Battlefield 1: A Gritty Anthology of World War I

Battlefield 1 arrived in 2016 and did something no shooter had done at that scale: it dragged the genre back to World War I, a conflict most games had treated as a history lesson rather than a playground. DICE built it for PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One, and Electronic Arts published it. It is the fifteenth entry in the Battlefield series. The result is a game that understands the Great War was not a single story but a hundred of them, told by people who never expected to survive long enough to tell it.

Trailer, via Battlefield.

Storm of Steel and the Anthology Structure

The campaign throws out the linear hero’s journey. Instead it hands you five War Stories, each a standalone glimpse of the war from a different corner of the globe, preceded by a prologue that sets the tone.

“Storm of Steel” opens in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918, putting you in the boots of the Harlem Hellfighters, an African-American infantry regiment. The trick is simple and brutal: when you die, the game does not reload you. Your perspective shifts to another soldier. The prologue ends with a lone Hellfighter and a German stormtrooper, both exhausted and surrounded by the dead, lowering their weapons in a moment of shared humanity. It is the most affecting ten minutes in the game, and it earns its grimness without a single line of dialogue.

The five stories that follow are uneven, but none of them feels like filler:

• “Through Mud and Blood” — the crew of a British Mark V tank named Black Bess at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917
• “Friends in High Places” — an American gambler impersonating a British pilot over France
• “Avanti Savoia!” — two Italian brothers in the Arditi shock troops fighting Austro-Hungarian forces in the Alps
• “The Runner” — an Australian ANZAC runner at Gallipoli
• “Nothing is Written” — a Bedouin warrior sabotaging an Ottoman train alongside T.E. Lawrence

Black Bess and the Claustrophobia of Armor

“Through Mud and Blood” is the strongest of the five. You play Danny Edwards, a young former chauffeur assigned as driver of Black Bess, a Mark V tank. Commander Townsend is cynical, the crew is fractious, and the mud-soaked fields of France are a character in themselves.

The story works because it traps you. Early tank warfare was not glamorous; it was mechanical failure, enemy fire and personal loss in a steel box. A pivotal moment forces the crew to use a messenger pigeon to call artillery down on their own position to escape being overrun. That is the kind of decision the game keeps asking you to make, and it never lets you feel good about it. Edwards and the survivors push through to Cambrai, but the cost is real.

Clyde Blackburn, Zara Ghufran and the Rest

“Friends in High Places” follows Clyde Blackburn, a charming American gambler who impersonates a British pilot named George Rackham to get his hands on a prototype fighter. He flies with a gunner named Wilson, dogfights German aces, protects British bombers and assaults a German Zeppelin over London. The framing device — an older Blackburn recounting embellished tales — is a nice touch, though the redemption arc lands softer than the tank story.

“Avanti Savoia!” is brief but impactful. Luca and his brother Matteo serve in the elite Arditi, storming fortified mountain positions in heavy armor with a machine gun. An artillery barrage triggers an avalanche, and Luca’s search for his brother in the aftermath is the emotional core.

“The Runner” follows Frederick Bishop, a celebrated runner serving with the Australian ANZAC forces at Gallipoli, carrying messages across Ottoman lines. He mentors a naive young soldier named Jack Foster, and the story ends with Bishop sacrificing himself to protect a British warship. The gameplay leans on stealth and quick action, which suits the material.

“Nothing is Written” puts you in the role of Zara Ghufran, a Bedouin fighter working with T.E. Lawrence to sabotage an armored Ottoman train called the Canavar. It is the most open-ended of the stories, allowing stealthy infiltration or all-out assault, and the final confrontation with the train is the campaign’s best set piece.

What the Multiplayer Does With the Setting

The campaign is the surprise, but the multiplayer is the reason people stayed. Battlefield 1 takes the series’ large-scale battles and drops them into the trenches, the Alps, the Arabic sand dunes and the sea.

You fight as infantry or pilot vehicles on land, air and sea. The hardware list is period-correct and strange in the best way: tanks and bikes on the ground, biplanes and gigantic battleships above and around you. Urban combat in a besieged French city plays nothing like the open spaces of the Italian Alps. That variety is the point.

Where the Campaign Falls Short

Battlefield 1 is not a perfect game. The anthology structure means some stories hit harder than others, and the flashback framing in “Friends in High Places” is the weakest narrative device in the set. But the decision to treat World War I as a collection of human stories rather than a single power fantasy is what makes it stick.

The prologue alone justifies the price of admission. Shifting perspective on death is a mechanic that could have been a gimmick; instead it is the clearest statement of the game’s thesis, that the war was a machine that consumed individuals and left the survivors to carry it.

Key facts:

• Release year: 2016
• Developer: DICE (EA Digital Illusions CE)
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
• Series: Fifteenth installment in the Battlefield franchise
• Modes: Single player, multiplayer
• Genres: Shooter; themes of action, historical warfare, first- and third-person perspective

Battlefield 1 · DICE · Electronic Arts · first-person shooter · game review · World War I