--- description: Battlefield I proves that the First World War can be as tactically exhilarating as any modern first-person shooter. title: Review: 'Battlefield 1' Is One of the Year's Best Shooters image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d901f0f7b74e67c/6988aa33bc6cfc51123def5f/screen-shot-2016-10-17-at-9-32-20-am.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Business](/section/business/) ## Business Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Tech](/tag/time-section-tech/) ## Tech Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Review: 'Battlefield 1' Is One of the Year's Best Shooters by [Matt Peckham](/author/matt-peckham/) ## Matt Peckham Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Oct 17, 2016 10:00 AM CUT  Battlefield 1 Battlefield 1Electronic Arts/DICE by [Matt Peckham](/author/matt-peckham/) ## Matt Peckham Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Oct 17, 2016 10:00 AM CUT Up go the signal flares, the shouts, the tracers and plumes of artillery smoke, the embers from blazing trees like startled fireflies. Out go the soldiers in tin hats, the bayonets, the haversacks and hobnailed ankle boots. Down rains devastation, hundreds of pounds of steel-cased explosives flung in parabolic arcs from smooth-bored cylinders. Above it all, a study in contrasts: half the dimming blues of an idyllic sunset, half atomic wrack and bloom, like the skies over Mordor. I’m taking the view off Cape Helles [near Gallipoli](http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/battle-of-gallipoli "undefined") circa 1915, beside the deck rail of a ship flanked by Dreadnoughts, about to charge the beachhead. Uphill lies cragged headland, machine gun roosts, bulwarks of stacked logs and the terra-cotta rooftops of a village below a crumbling fortress. I could linger indefinitely, the moment frozen in motion like the looping images in a _Harry Potter_ tabloid. It’s a scene from DICE’s [_Battlefield 1_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined"), a stupefyingly gorgeous first-person shooter out for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 18 that puts the lie to decades of assumptions—that World War I’s internecine trench volleys and wire-snarled footslogs are anathema to gameplay anyone might find tactically absorbing. Here are doting replicas of weapons a dwindling few in 2016 will know: Mausers and Lee-Enfields, Hotchkiss M1914s and Bergmann MP 18s, trundling Mark V tanks, buzzing Fokker Dr.I triplanes and L 30 airships almost as long as a pair of football fields. The latter look like something out of an alt-history yarn, but they’re not—these [madcap, sky-blotting death balloons really existed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin%5FR%5FClass "undefined"). The arsenal feels diverse, too, a trove of gadgets and gas masks, landships and light vehicles gradually encountered in solo or online play. Each feels familiar but functionally antecedent, the brutalizing implements of an era in which the apocalyptic thresholds of global brinksmanship had yet to be charted.  EA DICE Juxtaposed with photos, [_Battlefield 1_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined")‘s weapons are virtual analogues of their archetypes, though having hefted none in real life, all I can tell you is that wielding them efficiently requires adaptation to slower fire and reload rates. That, scant battlefield ammunition and fully destructible environments reward more cautious, methodical gunplay that’s nothing like the boisterous lethality on casual loan in so many modern shooters. DICE could have skinned a bunch of contemporary weapons to resemble The Great War’s bolt-action rifles and snail drum SMGs and called it a day. Instead, they’ve embraced the early 20th century’s technological idiosyncrasies, finessing everything just enough to keep it all as brisk and ballistically persuasive as anything with homing rockets or a laser sight. The game acquaints you with most of this by guiding you through a solo campaign that’s divvied into standalone “war stories.” The stories march you through quasi-linear maps linked to historical battles that transpired in French countrysides, the Italian alps and southern Levant. All of this is naturally rendered at DICE’s habitual overachiever levels of visual insanity. And if you’re a PC gamer rocking an ultra-HD television with high-dynamic range, the views are gobsmacking. Each story offers a unique problem or narrative perspective: a bickering tank crew lost behind enemy lines during the [Battle of Cambrai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle%5Fof%5FCambrai%5F%281917%29 "undefined"), the latent heroism of a cocksure swindler-turned-aviator amidst [“Bloody April,”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody%5FApril "undefined") the remembrances of an Italian war vet relayed to his daughter during a birthday party. All told, they add up to perhaps a half-dozen hours of play, but offer some of DICE’s finest work—an attempt to get around the usual boo-rahs or faux gravitas by bracketing eruptions of carnage with humanizing, anthology-style accounts. I only wish they’d made more.  EA DICE But like any other [_Battlefield_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined"), multiplayer is where you’ll eventually entrench, obsessing over soldierly performance statistics and unlockables once you’ve cleared the campaign and rounded up its collectibles. Most of the online modes we’ve seen, from Conquest’s 64 players jockeying to hold objectives across prodigious battlegrounds, to Domination’s close-quarters infantry skirmishes. Of the new modes, the easy keeper is Operations, a smart rethink of Conquest’s all out land-sea-air battles that gathers multiple maps into sprawling, round-based tug-of-wars framed by historical scenarios. Here [_Battlefield 1_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined")‘s less precise weaponry and slower-moving vehicles work to the game’s advantage, modulating the havoc of platoon-scale fracas by increasing reaction times and slowing things down in general. It won’t protect neophytes from practiced adepts who’ve mastered every weapon’s quirks and committed all of a map’s exploit points to memory. But it _does_ scale back the sense that you’re playing a game in which the outcomes feel pathologically precision-driven. No, this isn’t what you’ll want to point to when highlighting games that have something to say about the horrors of war (for examples of those, see [_This War of Mine_](https://www.wired.com/2014/11/this-war-of-mine/ "undefined") or [_Valiant Hearts_](https://www.wired.com/2014/07/valiant-hearts-review/ "undefined")). Even [_Battlefield 1_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined")‘s war stories, once you’ve left a cutscene’s moorings to push buttons or nudge thumb-sticks, have at best the emotional insight and depth of a _Fast & Furious_ flick. Latitudes stand between the game’s slick, chaperoned vignettes and online free-for-alls, and something like Wilfred Owen’s [“Dulce et Decorum Est”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46560 "undefined") or Hemingway’s _A Farewell or Arms_. Which is just to say [_Battlefield 1_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined") ([**_buy here_**](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01F9HMO9I/ref=as%5Fli%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01F9HMO9I&linkCode=as2&tag=timetechvideogames-20&linkId=fc8ab9671564c0b6eec189c250cb5c6a "undefined")) isn’t interested in adding ruminative ballast. Given what it’s so deftly up to (or, if you will, _not_ up to), there’s nothing shameful in that. **4.5 out of 5** _Reviewed on PC_ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4532591/review-battlefield-1/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4532591/review-battlefield-1/"},"headline":"Review: 'Battlefield 1' Is One of the Year's Best Shooters","datePublished":"2016-10-17T10:00:06.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:43:55.996Z","description":"This is how World War I makes battlefields more interesting, not less","url":"https://time.com/4532591/review-battlefield-1/","keywords":["Tech","Video Games","Reviews","PlayStation 4","xbox One","Windows","Electronic Arts","PC","gamereviews"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d901f0f7b74e67c/6988aa33bc6cfc51123def5f/screen-shot-2016-10-17-at-9-32-20-am.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matt Peckham","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/matt-peckham/"}],"articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d901f0f7b74e67c/6988aa33bc6cfc51123def5f/screen-shot-2016-10-17-at-9-32-20-am.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Battlefield 1","caption":"Battlefield 1","creditText":"Electronic Arts/DICE","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4532591/review-battlefield-1/","name":"Review: 'Battlefield 1' Is One of the Year's Best Shooters"}}]}] ```