If you’ve seen any marketing for Battlefield 6, you know that it takes the fight to New York City. Right from its initial announcement over the summer, Battlefield Studios put a major emphasis on a campaign mission and multiplayer map that would have players causing destruction in the streets of Brooklyn. The announcement was met with just a hint of trepidation. Would the military shooter series be able to handle a terrorist attack on iconic NYC landmarks sensitively enough, especially during a time when American politicians are doing everything in their power to paint major US cities as warzones?
It’s probably unsurprising to hear that Battlefield 6 doesn’t exactly handle a loaded image with grace, but the Brooklyn-based missions in its campaign are almost too ridiculous to get upset over.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for Battlefield 6 follow.]
Battlefield 6’s story begins after a political assassination spurs a divide within NATO. Some unnamed countries defect from the alliance as a result, and all hell breaks loose. A private military group called PAX Armata rises in the chaos with the goal of violently policing the world. (Or something like that. PAX’s motives are intentionally hard to pin down.) Still aligned with NATO, America deploys its troops around the world to fight PAX on multiple fronts, including Gibraltar and Egypt.
That takes us to the fifth mission of the campaign, No Sleep. In defiance of PAX’s threats, NATO decides to hold a summit in New York City just as tensions are at their highest. PAX is sure to crash the party, so the troops are called in to find where the group is hiding out in Brooklyn and stop their presumed attack. Things go south quickly in the most over-the-top way possible.
The mission starts with you tearing up fancy townhouses in Brooklyn Heights as you search for a secret terrorist base in the city’s least intimidating nook. The town is seemingly evacuated, so you’re never in danger of coming across a civilian, but you do find armor-clad terrorists hiding out in narrow bathrooms and immaculately designed bedrooms. It’s a good excuse to set some fights in tight spaces with lots of verticality, but it’s all a little goofy if you’ve ever had a babysitting gig in Brooklyn.
This whole chunk of the story is a bit of a silly tour around town for Brooklynites. It turns the borough’s most peaceful areas into war zones. Prospect Park is full of drones! Military trucks are weaving around Grand Army Plaza! The cute carousel in Dumbo is on fire! It’s basically my mother’s vision of where I live, informed entirely by the one news story she hears about a freak murder every few months, come to life. Brooklyn Bridge Park may as well be international waters!
All of this culminates in a sequence that is so patently absurd that I could only laugh at it. Your squad eventually finds PAX underground, as they are loading up a subway car with bombs and sending it into the city. After a chase sequence, the squad makes a hard call: “Never again,” one of my teammates says, invoking September 11. “That means not on our watch, got it?”
Smash cut to the crew shooting a rocket at the Manhattan Bridge to stop the train car from reaching the city.
Look, I’m not going to pretend that I find any of this offensive as a New Yorker. My knee-jerk instinct is to chide Battlefield 6 for rehashing 9/11 panic for a cheap set-piece and playing into the dangerous narrative that big cities are lawless hellscapes that must be protected by the military. It’s bad timing. But doing so would be ignoring the context of Battlefield’s complicated story, where a sect of accelerationists are specifically provoking the chaos. It’s a manufactured crisis where Brooklyn becomes a political pawn for power-hungry factions.
It would also be ignoring that it’s all so stupid that you can hardly dissect it with a straight face. I mean, you’re gunning down soldiers in a park playground while ducking for cover behind the jungle gym. Battlefield 6 does have some political heft to sift through (despite its developers’ insistence that it doesn’t), but it’s ultimately a silly amalgamation of shooter campaign clichés set in places that Battlefield Studios thought would make for good multiplayer maps. All I can really do is laugh as I watch million-dollar townhouses turned into Swiss cheese. You do you, Battlefield.