This week, I’ll be taking a look at a game I am very familiar with: Battlefield V. Battlefield is a first person shooter series, and this particular installment takes us back to World War II – or, in this game’s case, the British-German War, because my first and largest piece of criticism is the fact that the literal only two playable factions are the British and Germans. This really hurts the scale of the game; in-game cutscenes mention the different countries you fight in and factions like the Americans and French Resistance, but once the fighting starts you see the same few uniforms, which brings to me to my next complaint: the game’s customization.
Battlefield has never been a game to offer character customization, and with their first attempt it really shows. The different uniforms you can get are unique, but some are very outlandish and are unlikely to be seen in reality. There is a British uniform named “Union Jacked” that has written in bold white print “SLAY FOR THE QUEEN” on the back. The problem with that? There was no queen to slay for. The British monarch from 1937 until 1952 was in fact King George VI. Those dates are literally a 7 second Google search away, and the developers getting something like that wrong looks bad. The game was already marred by controversy at launch (something EA is all too familiar with at this point), and details like that do the game no favors. Another outfit, this time for the Germans, is called “Die Sturm Jäger.” This nomenclature is incorrect for several reasons. First, anyone familiar with the German stormtroopers knows that they served as specialists in WWI, but had no presence in WWII.* Second, “sturmjäger” is just one word. Finally, grammatically speaking, it should read “Der Sturmjäger,” with a masculine article (der).
Those two pieces of criticism aside, the game does do a good job on delivering a solid WWII experience. The weapons and vehicles are all very accurate, even allowing players to use both the rifle and shotgun barrels of the M30 Drilling (something I noticed Call of Duty does not allow) which pleased me greatly due to the nature of the weapon. “Drilling” means “triple” in German, and the gun’s three barrels reflect this. The battles are very immersive, with hulking tanks firing shells while planes dogfight above, but the infantry combat is my favorite. Each weapon feels different to use, and they are almost all satisfying (looking at you, Liberator).
When all is said and done, as much as the game is fun, I simply couldn’t recommend using it as a teaching tool when there are far better WWII games out there accuracy-wise. As I stated, this game already feels small with the limited amount of factions, and I opted not to even touch on the role of female combatants and the censoring of Nazi imagery (the latter was for marketing purposes, as some countries outlaw the use of swastikas, and doesn’t really bother anyone anyways, but it’s certainly not helping the game either). The game is a fun historically-themed shooter, but that’s all I can really say about it.
Noah's Blog 