As a collection, the short campaigns are an inconsistent bunch. The Norwegian missions have some cool moments on skis and an explosive finale but skew too heavily towards stealth (far from a Battlefield strongpoint), while the French story has some big shootouts that are wonderful when they work and jarring when they break. The British missions, striking a balance between the two, probably hit the sweet spot, especially when they open up and give you a vast desert playground to wreak havoc in.

Advertisement

None are terribly useful as a tutorial. You’ll learn the basics of infantry combat, and maybe some vehicle stuff in the British missions, but there’s no education for tank guys here or fighter jocks beyond a tiny sequence in the game’s playable intro.

It’s ironic, then, that War Stories’ second time around fails at the one thing the original ones did right: teach you how to play all aspects of Battlefield.

Advertisement

But then, do we need that? Five minutes of fucking around in a multiplayer game is probably more useful than a carefully scripted singleplayer moment anyway, which is why it’s nice that DICE have moved slightly away from that here.

Is that it?

While there are three stories available now, there’s another—about a Panzer commander—greyed out in the menu saying “coming soon”, while the playable intro hints at other stories based on a Spitfire pilot and an Allied soldier involved in Operation Market Garden.

Advertisement

Battlefield V’s War Stories—at least those available at launch—are more interested in doing what their namesake implies. By cutting down on a need to cover every aspect of the game, from snipers to tanks to aircraft, there’s more space to tell stories here, which as Battlefront II showed is what folks are primarily after in the singleplayer space.

And these are good stories, for what they are: short narratives layered over the top of guided tours of multiplayer maps. All feature stellar voice-acting and animation, and while there are few surprises amidst the war movie cliches, I ended up enjoying the time I spent with everyone in the game, especially the Kingsman-for-commandos British duo.

Advertisement

Your own standards may be higher than mine of course, but I’ve always been a sucker for big blockbuster shooter campaigns. I’ll play through every Call of Duty (that has one these days, at least), and even enjoyed the Battlefield singleplayer stories when they were still a thing.

Advertisement

Part of me knows that there are massive problems with these games, but their combination of solid shooting mechanics and action movie pretensions is a real guilty pleasure of mine, like curling up on the couch with a trashy novel, or sitting back and watching The Guns of Navarone for the 17th time.

Battlefield V’s singleplayer hits that same sweet spot. It’s good video game junk food. Nobody is ever going to buy the game just for this, but if you do grab it, there are far worse ways to get a handle on the basics of its infantry combat than being taken on a guided tour of some Second World War sideshows.

Advertisement

Not much of what’s going on is historically accurate, but again, that’s not the point. These off-the-beaten-path tales, of lesser-known theatres of the greatest war in human history, acknowledge their fictional nature up-front. None of these stories are meant as a literal re-telling, but instead serve as a vehicle to make us think, to acknowledge that this was a war fought by countless millions who never saw their deeds turned into a Call of Duty campaign or a Steven Spielberg movie.