Killer Cops Have More Fun in 'Battlefield Hardline'

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The hardest thing about Battlefield Hardline, a cops-and-criminals-themed first-person shooter set in Miami that desperately wants to be one of the biggest games of the year, was stopping myself from shooting people in the face.

What most clearly sets it apart from previous Battlefield games and other shooters is that, playing as goody-two-shoes cop Nick Mendoza, you can flash your badge and gun, demand the criminals put down their weapons, and cuff them, all without firing a shot.

This trick works on up to three criminals at a time. Any more, and the bad guys will do the math and realize they can take you. In other situations, the game's script will force you into a gunfight, sometimes because it makes sense for the story, and in other times because Battlefield Hardline seems to understand what the people want.

This restraint is supposedly meant to illustrate the difference between Battlefield Hardline and the other Battlefield games, which emulate military combat. As opposed to the main Battlefield games that are developed by DICE in Sweden, Hardline is also developed by Visceral games, which is located in the tragically gun-craz​y California.

Visceral began working on Hardline before Ferguson made headlines, but it's been impossible to ignore the fact that its police game is coming out following a series of high profile stories about cops murdering unarmed, black citizens.

"I think it's a very important topic and something we should be aware of. And we should make sure that we're not in any way exploiting that or making it a negative experience for players," Visceral senior producer Scott Probst told Gam​eSpot in an interview in February, prior to the game's release. "A lot of these unfortunate events have actually helped provide feedback to us about things that we should or should not be doing. And that's helped craft a lot of our experience."

Which sounds okay, but then he contradicts himself, saying, "We want to make sure that while we're providing players with fun and innovative and cool ways to play the game, we don't want to make it something that is a political statement or is changing the way the game's built and making it something that goes over that line."

At which I LOL heartily because you can't even fart without making a political statement, let alone make a multi-million dollar video game about cops that is heavily advertised to boys of all ages across the world, etc.

So what is the political statement here? As far as I see, it's that being a good, careful cop who respects human life sucks.

The thing about shooting in games is that it's fun as all hell. Show me a person who says he doesn't like unloading 200 bullets at a rate of 800 rounds per minute from Battlefield 4's divine M249 light machine gun without letting go of the trigger, watching floorboards explode into splinters and concrete pillars crumble in dusty clouds and I'll show you a liar or a person who doesn't know how to enjoy the simple things in life.

Guns aren't only the main characters in the game; they're also the reward for playing well. This has been the case as far back as Doom, which gave you bigger, stronger, cooler weapons the further you got in the game.

In the modern Battlefield games, this is taken to a fetishistic extreme. There are more than 100 firearms in Battlefield 4, which you can unlock slowly over time and customize with countless barrels, scopes, red-dot sights, grips, and snazzy paint jobs. Aside from the pleasure of actively playing the game, unlocking these weapons and taking them out for a spin is the reward.

It's fun, and if Battlefield Hardline is special in any way it's because it flirts with denying me that pleasure.

In a regular Battlefield game, you enter a new area and you don't stop shooting until everyone's dead. You can be a psycho cop in Hardline and do the same thing, but if you want to get more points and play it as Visceral seemingly intended, you have to slowly sneak around, check your corners, lure criminals away, and arrest them one by one.

It's a much harder and more boring way to play. It's excruciating at times because the more points I get, the more guns I unlock but am asked not to fire. You're given all these wonderful toys and asked not to play with them.

The result is a police game that is quite literally militarized. Hardline uses the same engine as Battlefield 4 (so guns still look and sound amazing), and while it cuts down its arsenal from over 100 to about 50 firearms, you can still notice the military in its DNA.

This is obvious when I cut down two dozen nameless bad dudes with an AK-47 in a warehouse, but is most telling in one of the earliest sections of the game, when Mendoza and his partner patrol a bad neighborhood.

As they venture further into the trash-strewn streets and single story dilapidated homes, Mendoza has to abandon his car and continue on foot because the police closed off the roads for security reasons, his partner explains.

At this point Hardline is emulating memorable scenes from Call of Duty, Battlefield 3, and other military shooters. The idea is to let you run around the environment unmolested for a bit, interact with non-player characters, absorb the local flavor, and humanize the natives. It grounds the action so that the location feels lived-in when the bullets start to fly, and it creates tension because you don't know which of the innocent looking civilians is actually an enemy ready to pounce.

Essentially, it establishes the relationship between American cops and the residents of a low income neighborhood in the same way Call of Duty established the relationship between American soldiers and the residents of a remote Afghan village,

Hardline lifts a lot of dumb, unrealistic ideas from CSI Miami and Bad Boys II, but this part about how these neighborhoods are treated feels so true it hurts.

Between the curfew, restrictions on freedom of movement, and the heavy artillery, Hardline reminded of a similar thought I had while watching reports of civil unrest in Ferguson, MO following repeated cases of police brutality: the residents of these neighborhoods weren't being policed as much as they were being occupied.

Whatever Hardline is trying to say is insignificant when compared to what the systems that make it tick are inadvertently saying about the culture they were produced in: Proper procedure is commendable, but military hardware is so much fun to play with and makes complicated problems way easier. Whether it's the limitations of the technology or the minds of the people who designed it, the reality is that the game is capable of little more but shooting and killing.

Battlefield Hardline tried to give me the opportunity to be a good cop, but as a result makes clear why the allure of violence is inevitable when there's a shotgun glued to my palms. I tried to be a good cop throughout the game's story, but it didn't change how it ended. All I got for my efforts was more guns.

In the game's multiplayer mode, it's business as usual. You can play as a cop or a criminal, but everyone has guns and the only option is shoot first and ask questions never, no time for back up. Maybe it's prophetic.