A MOST GLORIOUS TUTORIAL
I should begin by stating that this is my first Battlefield game. I am, however, well aware that DICE’s formula has become so entrenched that most reviews merely catalogue what has changed between installments. What’s new? What’s missing? What’s tweaked? The framework itself is assumed knowledge—Battlefield is part of gamer DNA at this point.
That puts me at a disadvantage. Lacking series context, I can’t meaningfully compare entries. All I can do is approach Battlefield 1 as what it is to me: an FPS among FPSes, a genre well outside my comfort zone. As usual on this blog, I focus on the single-player campaign. With a backlog north of a thousand games, I have neither the time nor the inclination for the endless multiplayer grind.
The campaign in Battlefield 1 is a solid, tightly produced experience—a handful of intense hours framed by World War I spectacle. Its structure is immediately distinct: rather than following a single protagonist, the campaign is divided into six self-contained war stories inspired by real conflicts of the era. Each is brief, typically winnable in under two hours. I enjoyed learning the specific mechanics and skills unique to each character enough to overlook the obvious truth: the campaign functions primarily as a tutorial for multiplayer. Still, it is a tutorial carefully disguised as something more dignified.
Narratively, however, it rarely rises above competence. The writing hits familiar beats without offering new insight into the horrors of war. Each episode is bookended by solemn, overwrought voice-overs about loss and suffering, while the gameplay itself often celebrates the visceral thrill of combat and heroic sacrifice. The result is tonal ambiguity rather than contradiction.
This places Battlefield 1 in an uneasy middle ground. It neither glorifies war outright nor meaningfully condemns it. Perhaps that balance is intentional—and honest. A franchise built on large-scale combat would ring hollow if it suddenly attempted overt pacifist messaging mid-firefight. In the end, the game evokes little beyond adrenaline, though it delivers that reliably.
You inhabit several protagonists across varied global settings, each tailored to a specific playstyle. One mission has you sneaking through the Sahara unarmed, ambushing enemies from behind. Another puts you in the cockpit as a morally dubious British fighter ace, dogfighting over Europe. You might man a stationary flak gun, crawl through Alpine trenches, or pilot a massive tank across a fog-shrouded battlefield.
Of the six stories—including a confusing opening tutorial segment featuring expendable Black soldiers in the trenches—the airborne and Gallipoli episodes stand out as the strongest. The tank-focused story is my least favorite. It is the most linear and the most frustrating, frequently forcing you to abandon your vehicle to scout ahead, only to be ambushed by enemies obscured by smoke and terrain.
Compared to its genre cousin Call of Duty, Battlefield emphasizes scale, openness, and systemic chaos over tightly scripted spectacle. Maps are larger, offering multiple routes and tactical options. The audiovisual presentation is overwhelming by design: bullets crack past your head, explosions disorient you, and shouted orders compete for your attention. The game never lets you settle.
While the campaign occasionally encourages alternative approaches—stealth, heavier loadouts, traps—the execution is uneven. The limitations of World War I-era weaponry reduce meaningful experimentation, and in high-intensity encounters it is difficult to think tactically when death comes from a handful of stray bullets.
Still, the combat is generally fair. You are rarely without cover, and scouting tools allow you to mark enemies from a distance. If spotted, retreating into concealment is often viable. These systems work well—when they work.
There are missteps. Certain sections rely on unpredictable, instant-kill bombardments. The checkpointing is inconsistent, sometimes forcing lengthy replays. One segment required scouting with binoculars that repeatedly glitched, leaving me effectively blind.
And that, frankly, is most of what there is to say. Battlefield 1 is competent, polished, and fleeting. Like the rest of the series, it is clearly designed with multiplayer as its core. The single-player campaign is impressive largely because it exists at all.
What ultimately undermines it is a lack of identity. The campaign has no hook, no personal angle, nothing that lingers. The outcomes are predetermined, the emotions prescribed. It is an expensive, carefully curated EA spectacle—slick, professional, and immediately forgettable.
I enjoyed playing it, as reflected in my score. But I was bored writing about it. That may be the most telling critique of all. Battlefield 1 is meant to be experienced, not examined. It gave me a few thrilling moments—most memorably a zeppelin going down in flames—but no stories of my own to carry forward. Those, I suspect, are reserved for the multiplayer modes I chose to ignore.
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