If nothing else, Battlefield 2042 is ambitious. The shooter features several game types, more than a dozen maps, new and classic gear, and an amazing game editor that offers near-infinite entertainment. Unfortunately, slicing into the Battlefield 2042 cake reveals a gummy, half-baked center. Hilarious bugs, performance problems, and balance issues plague every game facet, and it's made worse by the fact that 2042 is a strictly multiplayer affair. EA Dice obviously wanted to court two audiences with Battlefield 2042, with flashy and accessible game modes and abilities for newcomers, and larger-scale zones and classic game modes via Portal for veterans. Battlefield 2042 could very well deliver on that promise in the future, but this $59.99 PC game isn't worth a pickup just yet—unless you're hungry for a new shooter.
Out With the Old
Battlefield 2042 does away with the series' familiar Class system and replaces it with Specialists, hyper-versatile soldiers with unique abilities and perks. Classes were rigid, precisely defined roles that you selected pre-match to complement your team; Specialists, on the other hand, are much more flexible. They can be armed with whatever weapons and gadgets you want, so team synergy in the All Out Warfare modes feels far less important as a result.
What’s more, these Specialists have absurdly potent, or outright cheesy powers that feel more at home in a game like Apex Legends or Overwatch. For example, one Specialist can see through walls, and has a perk that lets her automatically ping anyone who shoots at her. Another has a grapple-hook that lets him Spider-Man around ledges and elevations, and move faster while aiming. My favorite is Boris, a Specialist who drops turrets for target-marks and easy kills like Torbjorn from Overwatch. These Specialists give the combat a distinct, arcade-like feel that abandons the previous games' more realistic approach.
Specialists are so powerful and flexible that much of the older games' teamwork and cooperation is cast aside in the All Out Warfare modes. Plus, you can’t see what your teammates have armed, so you can’t coordinate around that. Since you can bring any gear you want, or play as whichever Specialist you want, these large-scale game modes feel like free-for-alls. You just run toward the action, unload your arsenal, then keep moving. It is fun for goofy shooting action, but that’s about it.
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In Comes the New
The action changes up a bit in Hazard Zone, a 32-player PvP mode. In it, you face off against other players and AI bots, while coordinating with teammates to extract data drives in contested zones. You earn currency based on the amount of data you extract, which you can spend on upgrades and weapons in the next round. However, you lose this data when you die. This adds a risk/reward element to the action; you can focus on surviving to keep your data and earn points, or be more aggressive and risk skirmishes to earn more from killing players. On top of that, you cannot pick whoever you want at the start of a round: each team can only have one type of Specialist in the squad. In other words, you can't have a team of four turret-dudes. You are expected to make smart choices about your Specialist and your load out to better compliment the team. Hazard Zone features a smaller head count, so the action feels much more deliberate and better paced.
Hazard Zone is a gear-oriented affair, however. Maps are much too large and open for smart cover usage most of the time, so the team with the better modified or upgraded gear generally wins unless the opposition really drops the ball. Specialists' abilities are better balanced in this mode than the larger All Out Warfare skirmishes, making Hazard Zone feel like the central pillar of the Battlefield 2042 experience.
At the same time, it seems that EA Dice set out to reimagine Battlefield as a battle royale in some respects, without committing fully to the idea. Battlefield 2042 sits in a weird limbo as a result; it's not quite Battlefield, but not quite battle royale, either. With stiff competition from Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends, and the recently launches Halo Infinite multiplayer, all of which are free to play, the price of entry may be too steep for newcomers to stomach.
Battlefield Portal, the game mode editor, is 2042's best element. It features six maps across three previous Battlefield games, and a robust list of parameters and rules to choose from when creating your server. These include team size and distribution, squad size, spawn type, weapon and vehicle selection, weather events, and damage multipliers. The combinations are impressive, so it’ll be interesting to see how the community plays around with these functions. EA Dice has provided a few modes of its own, including Classic Conquest from Battlefield 1942, Rush from Bad Company, and Conquest from Battlefield 3; even the old Class system is recreated. Battlefield Portal is a wonderful mode, but it’s disappointing that the best part of this new game are elements from older Battlefield games.
Can Your PC Run Battlefield 2042?
To run Battlefield 2042, your PC must houses at least an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 or Core i5 6600K CPU, AMD Radeon RX 560 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU, 100GB of storage, and the 64-bit Windows 10 operating system. Unfortunately, Battlefield 2042's performance is a mixed bag that changes based on the map, weather effects in play, and number of character running around in the match.
On a desktop PC with an Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and RTX 2080 GPU, 128-player All Out Warfare matches featured frame rates that danced between 30 and 80 frames per second. This frame rate fluctuation makes the gunplay feel jittery and inaccurate, and no amount of tweaking seems to have a noticeable impact on the frame rate stability. DLSS, which uses AI upscaling to improve visuals and enhance performance, has only a marginal impact. Lowering the visual settings makes the game look significantly worse, for minimal improvements.
Then again, Hazard Zone, which is capped at 32 players, runs markedly better. In this mode, our testbed pushed polygons at around 80fps. The gameplay is smoother as a result. Portal game modes, capped at 64 players, also feel better. The older, less graphically dense Portal maps may be a contributing factor.
Sadly, the audio needs work, too. The in-game sounds seem projected from some indescribable space in the ether, so it's impossible to discern where audio is coming from. As a result, you'll need to open the mini-map a lot. Footfalls are particularly bad; my own steps sounded like they came from behind me, which had me spooked at my own shadow. Amusingly, other characters' footsteps are muted, so I've been popped in the back of the head at point blank range more times than I care to admit.
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An Odd Middle Ground
Battlefield 2042 is a curious beast. EA Dice is clearly aware of its doggedly faithful fanbase, and has made moves to keep them appeased. However, the developer is trying to court a new audience via easy-to-play Specialists, carte blanche weapon options, massive player counts, lessened teamwork in All Out Warfare, and Hazard Zone's dynamic risk elements. It creates an uneven feel. Sure, classic Battlefield content lives on in the excellent Portal mode creator, but it's odd and somewhat sad that it's a side dish and not a main course.
Battlefield 2042 is ambitious, but highly flawed. Considering that the shooter has no campaign mode, and is purely a multiplayer-oriented experience, it's disappointing to see it launch in this messy state. Fortunately, EA Dice tends to support their games for many months after launch to improve and polish elements as needed (see Star Wars: Battlefront). Battlefield 2042 isn’t there yet. Unless you're hungry to play a new shooter, it's best to hold off buying the game until EA Dice releases performance-enhancing patches, and the community cooks up some must-play game modes.
For more Steam game reviews and previews, check out PCMag's Steam Curator page. And for in-depth video game talk, visit PCMag's Pop-Off YouTube channel.
Battlefield 2042 is an ambitious shooter that features the excellent Portal mode-creation tool, as well as a few, cool game types. Unfortunately, technical issues and balance problems mean that you may want to hold off buying the game until EA Dice irons out the kinks.
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