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NEW GAME > Battlefield 1 By Thomas Bender With Battlefield 1, DICE and EA have crafted a shooter experience that transports the player to a different time and place. For one of the first times while playing an FPS, I felt as though I was reliving a time and experience based on actual history and events. The amazing feat, then, is that this sense of place and historical realism has been achieved even while stretching the rules to keep moment-to-moment gameplay as fun and entertaining as Battlefield has ever been. Fans of the series (or genre) are probably familiar with the industry’s struggle to craft a meaningful, fun, and entertaining single player experience. Battlefield 1 manages the best effort to achieve this in recent memory, thanks to some fresh changes with the story-telling and format. Rather than crafting one big story arc filled with plot twists, super villains, and an Earth-saving hero, Battlefield 1’s campaign follows the short - and sometimes mundane - stories of 5 separate individuals as they battle their way through their small portion of World War I. This format allows for more succinct stories, and more relatable characters that give Battlefield 1 the opportunity to stray from most of the industry tropes that riddle the genre. Don’t get me wrong, there are still huge explosions, set pieces, and unbelievable feats of heroic combat, but for the most part, the campaign stories are believable and communicative in a way that I don’t associate with shooter video games at all. The single player episodes also help to prepare you for the multiplayer experience, largely by giving you an opportunity to pilot some of the tanks, airplanes, and other vehicles that the series is known for. While the experience isn’t one to one (some of the controls are strangely different in the multiplayer portion of the game), it at least provides some confidence to give the vehicles a try when you jump into the epicly scaled battles of online multiplayer. As a Battlefield signature, the grand scale multiplayer matches return, offering the opportunity to wage war with up to 64 players on a single map. It can become chaotic quickly, but usually in the sense that you expect a war torn battlefield to be - explosions everywhere, soldiers dieing, compatriots diving for cover, bullets whizzing by your head, and the occasional yet always terrifying rumble of a tank cresting a nearby ridge. Even more impressive, is that after dozens of hours in these large scale maps, I have had minimal technical issues. This year the franchise has expanded on its Conquest mode with an even larger iteration that they call Operations. This mode pits a team of attackers against a team of defenders, and requires capturing ever more challenging sets of objectives to progress through the mission. Attackers get 3 chances to complete the multiple stages of a single map, and upon success are whisked away to an entirely new, equally massive battlefield (with historical story narrative to justify the battles and their outcomes). Despite the gigantic scale at play - both the maps and the teams - these hour-long fights are surprisingly close! After enjoying the single player campaign, and playing about a dozen hours of online multiplayer, all the pieces started to coalesce very nicely, and I’ve been hooked