Battlefield 6 Campaign | Review

Ooh-rah!

Jesse 'Doncabesa' Norris October 9, 2025Last Updated: October 9, 2025

1 4,896 6 minutes read

Battlefield 6 goes all out in its campaign. It is the biggest, loudest, brashest one since Battlefield 4. Fantastic gameplay, epic scope, and incredible audio are matched by a story straight out of the mid-2000s. A jingoistic, predictable, and poorly written affair that, as trope-filled as it is, did not ruin my enjoyment.

Battlefield 6 Campaign Review | Image Credit: XboxEra (Battlefield 6 PC)

NATO goes to PAX

In this near-future tale, America is weakened as our allies have mostly abandoned us and NATO. A new power has risen in the east, Pax Armata. This PMC (private military contractor) organization is out for blood. Pax thrives on chaos and seems to be invisible to our surveillance. Across nine globe-spanning missions, you will be on the ground and in vehicles, though never in the air.

Battlefield 6’s campaign is big, expensive, and thoroughly enjoyable. If the thought of an incredibly pro-soldier story that treats a single death on your side as worthy of a billion on the other side sounds good, then you will have a fun time. If, like me, none of the emotional beats ever resonate, then skip cutscenes to your heart’s content on future playthroughs.

The story is told through a series of flashbacks. Things begin with your main character, Murphy, showing up at Mills, a CIA operator’s, house. Most campaign missions have a short cutscene in between them, as you slowly unravel the great mystery of Pax Armata’s rise to power, and how they always seemed one step ahead.

It was a predictable slog of a story. One focused on how amazing your team was, despite never giving you any understanding of who they were outside of their class archetypes. It felt like the endpoint of a trilogy to start, and you slowly learned a limited amount of information about them. By the end, I still did not care about any of Dagger Squad, though I sure did love to blow shit up as them.

Ultimate Destruction

The politics of the game are terrible; the gameplay is amazing. I know most will not care, being used to the government-backed action movies America is known for. In BF6, you will jump between a few members of Dagger Squad. It does not mean much gameplay-wise, outside of your starting kit.

The campaign is smartly built mostly inside the multiplayer levels, with a lot of corridor shooting early on and some massive open-world style set pieces in the back half. Most of your time will be boots on the ground, sweeping rooms and sniping targets as a soldier. There are a few sections where vehicles come into play, though only on the ground.

One of my favorite levels was entirely in a tank. I had helicopter and jet support, but I was never able to fly them. The most flying you will do is with the various drones that are available at certain points. Gadgets abound with numerous explosives of all kinds. Using them to obliterate buildings never grows old. That sense of destruction is so much damned fun, carrying what otherwise is a paint-by-numbers military campaign.

Battlefield 6 does nothing ‘new’, per se. Instead, the focus is on slowly building up to some truly epic battles, with a scope and scale rarely seen before. While some of the early moments, like an entire building collapsing around you, can feel heavily scripted, a lot of the later ones are more diegetic. Massive bombing runs levelled dozens of tanks and soldiers, leading to deafening & blinding explosions. There really is nothing else like it.

Battle-feel-d

If you have played the open beta, you will know how Battlefield 6 feels. If not, get ready for a fast-paced shooter with a wide variety of weaponry. There are SMGs, Assault Rifles, Shotguns, LMGs, Snipers, and gadgets with which you will kill enemies and destroy the environment. Playing on Xbox Series X, the game felt good, though overly twitchy by default.

If you watch the video review alongside this, you may notice how deliberately I have to move my reticle. For any mid to long-range combat, it was twitchy on the controller even after adjusting the settings. As far as settings go, you have multiple difficulty choices from easy to really damned hard. Your character will automagically heal after not taking damage for a brief period of time.

As you are always a part of a squad, some of the other MP mechanics, like ammo drops from the engineer character, will help keep you stocked up during an intense firefight. While the game encourages stealth a few times, I found the NPC squad I fought with could not give two damns about it most of the time. They would walk right in front of an enemy, get spotted, and start firing everything they had.

NPC behavior is brain-dead as well. The difficulty appears to only up their damage output, decrease their damage intake, and make them more accurate. They stand still, occasionally popping out of cover to immediately ping you in the chest. There were also a large number of times when they became stuck in the environment, both alive and dead.

WOWttlefield… 6

Battlefield 6’s campaign on Xbox Series X starts out looking good and ends looking incredible. Character faces during cutscenes, both fidelity and animation, are the best the series has seen by a long shot. During combat, performance felt perfect on the balanced setting. You can set things to go to a higher framerate, but I only do that for the multiplayer mode.

In the more corridor-shooter-like early levels, the environmental detail is high. If you go off the beaten path, there is not much to find, but the team did a wonderful job of making areas feel lived in. Going through Egypt and seeing entire neighborhoods being leveled by an attack helicopter was breathtaking and horrifying in equal measure. This was enhanced by BF6’s best-in-class audio.

No series feels more immersive to me. While the voice acting was fine, it was the sound effects of the guns, explosions, and world in general that made me feel like I was really there. As we drove down a street in New York, shooting down a crane’s payload in slow motion so that it could land on top of our pursuers, every noise felt perfectly placed.

My bullet hits, the enemy call outs around us, tires squealing, all made the chaos feel real. The NPC chatter between your squad and others is dumb as hell. Full of tired jargon most of the game, until they try to add in some heavy emotions that never land. With this type of campaign, I doubt the majority of the player base will ever care, but it is something that stuck out to me. I was not alone in playing this one, though, as our Editor-in-Chief, Jon Clarke, has played through some of the campaign as well.

Checking out Battlefield 6 on PC

Jon here! While Jesse was tackling the Xbox Series X|S version of the game, EA were kind enough to furnish me with a copy on PC for me to check out. I’ve been slowly whittling my way through the campaign, and there are some surprising stand-out moments.

Battlefield’s sheer sense of scale is regularly used to significant effect, with enormous explosions and entire buildings crumbling to the ground in full view of the player, the audio and visuals of the Battlefield Studios teams coming together in a triumphant display of carnage. It runs flawlessly on my RTX4090, as one would expect.

Where it start to lose some of its high-production shine is that more often than not, on-foot and vehicle sections are little more than cleverly disguised corridors, the illusion of scale broken once you try to stray from the suggested path. Some of them are wider linear paths than others, and it emulates the feel of its multiplayer component very well, but it just doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

When you add those design decision limitations to a story that feels straight out of a 2008 bargain bin, it starts to fall apart a bit. With little in the way of a main character to connect or empathize with, and a plot that is as jingoistic as they come, the serviceable and mostly fun scale and gameplay of the campaign carry the heaviest load.

Regardless, if you dive in and play Battlefield 6’s campaign in the way it was intended, there’s fun to be had here. Besides, we’re all here for the multiplayer anyway, so the campaign feels like a nice tutorial with a blockbuster feel.

Wrapping Things Up

Battlefield 6’s campaign is an explosive, epic, and stupid 5 hours. Fantastic gameplay meets an annoyingly trope-filled story. Everything is so damned pretty, sounds too good, and plays too well for that to keep it from being a whole lot of fun.