the ones the game deems it ok for you to enter. Time after time you’ll see a door but have no option to open it, not even with the Magic Crowbar of Power.

Fortunately he can drive (although, a bit like the doors, only certain vehicles). Driving sections are few and far between, and fairly short lived, which is probably for the best. Handling is pretty stodgy and it’s not often clear exactly where you’re supposed to be going. Usually that doesn’t really seem to matter, as the game guides you down the only route available but there are occasions when you’ll end up hitting an obstacle or driving down a dead end through no real fault of your own.

Exhibit, eh?

Mendoza’s scanner can also be used to find evidence. It’ll buzz when you’re in the vicinity of something important, and then it’s a case of scouring the scene for the relevant item, which will glow green when spotted. It’s not as thorough as the sometimes tedious searches in LA Noire and largely functions as way of framing extra collectible items. They’re not vital to advance and the story will still make sense without finding every one, but they span the whole game and collecting each set rewards you with new weapons for the campaign and new Battlepacks for multiplayer.

Perhaps the more relevant comparison with LA Noire is in Hardline’s facial animations, which are some of the best since Rockstar’s noirish detect ‘em up. That’s possibly down to the fact that the characters have been made to look like the actors that play them. Anyone who watched The Shield will immediately recognise Hardline’s police captain Julian Dawes as Benito Martinez, the man who played Vic Mackey’s nemesis David Aceveda.

Unfortunately that detail doesn’t go much further than skin deep. Characters are pretty one-dimensional and outside of the cut scenes the script gets very repetitive, with the bad guys parroting the same few lines in identical accents.

That’s not to say the stuff that’s inspired by TV cop shows doesn’t work. The ‘previously on’ reminders when you fire up the game after a period away work well to refresh your memory on what’s going on, while the split into 10 episodes, each with its own narrative peaks helps the pacing and structure. It’s more Bad Boys than The Wire but can you really imagine a game with Battlefield in the title having that level of subtlety?

Battlefield Hardline verdict

While it shows real promise in subverting the genre Hardline fails to push any boundaries in gameplay terms, and the ideas it does introduce are often executed in a half-hearted manner. It’s not quite a stealth game, but wants you to play it like one without giving you all the necessary tools to do so.

Hardline could’ve used its law enforcement focus to do something different, but it lacks the confidence to do so, and its settings rarely feel too removed from the Battlefield or Call of Duty games that came before it, purely because they both left the traditional warzone long ago, taking the fight to city streets, lawless desert settlements and hostile swamps plenty of times before.

While Hardline is noisy, spectacular and distracting for a short while, it’s ultimately pretty one-dimensional – exactly like the films it’s trying to recreate. That makes it a success in a way but without its multiplayer mode it’d quickly become a one-weekend wonder.