Battlefield 6's Top Gun collaboration is more involved than I expected, and it convinced me that Carrier Strike should be a permanent mode

Battlefield 6's fourth season has been a highlight. From introducing naval combat to the game to adding its largest map yet - there's a lot for older Battlefield fans to enjoy. That same cohort, I wager - counting myself among them - will naturally be very excited for Top Gun to cross over with Battlefield 6.

The second half of Season 4 arrives with said cross-over as part of a limited-time event that introduces a lot of exciting new stuff to the game, to the point it wouldn't make sense to vault all that content in a few weeks' time. Yes, there are character and vehicle skins to spend money on, but I am not talking about that.

The meat of this update is the two game modes, one available in traditional multiplayer and the other in the free-to-play Redsec. Carrier Strike is a reimagining of Battlefield 2142's iconic Titan mode, available on the also newly-reimagined Wake Island. Then there's Fighter Sweep, a play on the Air Superiority deathmatch-in-the-sky mode from games' past, with a couple of interesting ideas of its own.

At a recent preview event, I got to play both, and Carrier Strike was easily the highlight of my time. This iteration is the closest yet at replicating the growing intensity and constant escalation typical of the original Titan mode. I see it as something of an apology for Battlefield 4's Carrier Assault, which attempted to re-create it and delivered what could only be described as a fan mode. Carrier Strike, by contrast, is a fully-fledged mode that retains and evolves the core elements from Titan.

The thrill is frontloaded as you see your teammates spawn on the aircraft carrier. Witnessing an entire team of 32 players on the deck of the carrier, with some rushing to claim a jet while others sprint to fill the last spot in a helicopter is a sight I really missed seeing in Battlefield. If you took too long editing your loadout and missed it, you may instead catch the catapult shunt a jet off the carrier and into the air as you jump off the deck to drive one of the remaining boats.

As a nod to Top Gun, the jet takeoff sequence is inspired by the films - which themselves are exaggerated from the real world. This isn't a simple runway takeoff like that seen in other Battlefield 6 maps; this is a cutscene that plays out with you in the cockpit, the closest we've got to Battlefield 3's Good Hunting campaign mission in multiplayer.

The rest of the match flows similarly to Titan mode. The goal for each team is to capture missile batteries scattered around the map so they can be positioned against the enemy carrier, slowly chipping away at their health. The batteries are attached to existing capture points, and you get to see them come online as you capture them, quickly turn to face the enemy carrier and fire off a barrage of missiles.

This has always been a clever setup that gives each location meaning, trading Conquest's standard war of attrition for a more direct approach where the team's objective is clear and unified. Once a carrier's defences have been breached, its interior gets exposed, allowing players to board it and arm explosive charges to take it out from within and win the match.

Carrier Strike also adds two twists of its own, seemingly inspired by the aerial combat theme of Top Gun. Jet air-to-ground munitions can now directly damage the carrier, and so can other vehicles and infantry. In my preview session, I couldn't tell whether either team worked that into their strategy, or simply decided to support teammates on the ground instead.

That may have been a side effect of the other new addition, automatic anti-air, which spawns when a team captures objectives in the same sector. But I didn't play enough to see whether the AA emplacements caused enough damage to be able to have that effect for infantry to even prioritise taking control of them.

Disappointingly, I found out pretty quickly that players can avoid the boarding portion entirely by simply continuing to capture or hold points and let the missiles do all the damage. One of my matches ended with one team winning because they fired more missiles at the enemy's carrier than the other, without needing to board it. The back-and-forth battle around explosives that takes place within the carrier is one of the highlights of this mode, so it's a shame you can't guarantee it every round.

Conversely, another match ended quite abruptly when one team - once they saw the enemy's core was exposed - made a major push to arm both explosives and guarded them until they went off. The sort of slick heist you can't help but admire.

By comparison, Fighter Sweep was a lot less interesting. It felt like the exact sort of tie-in mode typical of those events, even if it had its moments. In Fighter Sweep, six squads of two players alternate between destroying ground targets and taking out enemy jets, with the goal of being the first to reach a score of 1,000. Everyone is in a jet, so even players who don't typically fly in multiplayer get to have their turn.

Unfortunately, because this event also introduces two-seater jets, both players can occupy the same jet, rather than take one each. That discrepancy was immediately noticeable, as coordinated squads flying two jets were much deadlier than two players in one jet. Regardless of how good you may or may not be at flying, you can do a lot more damage by lining up behind the tail of someone busy chasing your wingman.

The elephant in the room here is the limited-time nature of these modes. Battlefield Studios has always listed both as part of the limited-time Top Gun event. Indeed, Top Gun's title, iconography and visual style are all over their cutscenes and in-game dialogue.

They can easily exist without those elements, but the question remains whether the developer will create new, non-Top Gun assets to replace them - or even take them out entirely - to keep the modes playable.

The two new two-seater jets introduce a similar dilemma. They're fully featured enough to add to Battlefield 6's core vehicle combat, and I'd certainly love to see them on more maps. But one of them is directly based on Top Gun's iconic F-14 Tomcat, even if it has the legally distinct F-74A Seacat name in-game. Could either or both of the two-seater jets survive? I believe so; two-seater jets aren't a Top Gun property, and the jets themselves could have a slight design change to avoid copyright infringement

The Top Gun event is set to end 15th September, though the developer didn't explicitly say whether that also extends to the new modes and vehicles. It would be a real shame to watch all that good work simply vanish in a few weeks. I hope EA and Battlefield Studios make the right decision there.

Newspaper

Battlefield 6's Top Gun collaboration is more involved than I expected, and it convinced me that Carrier Strike should be a permanent mode

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