The latest Battlefield Hardline beta has come and gone (at least by the time you read this). Undoubtedly, the beta will have sold fence sitters on purchasing the game while others have probably decided to save their $60 for another time. Hardline finds Visceral Games at the helm, leaving DICE to presumably work on Star Wars: Battlefront. Thus the question lingering in the air is if the developer known best for the Dead Space franchise could capture the magic that made the Battlefield franchise the powerhouse it once was.

So, did they? Did Visceral manage to create a game worthy of the Battlefield name? No, absolutely not. There is nothing here that would validate spending $60 (at the bare minimum) for this game. Then of course we cannot forget the potential Premium "Season Pass" offering on top of that. Of course, it didn't all leave a sour taste in my mouth, just a good portion of it.

• When you shoot someone in this game, the netcode and visual indicators seems solid enough. The problems pop up when you're the one being shot at. It's often very hard to tell where you're being shot from and by the time you figure it out, you're already dead due to the very low TTK (time to kill).

• As mentioned, the TTK is very low in this game. I would say this is an issue with a weapon or two but most guns have felt like they can take a person down in just a couple of hits. In other games this probably wouldn't be much of an issue but the Battlefield franchise has long had a higher TTK compared to the competition (such as Call of Duty). It feels out of place here and often felt like a hiccup when I would suddenly die without warning, and I don't mean from a sniper shot.

• Guess what made a return in a big way? Mutual kills! The bane of my existence in Battlefield 4 decided to return in force for Hardline despite being largely fixed in later patches for BF4. I don't know if this is due to possibly running on an older version of Frostbite or some other reason. All I know is that I had at least one mutual kill in every round of Hardline I played and I became just as frustrated now as I used to get when it was a common occurrence for me in Battlefield 4.

• Driving felt clunky in this game. For the game to have an entire mode dedicated to controlling moving vehicles, I would have expected the experience to feel better. Hell, there is even a racing game on Frostbite already (Need for Speed Rivals) that could have made for a good basis. I have seen vehicles become wedged in the ground. I have seen vehicles come to a complete and awkward dead stop by hitting other vehicles. Physics? Momentum? Who needs 'em! Driving over anything but the road became a guessing game as to what bit of ground debris would let you drive over it and what would somehow cause your car to just stop in its tracks.

Motorcycles are a bit more immune to this phenomenon simply due to their slimmer profile. However, you'd get into the issue where through broken physics or client/server syncing of positions (or both) results in some awkward "hops" and warping slightly when traversing the terrain.

• Speaking of vehicles and the Hotwire mode, I'm not a fan. The maps don't feel large enough for a vehicle focused mode that is just a nifty name given to 'Conquest with moving targets'. The entire premise behind the mode seems terrible and begs the question of "why wouldn't the criminals simply keep driving fast in a straight line instead of around the same couple of blocks in one big circle?"

All too often old Battlefield staples of not playing the objective showed up. You would have the person camping with Tripwire Mines or explosive Breaching Charges lined up on the road. These people would find a shady spot in or around a building and would trigger the explosives as the enemy drove by. Those setting up these kill zones can rinse and repeat thanks to their bottomless ammo bag. Of course we can't forget the always annoying Battlefield staple of people utilizing kamikazi jeeps. Yep, those are also still here in full effect!

• As such, the idea of Hotwire being about these high speed chases usually never materializes. You typically just have a few people from both sides taking control over the cars and driving around in a circle before being blown up by an enemy that placed explosives down on the road at obvious chokepoints.

• As a plus, the differences between the classes are actually a welcome change. The limited weapons actually make it worthwhile to play a variety of roles since there's not as much weapon crossover between classes in Hardline like there was in Battlefield 3/4.

Related, the means of unlocking the weapons and gadgets works really well in Hardline. If you see a weapon you want, simply accumulate enough in-game money and pay to unlock it. Since you earn money at a reasonable pace, it's very easy to unlock many of the weapons and gadgets you feel like you would be most happy with fairly quickly. This is in contrast to previous Battlefield titles that typically locked every weapon behind your character level. I'm not sure how they can apply a similar unlocking system in future Battlefield titles, but I would like it if they found a way. It allows for a bit more loadout variety almost right from the start.

• I certainly appreciate how the end of the game timer is the shorter timer in the pre/post-game wait periods. Having the longer timer at the start of a round allows more players to load into the game and get their loadouts ready prior to the action kicking off. Why it took so long for this small but important switch to happen is beyond me. I'm just glad that it's finally a reality and I hope it continues in future releases.

• Another welcome change is the fact that you can now take health and ammo from your teammates when they are the appropriate classes. Gone are the days of having to run behind an oblivious teammate as you spam commands at him to drop a damn ammo pack on the ground.

• In general, I found the maps to be noticeably smaller than in previous entries. Granted, we were only given a portion of the final game to work with during the beta, but it doesn't exactly provide me with much hope. I get the feeling that a lot of this has to do with the fact that Visceral and EA want the game to run smoothly on consoles, namely the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Why are there still last generation versions of games like this coming out in 2015? No idea, but the faster that trend comes to an end, the better.

• Dust Bowl is said to be a "mid-sized" Conquest map. If that's the extent of mid-sized, I don't have much hope for what a "large" map size will look like.

• Bank Job was also exceptionally small. There were multiple times where it all just felt like a killing field with people camping rooftops and shooting down into the road to stop the bag carriers from making much progress. Either that or one side was busy camping the vault or camping spawn areas. Essentially, this simply creates situations where one side can just completely and quickly lock down the rest of the round without any issue.

• We are already dealing with small maps but it might have been forgiven if there was any decent amount of destruction present. There is not. In fact, there seems to be far less destruction in this than in any other Battlefield game in recent years. Outside of specific areas where player initiated scripted destruction takes place, the most you will see are doors, wooden fences, and windows destroyed. There is no terrain deformation in the game. You cannot bring down buildings or structures. You also cannot put simple holes in walls outside of the designated areas and times that the game creators say that you can. It is, for lack of a better word, disappointing.

Was this again done for performance concerns on older PC hardware or consoles? Maybe. That is a very real possibility here. The team wants to hit 60fps on the consoles, so sacrifices need to be made somewhere outside of the sub-1080p resolutions. I'm not stating as fact that this is the only reason or that this is the real reason for why destruction is becoming less and less of a thing in Battlefield, but it is one of my gut feelings.

I get that it could also be done for the sake of balancing, but it's really annoying to see explosives and rockets hitting these little buildings and structures and not even seeing a scratch show up as a result. It feels like every new iteration of Battlefield strips away the destruction that used to be such a huge focus when it was first introduced.

• There are other minor issues that just rubbed me the wrong way. One of those is the fact that vehicles will pump out hip-hop songs every time you get into them. Yes, it can be turned off after entering the vehicle but I would rather it simply be an option to have that disabled from the start.

• The UI was downright terrible. Everything seemed absolutely massive and in my face both while playing and at the end of each round. There were multiple times where elements of the UI, namely the indicators showing where the points were in Conquest and Hotwire, obscured my view. I actually could not see enemies right in front of my face on more than one occasion because of the default UI! That's simply inexcusable right there. Then the end of the round comes and you see progress pages that look like they were designed for mobile devices. That is to say, they include unnecessarily huge elements and massive progress bars.

Thankfully there are large parts of the UI that can be customized while playing. It's not a perfect solution but at least there is some give when it comes to the UI.

• There is also the long standing issue of the spawn system in the Battlefield franchise. I'm sick and tired of seeing enemies literally spawn right in front of me while I'm shooting their squad buddy. Suddenly a 1v1 fight becomes a 2v1 or 3v1 or even a 5v1 in the blink of an eye. I really wouldn't mind seeing the spawn system receive a major overhaul. Simply make it impossible to spawn on teammates that are under fire. Hell, I'd even like it if that went a step further and prevented teammates from spawning on a player if an enemy simply has a direct line of sight on them.

• The random music blaring in the cars does lead to another other issue I have with the game: It feels completely tone-deaf. You have cops running around with automatic weapons screaming at criminals to freeze or get on the ground while gunning them down. Both sides somehow have access to military grade weapons and helicopters with machine guns. One of the spotting animations is your character flipping the bird. One of the hip-hop songs is "Sound of da Police" from KRS-One. It's as if they wanted to maybe make a more "light hearted" style Battlefield game but came up way short. It feels like the game is trying to find a balance between the crazy nonsense from the Bad Company games and the more "grounded" and "serious" mainline titles. Unfortunately, it comes off more that Hardline is simply having an identity crisis than anything else.

There you have it. Even after two pre-release "tests" of the game, the feeling remains that this isn't anything more than an over-priced expansion for Battlefield 4 that somehow lacks a number of the refinements that are now in Battlefield 4. Maybe the game's single player will be incredible. Even after Dead Space 3, I still have faith that Visceral can deliver a solid single player experience. However, Hardline isn't what I want in a multiplayer Battlefield game, and certainly not for $60+. If this was sold as an expansion for Battlefield 4 and priced accordingly ($20-$40), I might have been interested.

As it stands, I'm more looking forward to seeing what DICE does with Star Wars: Battlefront and its potential release in late 2015. Until then, I have a strong suspicion that Battlefield 4 will satisfy my random Battlefield itches in the coming months.