Battlefield Hardline (2015) opens with the song "Sound of Da Police" by KRS-One. This is a game that's clearest inspirations are cop dramas, 2010's prestige television, and the sort of drug war stories we still hear every day. The game has a liquid cocaine drug called Hot Shot, a side-narrative that you can discover clues about, but if this game was made in 2025 it would have been fentanyl instead. The game seems to, at the start, be about being a cop on the front line of a new drug war, of morally grey circumstances and holding onto one's beliefs (if you could say a cop has beliefs other then the expulsion of power from various holes).
Around halfway the game throws out the cop drama bullshit and leans into a bootleg Fast and the Furious clone where the game is trying very hard to be goofy, fun, and frantic. It fails, but to be honest? There's the barest glimmer of a decent frame sorta buried in there, and THAT's fucking infuriating.
I don't think this game is very good in any circumstance. Hell, the only reason I'm playing it is an excellent Bluesky post from a few days ago. Especially after playing Battlefield 3's wet fart of a campaign earlier in the year, I didn't really have high expectations, and yet I was still underwhelmed. Impressive, honestly.
I feel like there's a good game buried in there, somewhere, somehow. But honestly, as someone who likes to talk about and think about games, I have to work with what I have.
An good article I read a bit ago called Pokémon Black and White is a Reddit Game defines such a game as
A Reddit Game is born when time passes and the memory of actually playing a video game fades. Players reconstruct the experience through secondhand sources like forums, wikis, and YouTube essays. The actual game becomes secondary to the game as it’s remembered, reinterpreted, or imagined—a Reddit Game.
A related phenomena, or a sub-sect of sorts, are the kinds of games where the lofty ambitions of the developers are shining clearly through- where you can see the concept art coming to life, the listed mechanics and ideas firing off in perfect harmony- all in the minds eye. An example of this, I'd say, is Bioshock Infinite - a game that seems perfect built to sit and imagine what it could have been if the development had gone right.
People then will sit and say "Man, imagine what it would have been like if we got the game that the developers wanted to make." A common kind of mod for RPG's is to restore cut content to a game, hell, mods themselves become recommended as a sort of bridge between the idealized game that exists in fans minds and the actual thing. You ever see the STALKER community? The amount of mods there that people claim to be definitive ways to play are immense, too many to count. The "true" STALKER experience becomes whichever way someone likes to play it personally.
Art is like assembling a shack in a hurricane. There's no chance that anything will go well- that a finished piece will even be released to a hungry public. Thousands of games, probably more, get cancelled without us even knowing. We view the lucky ones in the end, the games that survived months and years of sweat and labor.
I think it's a human instinct, to get caught up in the theoretical games that we've never gotten to see. I can't work with the theoretical though, at least, not theoretical art.
When I look at Battlefield Hardline, when I was playing it over the last few days on various Discord calls, swearing while trying to get my Proton install to work with the game and it's fucking Battlelog system, I see a game that has so much promise buried in deep, waiting to be cut out and put into a supportive environment. There's levels that hint at what the game wants to be, open sandboxes where you get cool tools and get to poke around and make your own plans, hell, the entire premise of a single-player heist game! We don't really get those, at least ones that are set in an approximation of our world (Thief I'll try and get to you eventually).
I can't sit down and review a game that I've created in my head though. That's not possible, and just saying to someone "it didn't live up to the glowing idol in my head" isn't really conducive to real critical discussion.
As I'm writing this, we're two days into the post-release Silksong discourse. I've been catching bits and pieces of it on various servers and on Bluesky, but I have to wonder- would the game ever have lived up to what existed in people's heads? I think about Cyberpunk, or No Man's Sky, games that had people imagining an entire virtual reality to exist in- and which failed to live up to both the developers' ambitions and the salivating minds of the fans.
I don't really have an answer to what should be done for this. I do what I do with my own approach to art- I dislike using cut content mods on first playthroughs, I don't mod games at all the first time around unless it's absolutely needed to get the game running. These are mild idiosyncrasies. I can't tell everyone out there to play like this.
All I can do is approach it how I approach it- finding the game in front of me, not the one far off in the shimmering horizon.
You can follow me on Bluesky or put a little in my tip-jar at Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading!
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