Shacknews Best Multiplayer Game of 2025 - Battlefield 6

When it comes to playing with friends and battling against foes, Battlefield 6 stands as the best multiplayer experience this year.

The first thing you do when you launch Battlefield 6 is check who’s loading into multiplayer with you. It is the quintessential game you play when you’re fanging for a large-scale battle. It’s a high octane experience with matches that reward all sorts of playstyles. Even in defeat, victory can be found through hilarious moments and explosive sequences as your tight squad pushes an enemy position.

From a macro perspective, it’s obvious why Battlefield 6 rocks as a multiplayer game. The maps are big and the battles are laden with bullets and explosives. But to really understand why it works so well as a multiplayer game, you’ve got to break the experience down to its constituents.

To start with, each team is made up of several squads, each consisting of four players. This is the heart of your team and the people you will be fighting beside. With three friends by your side, you’ve created a tight-knit unit that can do anything from hold a street and go on a killing spree to crush an enemy point or perform a mighty flank to take down an entrenched tank.

Instead of being able to create whatever sort of loadout you want, Battlefield 6 limits players to the four classes: Assault, Recon, Support, and Engineer. Restriction breeds ingenuity. With one of each on your team, your squad will be ready for anything. Take a step back and now you can realize you’ve got an entire team made up of these squads, each working together to achieve victory.

The brilliance of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer is that victory can take on many different forms throughout a match. Earning the overall victory is obviously key, but war is made up of dozens of smaller battles. That flank your team pulled to destroy the tank? That victory allowed another squad to push up and take a position. By holding one lane and repelling enemy attacks all match, you’ve allowed your helicopter pilot to sweep around another angle without getting shot out of the sky with a guided rocket.

There’s joy to be found in these small moments even if, ultimately, your team winds up being defeated. It’s because these moments in and of themselves are incredibly rewarding. Winning a couple of fights and pushing your team forward an inch feels so good when faced with an unmoveable opponent in Rush.

Even if you don’t gel with the role of Medic that’s zapping people back to life or the Recon that’s playing a point-and-click adventure on the cliffs, there’s a job for you. Maybe it’s sitting behind a tank healing it or being the gunner in a chopper that’s circling the map. Your value is more than a simple K/D math formula.

When the match ends, even defeat yields rewards with XP pouring into the weapons you’ve used throughout. So you’ll drop back to the main menu to assess what you’ve unlocked and how to eke a bit more out of your favorite weapon. Better yet is when you unlock a new bit of equipment for your class.

Every part of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer feels fun to engage with. Every single element, from the small firefight in a single room to the sprawling multi-vehicle warzones, is bursting with explosive moments. Battlefield 6 is the pinnacle multiplayer experience in a year overflowing with great games to play with friends and strangers. Shacknews is excited to be able to acknowledge Battlefield 6 with its Best Multiplayer Game of 2025 award.

Check out more of the Shacknews Awards in our Year of the Games: 2025 article.