If you don’t know, Monday at E3, Electronic Arts announced their latest installment of the Battlefield franchise with Hardline. Not to be confused with the 90s hard rock band, DICE has created a cops and robbers-esque game inspired by TV dramas. While the single player isn’t available yet, they did announce a first come, first served closed beta during their presentation. I managed to sneak in before their web servers melted and secured myself a spot in the beta.
The first round starts me off on the Law Enforcement(LE) team and my second round puts me with Criminals(CR) on the map High Tension; game mode Heist.
The goal of the criminals on this map is to set charges to blow open armored truck doors to where the money is kept. Once the charges go off it’s up to your team to pick up the money and take it to an extraction point. This map has two packages to take to different extraction zones.
As a cop, your job is to stop the charges from going off for as long as possible. Barring that, you can stop the criminals from escaping by killing the courier and then recovering the money after it falls. This sends the money back to its’ spawn point. Criminals lose when they run out of tickets (respawns).
Hardline plays very much like a faster paced Battlefield 4 with a different rule set. Currently servers are only running 32 player slots and the matches seem to go quick. It’s very easy for one side to dominate the other. You don’t have that same feel of epic warfare that BF4 offers. Fights are much more scaled down and come in tight controlled bursts. Points in game are converted to currency which is then used to buy weapons and upgrades. Certain upgrades are locked and you have to earn them through gameplay.
Right now the game feels like DLC content rather than a full blown $60 purchase. Granted, this is still a beta and they’ve only given us one map and two game modes to play with. Battlefield Hardline currently ranks as a wait and see game for me, especially since I stopped playing Battlefield 4 months ago.
