Review of Battlefield: Hardline

The Battlefield series has been running alongside the Call of Duty series as it's mine rival ( whenever the Medal of Honor series seems to have fell off the face of the universe ). And there is a huge difference between the two, especially when it comes to Multiplayer. Call of Duty tends to circle around the idea of proxy conflicts, meaning small battles in small areas. Where as the Battlefield series area of conflict is vastly larger! Also, even though though CoD has its players shooting guns, BF has much more. You can shoot each other with a larger variety of weaponry than those on CoD, but BF also has vehicles to drive around in which ranges from motorcycles, 4-wheelers, to ATV and even tanks! And that is just on the ground! There are boats you can use on levels where water is part of the environment! There are even jets and helicopters that players can use to cause havoc in the huge battlefield ( nudge nudge ) that players play on! That isn't it! The environment is destructible! This fence is in the way? No problem! I'll shoot or knife it down! That enemy is hiding behind the wall? No biggie! I'll just blow the wall away! There is a enemy team hiding within a 2nd story building? Please! I'll use a tank and just drive into the sonovabitch ... which will make the building collapse!!!! Crazy right?! Not everything is destructible but there is enough of the structures that you can blow away that allows for the battlefield ( nudge nudge again ) to change according to the situation! But, like everything else, the same song and dance gets kind of stale and new ideas comes in. And here comes Battlefield: Hardline!

The backdrop of the entire game is the crime on war in Miami. The single player mode follows a straight cop, Nick Mendoza, as he uncovers the seedy underbelly of his city and his precinct which has his closest friends turn on him and having to get help to set things right by using the aide of "crooked cops and colourful criminals, from chatterbox coke dealers and deranged billionaires." The casts seem entertaining, if not believable much. You tend to like the criminals over the protectors of the law but it still ends up being a very fun and entertaining story. The single player campaign has 2 new mechanics. One being able to use your cell phone to scan the environments to find and solve investigations and to identity criminals who have active warrants! The other new addition is the ability to arrest people by flashing your badge at them. They will drop their weapons and wait for you to arrest them. But wait too long or you don't keep your gun trained on them then they will pick up their weapons, yell for help and try to give you lead poisoning. The traditional military base for the Battlefield series has changed to more of a street level kind battle. Instead of soldiers, you play 'Cops and Robbers' in the multiplayer modes. Most of the online modes are money orientated. There is a mode called Blood Money, where you ( being the robbers ) have to steal money from a central point before the cops ( opposite team ) confiscate it. Or, if that isn't your cup of tea, then you can keep hostage away from the cops long enough for your negotiator to strike up a deal in the hostage mode! There is a Heist mode where you have to blow up walls, floors and vaults ( like in PayDay ) and grab the money while the cops try to make you stop dat shit! The weapons are both street level and police issue and even the vehicles differ depending on which team you belong to. There is even a mobile spawn point that you can drive around the battlefield ( nudge nudge ). Truly this game is epic! And there are plenty of people who are playing the game still. Honestly, HardLine, in my honest opinion is very over looked and under appreciated. The story mode is alright but the multiplayer keeps you playing. Plenty of guns to work towards unlocking and gadgets and attachments for your weapon of choice. And the battlefield changes with each battle. You knock out a wall ... then what would you use when you need somewhere to hide. Because the environment doesn't regenerate. When you blow a crane next to a building and it crashes into a building, it could create another opening or just make more major debris to get around. The one of the few slight downside ( for me ) for the game was that I couldn't choose which side I was in. The game auto choose if I was cops or robbers. That wouldn't be so bad if there weren't some weapons that were cop or robber specific! That and the Freeze and Arrest thing in the campaign isn't transferred to multiplayer. It is the lame grenade button! :( You can still taze people though. That is always fun. And when you taze someone, you can interrogate them on the spot and find out the location of their teammates on the field. All in all, I feel that this is a step that BF should have taken further ... like how CoD did with the Modern Warfare or Black Ops branches they created. But in the meantime, I know that XBox 360 has been giving away whole DLC because of their upcoming Battlefield 1! So take advantage of the goodies! You won't regret it! Even if you like the original BF material. I promise! Buy this ... NOW! That's an order!

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