Matt Owen

I’m writing this straight after playing a few rounds from the game, so let me try and explain this to you in as raw a fashion as possible. This game is simply frustrating. I’m a big Battlfield fan. I would say Battlfield 1 is one of my all time favourite games. So all in all, I thought BF2042 was going to be amazing. It was literally my first game I bought for my brand new PS5. Little did I know how disappointed I’d be. I’m an average gamer, like most, but quite good at getting to grips with a game and can usually rack up an average to good K/D ratio. I probably plug away about 10hours a week at games, nothing crazy. When I play this game, I feel like a complete novice and I don’t think I’ll ever break out of that. The game is almost impossible to have any form of a kill streak. I always liked how Battlefield felt quite real but I didn’t want it to the point where I might only get 5 kills per round. Not only that but you could be running round for ten minutes or more and not see a single soul. It’s even worse when you don’t have a vehicle and you’re just running aimlessly in one direction. The cherry on the cake for this “realism” is that once you’ve ran around aimlessly, for what feels like an eternity, someone will just kill you immediately, causing you to go right back to the beginning again! What a horrible loop of “run-death-run-death”. The most aggravating factor about this game is just the sheer amount of times you do die. It really is abysmal. I’ve never felt so useless in a game before. It feels like I can’t kill a single soul, or if I have, it’s at the expense of dying 50 times. The design of this game really is atrocious. The character and load out options are shocking too. For some reason I’m still getting used to the set up and it doesn’t feel very streamlined. There is too much free movement mid-game, in the sense that you can literally change every class, every weapon and every character at any point during a battle. It promotes indecisiveness, because when you start dying countless times (and it will happen), you start changing weapons and load outs and then you still end up dying countless more times. The worst thing is you can’t easily see what new upgrades you have with your weapons, there isn’t even a notification after a battle to let you know what you’ve unlocked and, most importantly, where it is. The only positive point I have to say about this game is the changing weather conditions (pretty cool) and the feel of the weapons. When you use them, they do have a sense of realism and feel almost heavy in your hand, which I like. That being said, the game has to be one of the most frustrating things I have played in a very long time. Buy this game if you want to feel what real fighting is like…as in walk a long time, see nothing and then die. Don’t expect to get enjoyment from this Battlefield instalment. Very disappointed.