Battlefield is a large team-based multiplayer first-person shooter set in World War 2. When you first start the game, you have an interesting introduction where you switch between many characters in a short space of time. You are a soldier with a machine gun who shoots a few enemies before being killed by a tank. You then control a tank and take down a few vehicles and RPG soldiers. You then play as a sniper until he gets killed by a plane. You then fly the plane, before finally playing as another soldier.
After you finish this brief introduction, you can jump into the online modes, or play one of the short single-player campaign missions known as War Stories. I wasn't a fan of this mode, since it mainly involves your character doing solo raids in a stealthy manner which goes against the main idea of Battlefield.
There are many modes to the online game, but they basically play the same. There's a large map with 2 warring armies. Each army is split into groups of 4 players known as a squad. You can choose between 4 soldier classes when you respawn; Assault, Support, Medic and Recon.
As you play the game, new weapons and equipment is unlocked, but they are basically set up as follows: Assault is good with standard guns and has explosives that are great against vehicles. Medic can dish out medpacks and quickly revive allied soldiers, whereas other classes can slowly revive their squad members only. Support can dish out ammo packs, repair vehicles, quickly build defences, and carries larger machine guns which are great for laying down suppressing fire. Recon can spot enemies from afar and uses Snipers for long range attacks.
As a team, you take down enemy soldiers and battle over marked areas of the map. Doing these actions depletes the enemies “tickets” and when that count reaches zero, then it's game over. To take the marked areas, you eliminate enemies then stay within that area for a certain amount of time. The more soldiers are in the area, and the closer they are to the centre, then the shorter that time is. The squad leader can issue commands to attack or defend these areas.
By defeating enemies and playing the objectives set by the squad leader, you accrue Attrition points which the squad leader can use to call in ammo drops, vehicles, or air strikes. Working together not only helps you stay alive, but also gives you rewards.
You start off with a small amount of ammunition, but I found the deaths came pretty quick so it was a rare occurrence that I ran out of ammo. For players that survive longer, it will be a problem. You can collect ammo from fallen soldiers, there are Supply Stations on the map where you can collect ammo from (the areas that you need to control), and the Support class can dish out ammo packs. Health only partially regenerates, but then you need to use a Medpack. You can collect replacement Medpacks from Medical Supply Stations or from Medics.
The environment is highly destructive which is very impressive. Sometimes, it's a simple as shooting out a glass window to give you better view to shoot from. It is great when you hide inside a house only for someone to destroy part of the wall with a nicely placed rocket. The buildings can be completely ripped apart, especially if they come under an aerial bombardment.
There's not much you can do about a fully destroyed house, but you are able to board up broken windows, and certain areas allow you to place sandbags to wall off areas and give you extra protection. Barbed wire coils will stop infantry, and Czech hedgehogs will stop tanks.
The graphics in general are absolutely amazing. You can really use smoke to your advantage to create cover - which is a tactic the Medics often do since they can equip a smoke grenade launcher. If team-members are down, you fire a smoke grenade their way, run out to them and revive them. The smoke means the enemies will struggle to get a clean shot at you, helping you revive and escape in time.
There are loads of cosmetic tweaks which can be bought with the in game currency that you gain by completing the daily challenges and set achievements.
With each game you play, you will earn XP for your overall rank, and for each Class and Weapon. When Weapons are levelled, you can customize them with upgrades for less recoil, faster reload, greater hip-fire accuracy, quicker aim-down-sights etc. I'm never a big fan of this system as better players get rewarded, which causes a bigger gulf between the better/older players and the worse/younger players. I'm not sure if it is for this reason, but I found I was a mid-skilled player during the first few weeks, then found myself struggling at the bottom of the leaderboards after.
There's been a few patches since release, and Dice have added an extra story to War Stories, a Practice Range, and a new map. Maybe this content should have been there on release, but rather late than never.
I did enjoy my time playing Battlefield V, and if I was better at it; then I would most likely play longer.