While Hardline certainly isn’t your standard Battlefield experience, the changes and tweaks present here are welcome additions, breathing new life into the franchise that’ll entice both veteran and new players alike.

While Hardline isn’t the Battlefield you may be used to it offers a unique approach that will surely please fans of the genre. The campaign is a big step up from previous entries and while the multiplayer anarchy has been trimmed down, the gameplay in its place is more tactical and intimate.

An engaging narrative, beautiful visuals, varied gameplay, and top-notch multiplayer (that works well) all fit together to deliver one of the biggest and best experiences to be had this year thus far.

Hardline might not reinvent the wheel the series rolls on, but it certainly makes it spin a whole lot smoother. Speeded up gameplay, an opened-up single-player, and a robust suite of new multiplayer modes lends itself to the best Battlefield to date—though that’s not saying much, a decade later.

A passable and unspectacular campaign is unlikely to win any new fans, but Hardline's fresh take on Battlefield multiplayer makes it worth a shot. [Issue#256, p.68]

Multiplayer is, of course, the main reason that you buy into a Battlefield game, and it's generally enjoyable, even if it doesn't do anything to revolutionise the genre. However, both Activision and EA, and every other FPS developer that aspires to become the top dog franchise, needs to learn that if they are going to persist in putting single player narratives into their games, then they need to do a far better job.

We can see in its lack of substance a reflection of a disturbing social complacency when it comes to exploring complicated issues like police violence and systemic racism. We can also recognize what little faith it has in its players to wrestle with difficult concepts, to find something meaningful and troubling behind using a digital badge and police-issued firearm in equal measure to solve our crime problems.