So the new Battlefield: Hardline beta hit consoles yesterday and like many of you, I was eager to try it out. I play Battlefield 4 a lot and wanted to see what has changed with BF:H and what has remained the same.

Like most, I was hitting PSN all day waiting for it to be posted and was finally able to start a remote download of it at around 3pm EST. By the time I got home, my download was complete and I was able to immediately play a round of Conquest. What is strange though is that several of my friends were not able to play because BF:H was requiring a secondary download from inside the game which for some reason, I did not encounter. We were not sure what was going on but maybe the initial download changed to lighten the load on the PSN servers and then the rest of it was downloaded from EA servers? Whatever the reason, I was not able to play it with my friends last night. I was only able to play 2 games on my own with random squads.

For this post, these are only impressions for Conquest which is the mode I usually play the most of on BF4. Conquest for the beta takes place on a new map called Dust Bowl, which is aptly named due to an environmental event that occurs halfway through.

The Good

• Player movements are much improved since the last beta, which I was not impressed with at all.
• Player animations and the overall look of players is a lot better again than the first beta where they didn’t look good either.
• The environment on Dust Bowl seems very detailed. The map itself has a good variation of areas to explore and it seemed like you could enter many of the buildings that were present.
• Like BF4, Dust Bowl shows off how multiple levels can affect gameplay and strategy.
• The gunplay seems to be about the same as BF4, which is a good thing.
• Sniper rifles seem to be much easier to use and a bit more accurate. I also didn’t notice much in terms of bullet drop.
• I’m so glad they got rid of the counter-knife feature.
• Driving around in a cop car is (pardon me for this) fast and furious. It’s a much different pace than riding around in slow moving tanks like in BF4.
• Running around on foot doesn’t feel like you’re running miles before getting to the action. In fact, it almost kind of felt like player movements were a bit quicker than that of BF4.
• When the dust storm hits, it really changes the whole dynamic of the map.
• It seems like you can set up multiple loadouts per class?

The Bad

• You can’t blow up a lot of the walls and buildings for some reason. This makes this very different from previous Battlefield games. We need more destruction!
• Sniper rifles seem grossly underpowered. I hit several players 3-4 times with a sniper and they would not go down. Snipers are supposed to deal much more damage than that.
• Assault rifles have way too much recoil.
• The menu system is very confusing. Will need to play with it more to see what does what, but at present, there is just too many things to scroll through.
• Your player talks a lot in the game. It gets very annoying.
• The in game help menus are also very annoying. Luckily you can turn this off in the options.

That’s pretty much all I can remember off the top of my head from what I played last night. I’ll be trying out some of the other game modes tonight and hopefully I’ll be able to capture some video as well. For the most part though, I’m glad the game was delayed because it looks like they fixed a lot of the issues players were complaining about in the first beta. Hopefully Visceral takes more player feedback from this beta and improves the game more before its finally released in March.