Firestorm, a Hot Mess.

I’ve been waiting to get my hands on the Battlefield BR since the game initially dropped. I don’t normally buy games at launch, but being a Battlefield lover, buying this day one was a no brainer. If you also bought BFV day one, you know how disappointing it was to have an incomplete game. Battlefield developers held off on several game modes, including Firestorm which has finally released a little over a week ago.

Now getting to the point of the blog, Firestorm is one big hot mess. Sure, the visuals are incredible, the map is massive, and the gunplay feels great, but it’s flat out not fun.

I’ve just about sunk 20 hours so far into Firestorm, and it’s not something I’m really enjoying at all. The wait time for games is painstakingly long. It takes just about five minutes to queue up between games, and in a game mode that only gives you one life to make things happen, the wait time kind of kills how many games I want to play. I hate to compare, but the wait time to queue up in other BR titles like fortnite and Apex are so short that you can land, die, and queue up for another game twice before you can queue up for a single game in Firestorm.

Looting and inventory management is super important, if not one of the main objectives in any BR. Unfortunately, it absolutely pounds sand in Firestorm. My biggest problem is how confusing it is to differentiate items in Firestorm. Items aren’t easily identifiable, and it’s like doing a fucking math problem to figure out how to access items and rearrange your inventory. My biggest problem is the fact that after killing somebody, their loot drops in a clusterfuck pile of bullshit that you have to stand around and waste time figuring out what and how to pick up. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve killed someone and spent literally minutes trying to pick up an item that’s underneath something I don’t want, and looking like an asshole in the middle of a map.

Battlefield is known for their massive, beautiful maps, but in Firestorm, this hinders the game mode. It’s far too often that I’m wandering around from circle to circle for what seems like forever before coming across another team. The map is huge, and sure there is mobility to shrink it, but from my experience it’s not fast paced enough to keep me interested.

Moving in the same direction, Firestorm has an incredibly horrible problem with campers. There are so many times where I’ll be playing, and out of no where I’m sprayed down in a blink of an eye from a kid prone in a bush, or behind a tree, or in a closet, an attic, and the list just keep on going. And this obviously isn’t the developers fault, but there is nothing fucking worse than getting shot down and teabagged by some dickhead who was laying prone in between a couple of rocks.

Firestorm isn’t what I expected it to be, considering it was held back for so long after launch. I would have thought it would be the best feeling BR title, after being able to analyze and pick and choose the best features of other BR titles out, but unfortunately it just drops the ball. I think I’ll be skipping out on Firestorm when I play BFV from now on, and stick to conquest and rush; game modes that Battlefield does right.

-Big Lex