Battlefield Hardline
Battlefield Hardline
03.10.2025
Undercover
At the beginning of the millennium, Counter-Strike showed that the battle between good and evil, police and terrorism, can lead to many entertaining hours in the digital world. But what has been missing from this long-serving and timeless game concept? Vehicles, of course! Who hasn't stood on Dust II and thought, “I could use a tank right now!”
That's how the developers at DICE seemed to have felt when they had to come up with a concept for the next Battlefield in 2013. A sequel in the style of BF4 would probably have been the wrong move, as the game was already too similar to its predecessor. That's why they (or rather Visceral Games) decided to scale down the military conflict between states and alliances and shift it to the criminal milieu. Instead of West versus East, West versus Middle East, or West versus Europe, the focus was now on real good versus evil: cops and robbers, police versus criminals.
Fortunately, Hardline was more than just a repaint of the familiar Battlefield-concepts. Instead, the trade press described it as a fresh approach with suitable game modes and classes, but less well-designed maps. At the same time, it was also the worst spin-off in the series overall, because it wasn't a Battlefield game with large vehicle battles, but specialized in infantry combat. That's why I never touched the game and skipped this round.
So much for that – let's move on to the soundtrack. It was composed by Scottish composer Paul Leonard-Morgan, who has already received various awards for his film and TV scores, but only has three credits to his name in the field of video games: Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War III (2017), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), and Battlefield Hardline. In this review, I will only focus on the 19 tracks from the original soundtrack, even though the fan wiki also lists all the radio tracks from the main game and the DLCs. Unfortunately, since those sound like stereotypical gangster hip-hop, I'm out.
Let's take a look at Leonard Morgan's work instead. First things first: to illustrate the break with the Battlefield-brand, we only hear the familiar theme of the series briefly as a drum roll in Battlefield Hardline. The score, on the other hand, impresses above all with its (as to be expected) thriller and action amplitudes, which give the single-player part of the game the right amount of bad-ass cop feeling. After all, the campaign revolves around the basics of organized crime and sends protagonist Nicholas “Nick” Mendoza, a detective in the Miami Police Department, into the fight against drug trafficking, corruption, murder, arms dealing, and whatever else is fun.
The music is reminiscent of American police series such as Miami Vice or The Streets of San Francisco, whose funky basslines and guitar riffs blend the everyday life of investigators with morally gray tones and the urbanity of the criminal suburbs. Modern influences such as synths and driving beats, on the other hand, lean more towards heist movies à la Heat or Drive. Sounds stereotypical? That's because it is. Because without the underlying audiovisual accompaniment in the game, the soundtrack feels like an attempt at a stand-up routine at your own grandmother's funeral: entertaining, but somehow inappropriate.
Now, I don't want to blame my consumption habits on the soundtrack, and I readily admit that it is well crafted. At the same time, however, it is too uninspired and clichéd for me to be able to name anything remarkable here. Action and suspense alternate regularly across tracks, while the pieces themselves remain uniform.
An action song like Weedhouse or Deal Gone Bad, which brings out the electric guitar after a short intro and creates a thriller atmosphere with drums and drawn-out riffs, runs almost exactly the same for six minutes before eventually fading out—that's not how you build suspense. That makes me almost happy about tracks like Fireworks Raid, whose simple riff at the beginning is reminiscent of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 ... only to fall back into the B(attlefield) pattern.
Another ray of hope is Nick and Khai Reunite, which thankfully leaves the guitar behind and brings a sense of security to the rough world of cops with soulful, echoing synth tones and piano. In itself, this is nothing special, but at least it offers some variety from the constant switching between shootouts and manhunts. The score for Battlefield Hardline therefore remains average, lacking any form of identity. Ideal for a criminal going into hiding, but unfortunately not as a soundtrack.
