Battlefield 2042

Download Battlefield 2042 - online FPS war simulator

Battlefield 2042 launched in late November 2021 after a three-year break for the franchise. After the official release, however, it feels like this latest Battlefield could have used an extra year of development to iron out many of the issues players are experiencing. 

That said, the game also does some things well, and it deserves credit for those. In this article, we take a critical look and cover both the positives and negatives we’ve encountered since launch. 

Availability

Battlefield 2042 is available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. There are certain limitations depending on the platform you play on. Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (both older consoles) support a maximum of 64 players at a time — which is still a solid number, especially in a game that looks this realistic. 

If you play on Xbox Series X|S, PC, or PlayStation 5, you can join matches with up to 128 players at once, which also says a lot about the game’s scale. 

A massive sandbox world

If there’s one thing the game generally doesn’t get criticized for, it’s its size. The maps are huge overall — not just in width and length, but also vertically. The Battlefield series is known for its variety of vehicles, from tanks and jeeps to helicopters and fighter jets. 

Plenty of games market themselves as “huge games” with “large, open worlds,” but here we see a game that truly lives up to what it has proclaimed itself to be. The world is enormous, which can feel awesome to play in — if you can look past many of the criticisms we mention in the sections below. 

Try the game for free with an EA Play subscription

If you have an EA Play subscription, you get access to a trial of Battlefield 2042 — along with a wide range of other games. That means you can pay for a single month and play many titles for a very small amount. 

With EA Play you get access to new trials as well as full games across genres — play everything from Dragon Age Inquisition and Sims 4, to Star Wars: Jedi - Fallen Order and FIFA 21. Battlefield 2042 can be played for 10 hours in this trial, so you can test the game without being too disappointed if it’s not your cup of tea. 

Criticism – endless bugs and combat issues

The biggest criticism is that it feels unfinished. Some of the bugs and glitches you can experience while playing are ridiculous, such as falling through the floor, driving through certain buildings as if they didn’t exist, and even launching a speedboat into the air if you hit a ledge, letting you crash into jets and blow them up near the top of the map. 

These things aren’t fun — especially when they happen repeatedly — because they make the game feel unpolished, sloppy, and unstable; not the three words you want to hear about a game focused entirely on online matches against others. 

While this article was being written, the game was scraping the bottom on Steam with 66% negative reviews out of nearly 70,000 user reviews. That says a lot about how bad things are and how disappointed fans of the franchise are. 

Another recent game that also received harsh criticism from the media (but which we actually thought was decent) is the new Call of Duty: Vanguard. COD: Vanguard does reuse some content in terms of historical themes, but it runs well and has a good story (Battlefield 2042 has no campaign or story mode, as it focuses solely on online multiplayer). 

Conclusion

Battlefield 2042 hasn’t exactly been showered with praise from critics or fans. There are clear reasons for this — one of the biggest being that it seems to have been released before it was ready. 

It has become somewhat common for developers and publishers to launch games before they’re fully polished; players get quicker access (with some bugs they have to live with), while developers take more time to fix issues post-launch and effectively lower the bar. 

It seems consumers have had enough — and there are many immersion-breaking bugs that make it impossible to play the game as intended. This is unacceptable, and until these bugs are fixed, the game won’t deserve a better rating, despite its massive scale and occasionally fun and impressive gameplay.