In the years since Battlefield 3, and especially since the launch of Battlefield 1, DICE’s first-person shooter series has substituted silliness for seriousness. Battlefield 5 bucks the trend a little by establishing a robust blend of old and new. The sandbox of destruction that defined the Bad Company years now finds equal space alongside the slick UI, fluid animations, and sharp gunplay of recent Battlefield games. It’s a vast improvement on Battlefield 1’s warped interpretation of World War I, but it’s held back by one exceptionally tedious new mechanic.
For even more on the upcoming WW2 shooter, here are all the latest details on the , setting, and battle royale mode.
The culprit is the new Bleeding Out phase, which removes the option to hurry back to the deployment screen and respec ahead of your next life. Instead, you remain in the first-person perspective, bleeding out on the floor and screaming for a medic to wander by and save you - which, of course, never happens. If you are revived it’s seldom worth it: you have the same amount of ammo you died with, you are often in a pretty hairy situation, and, worst of all, if you die again you’ll be forced to endure the same tedious Bleeding Out phase all over again.
Previous Battlefield games let you hop back to the deployment screen and make key loadout changes or switch your spawn point all while the necessary respawn timer counts down. So while it doesn’t necessarily take longer to die and respawn in Battlefield 5, the process feels much more laboured than ever before. This sounds like a minor gripe, but when you consider just how much time you spend downed in an hour-long match of Conquest, these gory intermissions are a real problem.