I have been anticipating this game since its announcement. I mean, who wouldn’t love to play a good “cops vs. robbers” game. The campaign lives up to the hype; it was fun, involving, immersive and fleshed out. The characters were well-written and the story was great.

Players take on the persona of police officer Nicholas Mendoza, an average rookie on the Miami police force. The story chronicles dirty cops overcome by greed. The abrupt ending feels like a cop out. The episodic structure of Hardline‘s campaign is hardly unusual. Chapters are framed with recaps and coming-soon montages, reminiscent of games like Alan Wake and Split/Second.

At the end of an episode, players are greeted with a timer counting down to the next episode, just like Netflix. Hardline falls short of the Netflix 13-episode standard; the campaign only has 10 episodes and a prologue. But those 10 episodes are full of story and are very well-constructed with better attention to detail than past games.

Multiplayer mode is the generic Battlefield formula, but this is getting stale. Even with the new modes, it feels too much like past games to buy what essentially feels like a $60 add-on to 2013’s Battlefield 4. There are only a handful of new game modes, but nothing to write home about. They are all basically capture the flag.

Overall, the single player mode is remarkable with an engaging story, but left me wanting more. The multiplayer is a rehash of past installments with little to no new components.

This series is going downhill alongside the Call of Duty franchise, but what will take its place?