Battlefield 6 (PC) review: A return to form for one of the best multiplayer shooters around

Booting up Battlefield 6 on PC felt oddly nostalgic for me. It’s like returning to an old hangout spot that’s been renovated but still smells faintly of gunpowder and bad decisions. You can tell EA and DICE really want to make good after Battlefield 2042’s stumble, and it shows in how familiar everything feels: soldiers yelling, tanks rumbling, and chaos spreading faster than you can say “revive me”. It’s a reset of sorts, and while not quite a revolution it’s a clear attempt to remind fans what “Battlefield” used to mean before the series got too flashy for its own good.

From the first few missions, it’s obvious BF6 is stepping back from the over-the-top sci-fi setting. Gone are the hover-boards, robot dogs, and future-tech fluff, and instead it’s a grounded return to bullets, grit, and good old-fashioned squad-based mayhem. After a few hours in, it’s clear DICE is playing to its strengths again. And here’s the thing: for all the bad press surrounding studios that push out half-baked, buggy PC launches, BF6 actually feels stable from the get-go – frame rates hold and crashes are rare. It’s not flawless, but compared to the usual mess that accompanies a big PC launch these days, this one’s refreshingly trouble-free – and that says a lot about where we are with modern PC gaming.

The single-player campaign is a short one though, coming in at about five hours for most players – and it’s built like a greatest-hits medley of war-game moments. One minute you’re breaching doors, the next you’re rolling a tank through dust clouds or sniping targets across a sun-baked field. It’s cinematic and well-paced, but never really surprising. The larger-than-life plot revolves around Pax Armata, a shady private military company trying to strong-arm the world into a new order. You and your squad, Dagger 13, chase a defector through various hot zones, though the story mostly acts as scaffolding for the set-pieces.

It’s fine for what it is, just don’t expect much emotional investment. The characters blur together, the dialogue feels like it came from a war-movie generator (“We do what we have to, soldier!”), and transitions between missions sometimes feel abrupt. But when you’re inside the missions, the game looks absolutely stunning. One of my favourite is a countryside sniper level, where the wide open space allowed me to plan my own approach and strategy. And the spectacle is well worth the price of the game: Explosions have proper heft, lighting is gorgeous, and DICE’s Frostbite engine is surprisingly good now.

But you don’t buy Battlefield to play its campaign, because Multiplayer is the beating heart of the series. That, thankfully it’s much stronger this time around. The destruction physics are back, maps are varied, and the chaos feels controlled enough to be enjoyable rather than exhausting. BF6 offers nine modes at launch in rotation, from intimate infantry skirmishes to sprawling 64-player wars where fighter jets scream overhead and skyscrapers crumble mid-match. Multiplayer is where BF6 is truly glorious.

What’s changed though, is the pacing. The game is faster now – some would say too fast – and while that might irk the old guard who preferred deliberate positioning and long flanks, it injects a kind of modern shooter adrenaline that’s not too far off from the other great multiplayer shooter from Activision Blizzard. Really, you will spend less time running across empty fields and more time fighting in BF6.

There are still quirks. The UI can get messy when things heat up – revive prompts, objective updates, ammo icons, and teammate markers clutter the screen. As the squad medic, I’ve literally stood over a fallen teammate mashing the revive button, only to realise the game wanted me half a metre to the left. And there are balance issues too at launch too. Some maps feel lopsided, certain choke points turn into grenade soup, and the time-to-kill feels inconsistent depending on your connection. It’s not game-breaking, but frustrating enough when it hits you one too many times in the same match.

The four-class system of Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon returns. Each class has distinct tools, but DICE also added a little flexibility with weapon loadouts. You won’t get totally locked into class-specific guns in BF6, which is liberating but also blurs some identity. I liked tinkering with my build mid-match, but purists might prefer the stricter class boundaries of earlier titles to keep matches more predictable. The problem, as ever, is random teammates. When I jumped into public servers solo, about half the players ran off like action heroes with zero regard for objectives. Alas, playing BF6 without coordination is exhausting and frustrating at the same time. This isn’t limited to BF6’s multiplayer of course, but like almost all team matches, the game encourages you to make or find friends to play in the same team. And when you do get to play in a well-oiled team, BF6 hits peak satisfaction.

Technically, the PC version of BF6 performs solidly – a far cry from 2042’s messy debut. On my PC gaming rig that’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5080 GPU, I saw consistent performance even during large firefights. But the occasional crash or weird physics bug do crop up, but it’s nothing that I would say makes the game poorly launched. That said, the game’s still pretty reliant on hardware, and you’ll want a good GPU if you plan to run it on Ultra settings.

And I have to mention the destruction again, because it’s genuinely satisfying when you it happens. Watching a building’s facade collapse mid-fight, sending debris scattering as dust clouds choke the light, still have me go ooh and aah. It’s not as omnipresent as pre-launch trailers might imply, but when it happens, these destruction feels meaningful in-game as it forces players to adapt and reposition – the battlefield literally reshapes itself. And I’ve not seen any game pulling this off so naturally.

If there’s a criticism that sticks, it’s that the BF6 plays things a little too safe. To me, anyway. The campaign is fun but short, and the multiplayer felt more like a refinement rather than a genre-defining one. But DICE got it right where it matters: the game’s fundamentals are solid, the performance stable at launch, and when BF6 still serves plenty of adrenaline-spiking moments that made the series early games popular. But make no mistake, this is the Battlefield I wanted back. It’s not perfect and it’s not daring. But damn, it’s fun to play a Battlefield game again.

Battlefield 6 is now available for PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.