'It is straight up junk': Fan favorite mode Rush is going down like a lead balloon in the Battlefield 6 beta

What have they done to my beautiful boy? Rush, one of the greatest modes of Battlefields past, is a total bust in the Battlefield 6 beta. Its debut is going down so poorly with fans that Battlefield Studios should seriously consider going back to the drawing board.

For a sect of Battlefield faithfuls who hopped aboard in the Bad Company era, Rush was it, man: Two M-COM sites, ~75 attacker tickets, and one dynamic frontline. It's essentially Battlefield's version of Counter-Strike's bomb mode, except with respawns and no singular bomb-toting VIP. In Rush, all attackers can plant the bomb, so it's up to defenders to play whack-a-mole until the reinforcements dry up.

The rules of Rush are unchanged in the Battlefield 6 beta, but the format and maps feel all out of whack. Locked at 12v12, BF6 Rush lacks the sense of scale that it had in Bad Company 2 and especially Battlefield 3 and 4. Though the player limit is likely a consequence of its uncharacteristically cramped map layouts.

"It is straight up junk," wrote non-words-mincer BIG_CEC_ in a top-upvoted post on the Battlefield subreddit. "I was really looking forward to playing Rush all day. Not anymore."

"This sh*t is not Rush," added DimensionWroth3043. "This feels like Search and Destroy from Call of Duty with bigger teams and rounds that change location. The lower player count and lack of vehicles has ruined this game mode."

The consensus worst Rush map in the beta is Iberian Offensive, which confusingly utilizes only a central sliver of its city grid and zero vehicles. There's so little space between M-COM sites that you can literally watch one site from the other. Worse is defense spawns that spit you out so close to the action that attackers can set up in a window and spawnkill.

The same is true of certain M-COM sites in Cairo and Empire State, leaving Liberation Peak as the sole beta map that plays like normal Rush.

That's about the tenor you can expect online at the moment, but it's worth saying this iteration of Rush isn't universally hated.

"Personally, it's my favorite mode in the beta so far; maps are still too small, but the lower player count allows for more tactical gameplay and less of a clusterf*ck everywhere," Sidewinder_ISR wrote in a reply.

Sidewinder makes a great observation there. It's possible this smaller take on Rush is a deliberate attempt to differentiate it from Breakthrough, the unofficial successor to Rush introduced in Battlefield 1 that swaps bomb sites for Conquest-like capture points.

Breakthrough and Rush have shared an awkward redundancy in the past: DICE generally favors the newer Breakthrough as its go-to linear objective mode, with Rush getting demoted to a specialty mode that sometimes isn't included at launch (Battlefield 5 didn't get it for a year).

The instinct to tweak them is natural and reasonable, but uh, is it possible to just not? I don't think new Rush is irredeemable, but it was already really fun on a larger scale, and Breakthrough/Rush are already different enough to justify their own spots on a playlist.

The Rush backlash is also tied to a wider debate over the size of maps in the Battlefield 6 beta. Of the four maps we've seen so far, only one captures Battlefield's signature scale—and even that map, Liberation Peak, isn't all that big. There's an insatiable hunger for a Rush map that lets dozens of players assault a beachside base via water, or at least have enough space to move around so that vehicles even make sense.

The more we see of Battlefield 6's pool of nine launch maps, the less I'm convinced it'll satisfy those waiting for loads of big maps to arrive. That said, BF Studios has already made some adjustments to Rush based on feedback: M-COM detonation timers have decreased, and spawn timers have increased.