Battlefield 6 Season 4 launches this week, and finally delivers on the promise or potential of the game at launch. Almost. No, we don’t have the amphibious assault of Gibraltar from the campaign translated to multiplayer – still something of a mystery – but we do have something better for the game as a whole.
The first wave of content for Season 4 is really all about the brand new map Tsuru Reef, set in the Pacific Ocean with a small archipelago of islands to battle across. It’s particularly rocky with steep cliffs, a luxury resort, an old war bunker, and just in general, this is the largest map in the game so far.
It’s a real feast of combined arms battling. Both sides start off in Conquest needing to take sea and air vehicles in order to get to the main islands and objective points, and this persists through the match. Boats get used a fair bit for flanking manoeuvres, there’s the constant threat of fighter jets, little birds and other aircraft, and the scale of the map really does a good job of encouraging their use.
But I will say that the boats on offer to start with are a little underwhelming. The RHIB is just a troop transport dirigible with a mounted machine gun. It’s a wet hummer, and while that’s good for getting around, it puts more on the CB90 Patrol Boat to match up to what’s available on land and in the air. This two-seater boat does provide contrasting weaponry for the main driver and the passenger, but I was generally stuck in the second seat, lumbered with a cumbersome twin-barrelled mortar. Flexible with being able to shift between ranges and direct and indirect fire modes with its slow-moving shells, but with the boat bouncing around on the waves and the ship in someone else’s control, I didn’t really feel like I was particularly effective. I had much more joy when playing on foot and spoiling the boat party for others!
Tsuru Reef, though, is a map that I think gives a good first impression. It’s a map that will take a bit of learning, and has good variety between its objective points. You have a cluster of relatively close capture points on land which are easy to sprint between or use a tank to patrol, but then there’s also the more spread out objectives that require special effort to capture. The hotel resort, for example, is a little separated from the main cluster, broken off in part by a canal, while another control point is on a rocky little island with a natural tunnel carved through it, which makes for both a slightly awkward point to capture if it’s defended, and also maybe not the most interesting place to camp on for half a match.
You’re always dealing with the varying scenery, the natural elevation changes providing overlooking and sniping opportunities in addition to getting up high in buildings, while the canals and rivers mean that vehicles are funnelled through certain chokepoints. The hills and rocky outcroppings might provide a bit more cover for ground troops, but they also mean that fighters and helicopters can try to plunge down to the ground, both breaking target lock and line of sight.
It’s a good map, but it really feels like it’s just the opening salvo, with some of the more interesting stuff in this season still to come. In mid-August there’s the return of the ever-popular Wake Island, as well as the Top Gun collaboration for the limited time Carrier Strike game mode, which will have teams looking to assault and take down each other’s carriers, as well as custom lobbies and spectator mode. But I really hope that Battlefield Studios will keep digging this well through the rest of this year, fleshing out the naval warfare of this game with more varied boats, more maps, and (hopefully) with Carrier Strike becoming a fixture of the game’s mode list.
