Battlefield: Hardline (2015) review

    BATTLEFIELD: HARDLINE is apparently the redheaded stepchild of the Battlefield franchise. The franchise is primarily based on military shooting alongside driving tanks among a handful of other vehicles so the shift to a "cops and robbers" game was a significant twist. Personally, I very much enjoyed this entry into the franchise and am regretful we don't have more video games that are from the perspective of the police. Then again, given how many people end up dead and how many laws our protagonists break, perhaps there's a reason you're more likely to end up on the "robber" side of things in video games.

    The premise is that Miami is undergoing a drug war in 2012 with new players violently eliminating the competition with seemingly no response from the police. Detective Nick Mendoza (voiced by Philip Anthony-Rodriguez, motion captured by Nicholas Gonzalez) is partnered with Detectives Carl Stoddard (Travis Willingham) and Khai Minh Dao (Kelly Hu) to try to find out who is responsible. 

    What follows is a fairly paint by the numbers story about how our protagonists investigate the big mean drug cartels but discover that the enemy is closer than home, finding out instead that dirty cops are involved with an ultimate plan to privatize law enforcement. The single player campaign is about seven and a half hours long, which is a pretty robust campaign even if it could have involved a couple of more missions.

    There's some decent twists and turns throughout the campaign, including a betrayal by someone I didn't expect to turn out dirty because they're someone that we've been trained to trust in other video games. The later half of the game suffers from abandoning the "cop" premise, though, and putting you as a vigilante on the run. I was actually enjoying play a Bad Boys-esque narco cop in Miami and could have enjoyed a couple of more adventures with that. We didn't even get to do one speedboat chase!

    I especially liked Nick's relationship with Khai, the two of them having excellent chemistry and a relationship that changed multiple times in the story. It's not romantic, though gamers might be forgiven if they assumed it would be. It's also a nice gender reversal of the cowboy cop and the by-the-book cop with Khai being the one who loves breaking the rules and engaging in needless bloodshed. 

    If I had a big complaint about the game's storyline, it's the fact the story just sort of ends without a real resolution. Yes, the big bad is taken care of and the player characters get a big windfall but there was a lot more to deal with. The uncertainty of the ending may have been the point but I think addressing matters more directly would have been better. 

    The majority of the gameplay is shooting, as to be expected, but the game has a surprisingly robust stealth system. As much fun as it is to go shooting up dozens of criminals, it's better to sneak around the levels and arrest as many crooks at gunpoint as possible. The system also incentivizes this as the more crooks you take in alive, the higher your score and the more specialized equipment you get. It doesn't always make sense, why do arrested criminals stay silent while you stealth attack others, but it's still great to handcuff them versus putting them in body bags.

    I can't really say much about the multiplayer and eight years later, the community is mostly dead. If you're going to buy Battlefield: Hardline, do it for the single player campaign that is entertaining but a bit truncated. There's a lot of good missions in it and unexpected guest stars like Alexandra Dadarrio as a redneck trailer park girl. It's fun, if not a "must buy."
 
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