Battlefield 4 Review: A 2013 Shooter That Still Earns Its 8.0/10
Battlefield 4 opens with water. Tombstone Squad is escaping Baku, Azerbaijan with vital intelligence when their car plunges into the sea. Dunn, trapped between the seats and critically wounded, hands Recker his pistol and orders him to shoot out the windshield. Recker does it. Dunn drowns.
That is the first ten minutes of the 2013 shooter, and it sets the terms. Battlefield 4 wants you to feel the cost of the order, not just the noise of the explosion. It mostly earns that.
Trailer, via Battlefield.
Recker, Tombstone, and the Valkyrie
The campaign casts you permanently as Recker. It primarily follows chronological order, which sounds like a small thing and isn’t. You stay in one head, one squad, one chain of command from Baku to the Suez Canal, and the continuity gives the whole thing a spine.
The plot is geopolitical pulp, delivered fast. Admiral Chang is planning a military coup d’état in China. If he succeeds, he gets full Russian support. Presidential candidate Jin Jié has been assassinated, and Chang has convinced the Chinese that the United States did it. Garrison sends Tombstone into Shanghai to rescue three people: Kovic, Hannah, and Hannah’s husband.
Then an electromagnetic pulse fries every piece of electric equipment in the area. Irish, against Pac’s protests, diverts the squad to rescue civilian refugees stranded on boats. Recker lost the squad leader position because he didn’t stop Irish in Shanghai. Kovic becomes acting squad leader later, on the Titan mission. That is a real consequence for a decision the game frames as decent, and it is the best writing Battlefield 4 does.
Levolution, Commander Mode, and the Titan
The features hold up. Levolution reshapes maps mid-match. Commander Mode returns. Naval Warfare is a genuine addition rather than a bullet point. Boot Camp is a separate mode for learning the basics of the single player and multiplayer, and the multiplayer takes the training wheels off from there.
The set pieces in the campaign are where the ambition shows. Tombstone scours the sinking USS Titan for vital intelligence, and the carrier buckles under its own weight and splits in two. The squad jumps ship. Later, a freighter crashes into a bridge during the Singapore airfield assault and throws Tombstone into the sea. You survive, move through a sewer, and keep going.
Not every chapter lands. The Kunlun Mountains prison sequence runs long, and the two-day foot march where Tombstone hunts for food is a slog the game mistakes for texture. Dima, the Russian prisoner with radiation poisoning, dies when a helicopter shoots down the cable car. He deserved better than a cutscene.
Here is the running order of the campaign’s major beats, roughly as they hit:
| Chapter | Setting | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baku, Azerbaijan | Dunn drowns; Tombstone escapes with intelligence |
| 2 | Shanghai | Electromagnetic pulse hits; rescue mission; Irish diverts for refugees |
| 3 | USS Titan | Intelligence recovery; carrier splits in two |
| 4 | Singapore airfield | Freighter hits the bridge; Pac apparently killed |
| 5 | Kunlun Mountains | Prison riot; Dima dies; Hannah’s Singapore betrayal explained |
| 6 | Tashgar | Major Greenland; push toward the airfield |
| 7 | Suez Canal | Final assault on the Valkyrie |
What Battlefield 4 Gets Right
The campaign’s strongest elements are the squad, the continuity, and the multiplayer, though the source material does not rank them against each other.
- The squad. Irish, Pac, Hannah, and Kovic are written as people with friction between them, not as voices feeding you objectives.
- The continuity. One protagonist, chronological order, consequences that stick.
- The multiplayer. Levolution and Commander Mode give matches a shape that most shooters of its year could not match.
Hannah is the piece that holds. She appears to betray Tombstone in Singapore, hands them to the Chinese, and infuriates Irish. Then she shoots the soldiers holding Recker, Irish, and Dima at gunpoint and explains she was tasked to protect Jin Jié, who had been posing as her husband. Chang’s army killed her family the day after she brought Jin Jié home to meet them. Irish apologizes. The game does not underline it.
Pac’s return is the one note that rings false. He survived Singapore, he says, by crawling through a thousand miles of shit with a hole in his stomach. It is a good line. It is also the kind of resurrection that cheapens the chapter that killed him.
The Verdict on Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 is a genre-defining action blockbuster built from moments that blur the line between game and glory, and the marketing line happens to be accurate. The campaign’s best scenes — Dunn in the flooding car, the Titan splitting, Hannah’s reveal in the mountains — are about obligation and what it costs. The weakest scenes are about spectacle for its own sake.
The multiplayer is the reason the game lasted. Levolution, Commander Mode, and Naval Warfare gave players systems to argue about for years, and the single-player campaign works as a boot camp for all of it. That combination is rare, and the studio got it right more often than not.
It is not a flawless game. The prison chapter drags, Pac’s survival undercuts Singapore, and the Tashgar foot march tests patience. But the squad, the chronology, and the consequences carry it. Thirteen years on, Battlefield 4 is worth your time.
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