Battlefield 6 open beta review in progress – beautiful destruction

The open beta for Battlefield 6 is already in early access but how does it look and play, and can it really become a serious rival to Call Of Duty?

EA has a reputation for being many things, but not a risk taker. They can be a little more daring than their reputation suggests – It Takes Two was a very unlikely game for them to back and making Dark Souls the primary influence of your big budget Star Wars game was certainly a choice – but in general they’re seen as sensible and cautious to a fault. And yet, at a time when EA Sports FC is looking surprisingly vulnerable, they’ve bet everything on the success of Battlefield 6.

Battlefield predates Call Of Duty by a full year but it only started to get big on consoles with 2008’s Battlefield: Bad Company and even then it’s always seemed too hardcore for true mass market success. After the unequivocal failure of 2021’s Battlefield 2042 it would’ve been perfectly reasonable to just give up on the franchise, at least for a while, but instead EA has gone all out and tied up four of their most talented studios in making Battlefield 6 and a faintly hinted at Call Of Duty: Warzone equivalent.

If Battlefield 6 is a flop we dread to think what will happen to those developers, or EA as a whole, especially as rumours suggest they have seemingly impossible-to-reach goals for the game. But after playing the ongoing open beta suddenly we’re more optimistic about the game’s success. It’s a game that almost everyone is going to find fault with, often in very different ways, but it already feels like a viable alternative to Call Of Duty and that seems to be the whole point.

Although there were plenty of sequels afterwards, 2013’s Battlefield 4 was make or break for the series and unfortunately for EA it broke. The game was a buggy mess at launch and so even though it was going up against weak link Call Of Duty: Ghosts it never came close to outselling it. Nevertheless, it is Battlefield 3 and 4 that this new game feels most similar to, in terms of its quasi-real-world setting and its attempts to meld different elements of both Battlefield and Call Of Duty into one game.

The open beta started on Thursday, August 7, if you had early access, and will continue into the weekend and for another few days later in the month. That means that, so far, we’ve only had a few hours playing the beta, which naturally does not have all the options of the final release.

First impressions are very good though, thanks to the exceptionally good graphics and the series’ signature destruction effects. EA has already said that in terms of destruction they’ve been looking back at Bad Company’s approach, where you could flatten almost the entire map, rather than the more controlled effects in the modern games.

Whether that was a technical decision or not has never been clear, but it always seemed a terrible mistake to neuter one of the most important elements of the game. But now every battle is filled with collapsing buildings and explosions that can be seen to do real, physics-based damage to the ground.

However, and despite what EA have said, it’s not Bad Company level. There are lots of walls and objects that are impossible to destroy and it’s not always obvious which ones and why. Sometimes you need bigger ordnance and sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be anyway to destroy them at all.

Nevertheless, shooting upwards and exploding the floor from underneath a rival team is hugely satisfying, just as it’s excitingly terrifying when someone blows up a wall in your face and suddenly you’re in desperate firefight with the players on the other side.

The sound design is fantastic and it’d be an absolute crime not to play the game with headphones, not just because it’s amazingly immersive but because paying careful attention to the soundscape allows you to accurately pinpoint where a firefight is going on, even if you can’t see it yet.

We suspect that the size of the maps is going to be a key point of disagreement in the coming months, as EA is clearly trying to create a compromise between Battlefield’s famously large designs and the fact that for newer players they’re so easy to get lost in. The very biggest maps in the game aren’t in the beta but it’s certainly true that the current ones are a bit on the small size for the Conquest game mode, without being ruinously so.

The fundamental problem preventing Battlefield from becoming truly mass market is that for a new player the average match involves wandering around aimlessly, never seeing anyone else, and then getting shot from a mile away by a sniper you never knew was there. Especially because all the tanks were already taken by the time you got there, and the jets are too hard to fly.

That’s the classic Battlefield experience for a lot of people and it’s hard to tell from this beta to what degree that’s changed, because at the moment no one knows what they’re doing – which is going to be very different to a couple of months after launch. Competent matchmaking should compensate to a degree, but it’s also hard to tell how that’s working right now, because the game has so little data to work with.

What we can say is that we’ve never been particularly good at Battlefield and yet we never felt that we were getting clowned on in the beta, with plenty of cover for most of the maps and at least some other players visible at all times. We are concerned about the gunplay though, as while it was never going to be as good as Call Of Duty there’s a worrying lack of auto-aim when using a joypad.

Maybe we have to start fiddling about in the options, but the default seems very off-putting for new players, whether they’ve played Battlefield before or not. And while it’s also a key part of the game design, the time to kill (TTK) for most people is going to be miniscule, with one shot deaths being commonplace.

That is compensated for somewhat by the pace of the action being faster than the Battlefield norm. The COD-ification of Battlefield has been a point of contention for years though and while Battlefield 6 does seem to be a sensible compromise between most factors, the problem is it’s never going to please anyone 100%. Which is inevitably going to lead to a lot of increasingly unhinged internet arguments.

At the moment though, while everything is new and exciting, it’s all good fun. Familiar and yet taking full advantage of modern hardware, in a way that feels like a major step forward for the franchise, if not the genre as a whole. If you end up playing it this weekend, or later in the month, we think you’re really going to enjoy it. How anyone is going to feel about it in the weeks after though we really couldn’t say.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: DICE, Ripple Effect Studios, Motive Studio, and Criterion Games
Release Date: 10th October 2025
Age Rating: 16

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