This has one of the best openings I've ever seen in any game, and I played the campaign on game pass in the hopes that the rest of it would be in a similar vein. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The opening level of this game establishes such a strong tone as a "war is hell" type of experience, as when you die the game simply zooms out to show you the name of your character and his lifespan, and then puts you straight into the shoes of another similarly doomed soldier. Everything is full of mud and grit and soldiers dying all around, and it hammers home the meaninglessness of all of it. After this level, you unlock a variety of mini-campaigns to play, each showcasing a feature of the game; tanks, planes, sprinting, armored soldiers, etc. While the game does try to keep the tone of the opening level somewhat, all of these levels play like the same kind of one man army power fantasies you've played in every other military shooter ever. It's a massive let down going from "war is hell" to "look how good you are at killing, you badass." Also, lmao at the campaign that is all about glorifying T.E. Lawrence and ends with "T.E. Lawrence remains controversial to this day."

Battlefield 1 takes the Battlefield series back to WWI instead of the modern area where the last four games have been, while everything is certainly not period authentic, this leads to some great changes that seem to have created more balance between the classes, the vehicles, weapon emplacements, and made flying a lot more enjoyable. This entry brings back the environment destruction of the Bad Company games, allowing levels to change quite a bit as matches play. The team that is losing can get help in the form of an armored train, battleship, or blimp which can make things interesting. The blimp can feel a bit overpowered in my experience, though it does make for the most entertaining and environment effecting crash if you manage to take it down. The online modes have some of the best maps I've seen in an online game (maybe I just think that because I played Halo 5 recently which has the worst maps I've ever seen), well designed and varied, and with new random weather effects that can change the way teams play. The new Operation game mode is a great addition that has you defending or attacking control points across different maps and with a short narrative that begins, breaks up, and ends the action. There are a good variety of weapons that you can slightly customize, some fun new equipment items, and vehicles that no longer feel as overpowered and that have different loadouts you can equip them with. This is the best Battlefield has been at multiplayer and I've already had some of the best matches and moments that I've had in any Battlefield game.

On the negative side is the single player campaign which is quite poor for the most part, while this is par for the course for the series, it was even more disappointing now that it is focused on a war not often talked about and after they said how much they wanted to show off lesser known fronts. The game is split up between five campaigns, and a short opening that has you fighting as the Harlem Hellfighters. The campaigns have two to four missions, each campaign is likely to take about 20 minutes to complete if you don't care about pointless challenges and collectibles. You fight as a British tank driver, an American who joined the British air force, an Italian, an Australian, and a Bedouin woman working with Lawrence of Arabia. For some reason half of the non vehicle based missions are stealth missions, you can fight through them but because they are meant to be stealth based there are so few enemies you would be able to just run through them in a couple minutes, the only reason for using stealth being to accomplish the games annoying challenges that can unlock a few multiplayer skins. The engine and enemy AI is also not designed for stealth so you can walk near enemies in daylight, abuse their poor AI, and they will ignore dead bodies of their allies. Some of the challenges are only there to force you to play through the missions again. There are five hidden documents in most missions, getting all five just gives you a small and uninterested detail about the war. Each campaign squanders the potential of telling interesting stories in conflicts that can still effect the world today, especially the one with Lawrence of Arabia, and instead focuses on lone wolf hero moments full with often ridiculous cutscenes. The tank driver and Bedouin campaigns are the worst, being the most ridiculous (with the exception of the pilot campaign which is told by a guy who might even be exaggerating events) and they are the most full of stealth focused missions, the Italian and Australian campaigns were better and the most serious but were short and very dull to play through in the Australian's case. The framing of the Italian campaign and tone is what the series should have been if it was going to tell good and serious stories while also teaching you about history and lesser known war fronts. The pilot's story is probably the best as plane combat, while easy, is fun, and it has one moment that feels more serious and fitting for the game and a bunch of B movie dumb action hero set pieces that fully embraces the inherent stupidity of the genre, it is also the only campaign where the stealth mission makes sense (yes, even the pilot gets one). If you watched the single player trailer before the game's release then you saw the best the game had to offer, the prelude with all the soldiers dying as you play them, a good opening cutscene for the tank driver, horrors of trench combat seen form the retreating soldiers, and a brief moment where you control a messenger pigeon flying over the battlefield. All of that was organized like that to make the campaign look interesting because you will never see anything like that again for the rest of the game.

The campaign is a huge disappointment, but most people will be getting this game for multiplayer which is excellent.

(Written Oct 21, 2016)

Video: https://youtu.be/ixAxBDzDeLs

Campaign only review.

The thing about Battlefield 1 campaign is that it starts so well. The prologues is basically random soldiers fighting endless waves until you die, at which point you spawn as another soldier. This captures the heart of what the series is about, while succinctly portraying how different kind of a war the World War I was: a brutal total war where faceless soldiers killed nameless enemies on the other side, until it just ended one day.

Then you actually start the campaign. There are five acts, each with different theatres of war and different protagonist: one in Western Front from a British tank crew, one in the skies of France and London, one in Isonzo, one in Galipoli and last one in the Mesopotamia. While the changes in scenary are certainly good, the level design gets stale quite quickly. Much like Battlefield 4, the campaign here "encourages" a more open-ended gameplay. This usually means that you are going through an open level often with not enough tools, taking on enemies alone like a rambo. If they wanted to establish that a single soldier's action means barely anything in the grand scheme of war in the prologue, the rest of the game does away with all of that. You are expected to play like a hero, with weapons that honestly does not feel like WW1 due to the prevalence of automatic firearms. The levels, when designed well, is a joy (like the second mission in the Mesopotamia), but they are mostly too open with too little variations. This, coupled with the overall tonal dissonance, makes the campaign very disappointing affair, despite its potential.

This is a very solid backbone of a shooter, with extremely finely crafted controls and great performance optimization. The content that rests on that backbone might be a bit questionable but even if you think it's garbage, it's garbage that you can play very efficiently. The options menus give you an exceptional amount of room for customization, even letting you pick individual mouse sensitivity to each separate type of zooming that happens in the game.
P.S Please don't believe any part of any story that this game tells about World War 1. It's pure fiction, and probably also afflicted by the developers' agendas. -And the last thing you should do is attempt any of the so-called tactics that were used. You do not try to take out anti-aircraft defenses using aircraft.