Beat the singleplayer campaign of Battlefield: Hardline on PS4 yesterday. Not great, not terrible.

The very first impressions were quite awful. It's one of the uglier games I've played this generation, the pacing is terrible in the beginning and the car controls are ridiculously crappy (also: one time my car just fell through the street and I died). However, then I discovered many things to like here: the characters are quite likeable, the story is just interesting enough to make you care and most importantly: there are some police-themed mechanics here that really mix things up compared to all the war shooters out there, including other Battlefield titles.

To my surprise Hardline has a lot of stealth gameplay. You can actually perform simple takedowns on unaware enemies or make arrests, which means that you have to flash your badge to unaware enemies and then you can capture them. The latter is actually a pretty cool mechanic because enemies need to be either isolated, so yelling "hands up" or the held up enemy won't alert other enemies, or grouped tightly together, so you can threaten all of them with your gun - if an enemy is not threatened for a few moments, he will reach for his sidearm and open combat ensues. There's also a mini map that shows enemies along with their vision cones and a scanner that allows marking enemies after which you can see them through walls while using the scanner.

On top of that you can throw empty bullet cartridges to attract enemies to certain points. It's not a very deep mechanic but made the game far more interesting than I expected a Battlefield singleplayer campaign to be. Furthermore the progression system exclusively rewards non-lethal takedowns and once in a while there's an enemy with a warrant and you get even bigger rewards for those - these guys need to be first identified with the scanner. And since you can replay individual levels, failed stealth is not too much of a setback so the stealth gameplay doesn't feel too forced. And the combat itself is of course pretty fun and solid since this is a Battlefield game.

Also, you can collect pieces of evidence which belong to cases and every time you close a case you get further gun unlocks. Collecting evidence is fairly straightforward but surprisingly rewarding. Again, the scanner is your friend since it shows direction and distance to the next piece of evidence - some pieces of evidence are found on guys with a warrant. It's really simple stuff but was a lot more fun than collecting intel and whatnot in war shooters, for one because you have a tool that helps finding it and also because it ties into the story and the police theme. That's great! Admittedly sometimes you have to collect evidence during chase sequences or something and then it just feels utterly out of place...

Of course it's not perfect. The game gets a lot worse once you get to play "the other side" later on. The gameplay doesn't actually change much then but the arrest mechanics begin feeling kinda out of place then. Then there's the thing that you have limited equipment slots and as a result I barely used potentially fun tools like the grappling hook. The levels didn't support this stuff that much and of course I never knew in advance when which tool would come in handy. That's stupid. The story also gets kinda crappy later on and the ending downright sucks - so, that's bad. And of course there's the traditional problem with Battlefield singleplayer campaigns: they just don't support what the game is best at. The maps are for the most part pretty small and linear and heavily scripted. You don't get as much tactical freedom as you should have, vehicles can only be used during very specific heavily scripted sequences (which generally suck) and destructibility boils down to bullets passing through all sorts of cover instead of allowing for extra tactical options. That sucks.

So, the first half of the game was pretty great in my opinion, the second one was rather meh. The game was much better than I thought it would be but all in all the singleplayer campaign is just okay.
I had been considering to get the game for a while and got close to buying it several times. I think after your post I'm actually gonna give it a shot if I find it anywhere at a reasonable price. Thanks!