Players of the recent Battlefield 5 alpha have been witness to quite a treat. Building on DICE's excellent work in BF1 and Battlefront 2, we're looking at an exceptionally handsome game that, small bugs aside, almost feels like the finished article. It's visually outstanding in fact, the only disappointment - if you can call it that - being that the signs are pointing towards an evolution of the Battlefield formula and its Frostbite engine, as opposed to a full-on next-gen revolution.
Some might say that expectations of a wide-ranging revamp of the tech might seem somewhat optimistic, but there is a strong precedent. In 2011 - a full two years before the arrival of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One - DICE unleashed Battlefield 3, the game that laid the foundation for the series entries to follow, certainly from a technological perspective. Based on 64-bit processor support along with a requirement for DirectX 11 class graphics hardware, this was a developer essentially laying the foundation work for the console generation to come, with a cutting-edge PC version taking point.
At the same point in the current console generation, Battlefield 5's closed alpha - released only on PC - shows key embellishments, along with some crowd-pleasing enhancements to the destruction model. However, the overall aesthetic and some of its most impressive tricks will be familiar to those who've played Battlefield 1. The alpha reminds us of how good Frostbite is in dealing with massive, open levels. Select your capture point, click, and the overview of the map swoops down seamlessly into the in-game view - a cool trick from BF1 that still impresses in its successor.

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.