Some truly powerful stuff.
Increasingly, first-person-shooters have come under flack for being little more than weaponry porn.
More and more the games seem to be ditching the idea of telling an immersive story in order to follow in the very successful footprints of the multi-player-only likes of Fortnite and PUGB. Just look at the most recent version of Call Of Duty, which ditched its single-player campaign entirely.
COD’s biggest competition has always been Battlefield, and while the former continues to venture further and further into the future, Battlefields has decided to go back to war grounds previously thought over-played.
2016’s Battlefield One took players back to WWI, while the just-released Battlefield V brings us back to WWII, a setting that shooters have been a part of since the genre was created.
Those who prefer single-player experiences usually feel short-changed by these games, but BFV ups the ante a good bit here by providing three separate campaigns at launch, with the fourth to be available in early December, giving good reason to return to the game in the near future.
Of the three War Stories, we get Nordlys, which focuses on a Norwegian resistance fighter attempting to dismantle a German nuclear program, and Under No Flag, in which the player takes control of a convicted bank robber who is conscripted into Britain’s Special Boat Service as an explosives expert.
However, the War Story most like to remain with the players the longest, is Tirailleur.
Clip via Battlefield
The story follows the Senegalese units of the French Colonial Forces during their participation in Operation Dragoon, the landings made in southern France beginning in August 1944.
We control Deme, who recounts the story in flashbacks as an old man. He is assisted by Idrissa, a more experienced soldier, while their entire company is considered completely outmatched in its task of attacking and securing the enemy positions manned by expert German Fallschirmjäger units in the French countryside inland from the Côte d’Azure.
The campaign highlights the staggering bravery that these men had in the face of practically certain death from the enemy, and intense racism from the soldiers they fought alongside of.
We won’t give too much of the plot of this particular campaign away, but it is further fuel to the fire that games are capable of telling these hugely immersive stories in a particularly unique way. Especially considering the first-person shooter can often be viewed as a lowest common denominator (when done lazily, or when aimed to match a popular competitor), but instead we get something very different, and very powerful.
Battlefield V is available on PS4, Xbox One and PC from Tuesday 20 November.
