Campaign Mission Review: The Rock

We flash forward a few years and change perspective to a young Black woman in a sick-ass blue-hued house that’s getting raided. She accesses a fake bookshelf, enters a code, opens a safe, and grabs her firearm.

\[Side note: Your force equalizer should ALWAYS be on your person. John Correia would NOT be happy with this lady.\]

Turns out it’s Murphy’s old mentor? Murphy and his new Juice Crew are here to protect her from possible PAX assassins. Murphy wants answers about an op that went sideways in Gibraltar. So we flash back to a new-to-us, but old-to-Murphy, squaddie: Gecko.

\[Note: I don’t like this change in perspective this early. DICE has always struggled to build their “TF-141” equivalent, and the only thing we know about Murphy is that he feels guilty — yet we’re already cutting away from his POV to someone we don’t know.\]

I won't comment on graphics too often — more on cinematography — but the lighting during the C-130 latch opening for the skydive? Gorgeous. This isn’t like BF3, where there was so much lens flare it felt like a Zack Snyder movie.

Gecko doesn’t seem to be wearing gloves. Weird, considering the altitude and cold. She even touches the ground post-skydive with bare hands. I'm not one of those “Ruins my immersion, 0/10” guys, just something I noticed.

First action from the Black lady — name-dropped as Mills — is clearing out an MG nest pinning down another squad. You’re supposed to snipe the guy from a ridge, but I just ran up, and my new squaddie, Carter, handled it for me. Once again: Hardcore difficulty, and I didn’t even have to shoot a single bullet.

The gist of the situation: PAX is restarting conflicts so they can be paid to solve them, and NATO is stepping in to stop it. The Juice Crew splits up and you’ll see the other squad vaulting over a wall. Small thing to note, but I liked it. Unlike the previous mission, where the outlook crew just stood around doing nothing, this squad feels like they act independently from the MC.

\[First glitch spotted\]: A guy vaulting over air — but hey, maybe that’s something they teach you in the NATO handbooks.

Juice Crew 2 needs to blow up a structure and calls for sniper support. Once again, I just ran straight at PAX — felt a bit more danger this time, so I knifed them. That won’t fly in the next fight, though. You're forced to hunker down in a tower — fail to do so, and it’s mission over. I'm actually forced to use my gun and snipe. Radical. Except...

It’s boring. And generic. PAX focuses entirely on Juice Crew 2, so I’m never in any real danger.

Classic design rule: A player should have to juggle multiple problems at once to stay engaged.

You had a helicopter dropping off troops to go clap Juice Crew 2 cheeks, that awesome but why didn’t it drop enemies on our sniper nest too? Imagine this instead:

Enemies attacking the sniper nest top and bottom

PAX firing RPGs not at you, but at the tower

Player has to snipe RPGs, stop close contacts, and maybe leave their nest to save the tower

All while still defending Juice Crew 2

Make us use more than 2 neurons at a time.

I won’t always go this in-depth with improvement fan-fics, but just know: if the situation only has you focus on one thing, and the AI isn’t smart enough to make that one thing hard, I’ll call it generic.

And again: this is Hardcore difficulty. Most people are going to play on Regular. I can’t imagine how mind-numbing this must feel on that setting.

Our area gets hit with artillery, and we dip into a tunnel. I mostly run with the knife out. Looks like Gecko’s balling with a fucking Damascus steel knife???

Next firefight is curiously engaging, because, what do you know, it has you focus on doing multiple things. We're ambushed in an old, dark WWII museum. The space is claustrophobic, you can’t just run past enemies. You can’t sit behind chest-high walls the whole time. There are mannequins dressed like soldiers, making it harder to ID enemies. You're still pointing and shooting yes, but the puzzle is to IDENTIFY where to point and shoot first. I really hope we see more missions like this in the future.

This was also the first time I felt it necessary to use squad commands. Bit clunky, but usable.

Gecko then slides down to a lower level using an elevator cable — again, no gloves. Made me wince.

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Next engagement: destroy an AA battery. You can still just run past most of PAX, grab the C4, and blow the objective. On Regular? Would be trivial.

\[Side note\]: It takes 3–4 hits to kill an enemy with a knife. Not sure if that’s just the difficulty scaling or if the knife is trash. Either way, not a fan.

Still, I liked the environment and setup. But the most astute among you might have noticed — I haven’t talked much about Gecko or her boy-toy. That’s because... there’s not much to say. Gecko could be swapped for a silent protagonist and nothing would change.

Final objective: blow two more AA guns so NATO troops can arrive. Again, you can kind of just run past PAX spamming grenades. DICE seems to think players need ammo refills every picosecond.

Another chopper shows up — totally ignorable. Someone else will blow it up eventually.

Mission ends with Gecko and the Juice Crew dropping flares to bring in the cavalry.

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A step up from the previous mission. But, I’m still not sure why Murphy couldn’t have been the lead here. Gecko gave lip to Mills at the start of the mission but we see none of that attitude in the flashback. The most interesting thing about her is that she owns a Damascus steel blade.