Turns out Battlefield V has launched with a battle royale mode – just only in certain circumstances. If it ends in a draw, there’s a fourth Final Stand round: a no-respawn, shrinking-map, last-person-standing affair, rendered more powerful by the fact it takes place in surroundings you’ve come to know well. Grand Operations is the pick of the current bunch, mixing up the game modes and charting a military action across three days. But the majority throw you into large-scale battles that really make you feel part of a bigger war effort. Some cater for those who prefer closer-quarters, on-foot combat, although even those make Black Ops 4 feel claustrophobic in comparison.

The multiplayer modes are plentiful and diverse. You can jump into planes or tanks, or man fixed machine-guns or flak-guns.ĭiverse multiplayer modes. Its multiplayer maps – ranging from the thick snow of one of the war’s first engagements at Narvik in Norway to the crumbling desert forts of Hamada in North Africa – are simply magnificent: huge, geographically diverse, sumptuous to behold and, as is Battlefield’s trademark, fully destructible, letting you level buildings with tanks or chip away at cover with sustained fire. The War Stories provide a taster of several of the multiplayer modes, and it’s when you play online as a member of a 32-strong team that Battlefield V really takes off. When it arrives, expect controversy it’s called The Last Tiger, and will let you play as a German tank commander. Each War Story takes about two hours but, frustratingly, one of them is missing at launch. There’s one proviso: the enemy AI is impressively dumb unless you crank up the difficulty level. You can tackle your objectives in any order and via any means you like, moving stealthily through a village to steal documents or skiing down a mountain picking off enemies with a pistol. The War Stories impress by giving you options. And Tirailleur casts you as a French North African volunteer, participating in the post-D-Day thrust to liberate France while dealing with overt racism. Nordlys, which sees you controlling a teenage girl causing havoc in the Norwegian resistance, has hints of Scandi noir. Under No Flag, in which you play a convicted gangster recruited to fight for the nascent Special Boat Service in North Africa, is pure Guy Ritchie. Unlike Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Battlefield V has a single-player campaign, delivered as an anthology of War Stories, diverse vignettes from some of the war’s more far-flung outposts that often have a myth-busting agenda. Battlefield V’s second world war setting comes with weapons and vehicles that are crucially more sophisticated and easier to handle than Battlefield 1’s first world war instruments of battle. That said, what you do get is pretty impressive.

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