Battlefield 6 Season 4 launches this week and finally delivers on the promise or potential of the game at launch. Almost. No, we haven’t translated the Gibraltar Amphibious Assault from the campaign to multiplayer – which remains a mystery – but we have something better for the game as a whole.
The first wave of Season 4 content is actually for the brand new Tsuru Reef map, set in the Pacific Ocean with a small archipelago of islands to fight on. It’s particularly rocky with steep cliffs, a luxury resort, an old war bunker, and overall it’s the biggest map in the game so far.
It’s a veritable celebration of combined arms combat. Both teams begin the Conquest by having to take sea and air vehicles to reach the main islands and objective points, and this persists throughout the match. The boats are quite used to flanking maneuvers, there is the constant threat of fighters, small birds and other aircraft, and the scale of the map really encourages their use.
But I will say that the boats offered to start with are a little disappointing. The RHIB is just a troop transport airship equipped with a mounted machine gun. This is a wet hummer, and while it’s useful for getting around, it offers more to the CB90 patrol boat to match what’s available on land and in the air. This two-seater boat offers contrasting weapons for the main driver and passenger, but I was usually stuck in the second seat, cluttered with a bulky two-barrel mortar. Flexible with the ability to switch between ranges and direct and indirect fire modes with its slow-moving shells, but with the boat bouncing on waves and the ship under someone else’s control, it didn’t really feel like it was particularly effective. I had much more joy playing on foot and spoiling the boat party for others!
Tsuru Reef, however, is a card that I think makes a good first impression. This is a map that will take a little learning and has a good variety between its objective points. You have a relatively close group of capture points on land that are easy to sprint between or use a tank to patrol, but there are also more scattered objectives that require special effort to capture. The hotel complex, for example, is a bit separate from the main group, separated partly by a canal, while another control point is on a small rocky island with a natural tunnel running through it, making it both a slightly difficult point to capture if defended, and also perhaps not the most interesting place to camp for half a match.
You’re still faced with varied landscapes, with natural elevation changes providing opportunities for views and sniping in addition to getting high into buildings, while canals and rivers mean vehicles are funneled through certain choke points. Hills and rocky outcrops can provide a little more cover for ground troops, but they also mean that fighters and helicopters can attempt to dive toward the ground, breaking target lock and line of sight.
It’s a good card, but it really feels like it’s just the opening salvo, with some of the most interesting things from this season still to come. Coming mid-August, there will be the return of the hugely popular Wake Island, as well as the Top Gun collaboration for the limited-time Carrier Strike game mode, in which teams will look to attack and eliminate each other’s aircraft carriers, as well as custom lobbies and a spectator mode. But I really hope Battlefield Studios continues to dig into this throughout this year, fleshing out this game’s naval warfare with more varied ships, more maps, and (hopefully) with Carrier Strike becoming a staple of the game’s mode roster.
