Battlefield Hardline Video Shows Off A Little Stealth And A Lot Of Action

EA and Visceral Games have been fighting against the public's perception of Battlefield Hardline ever since it was announced. It came at a time when people were still absolutely peeved at EA over Battlefield 4. Well, EA is trying to salvage the public's perception of Hardline anyway that they can and I can't say that they're doing a bad job of it.

The latest video for Hardline, via AllGamesBeta, is a collage of single-player segments surrounding various aspects of gameplay. You get to see the player character(s) engaged in interrogations, a little bit of James Bond-style hijinks and even some intense shootouts.

One of the things that instantly stuck out was the audio. Before getting into all the nitty-gritty surrounding the gameplay mechanics, one thing I thought was neat was the directional audio. During the early part of the video where the characters are talking in the car it actually sounds like the voice of the player-character is coming from the first person, where-as Kelly Hu's character sounds like she's talking from the driver seat and the cop and perp actually sound like they're talking from a few meters away.

It's not a major thing but it is something noticeable. I was recently watching some of the content from Assassin's Creed Rogue and noticed that the voices didn't really seem to be coming from the characters relative to their position on the screen, which was mildly irritating (for the game to be a triple A title, anyway).

But here, Hardline featured some really nifty sound design elements that work well to bring a strong sense of immersion and atmosphere to the table.

As far as the gameplay goes...

I found it a bit of a mixed bag. The idea of being able to outline and spot enemies from a distance and plot a way into the location without alerting enemies seem like an awesome thing. The video went the opposite route, though, going in guns-a-blazing and getting right to the action.

The shootout in the gang hideout near the end of the video was a lot more impressive to me only because we were able to see more of the physics in action, as well as get a decent look at the game's revolver and double-barrel shotgun.

I think there's some elements of Hardline that look pretty cool. If the game really does encourage arresting perps and exercising the option of not going all Rambo on everybody, I think this could turn out to be an interesting game with a decent measure of replayability.

I don't know if videos like the one above are a little too late to the party, but given the early 2015 release for Hardline, EA and Visceral Games still have plenty of time to get their acts in order and attempt to win over the favor of the gaming audience... assuming Hardline turns out to be a game that's more than just a glorified expansion pack for Battlefield 4.