Totally true: Every time I read the name "Mendoza," this goes off in my head. That makes writing about the new Battlefield Hardline launch date a bit of a challenge, because every time I think about newly-promoted police detective Nick Mendoza's war against the criminal underworld of Miami, my brain goes swimming in a non-stop litany of McBain-esque rage. But I have a job to do—and one way or another, it's going to get done.
Battlefield Hardline was originally scheduled to launch on October 21, but the beta held back in June revealed that the game wasn't quite as close to being ready for prime-time as EA thought. Instead of shoving it out the hatch anyway to take advantage of the lucrative holiday season, the publisher decided to push the game back by several months, to "early 2015."
Today EA nailed down that date as March 17, 2015. On that day, Mendoza (Mendoza!) will team up with veteran cop Khai Minh Dao to take on the criminal scum who are drowning Miami in a filthy tide of drugs and violence. "In a series of increasingly off-the-books cases," Battlefield Community Manager Vincent Vukovic wrote, "the two detectives come to realize that power and corruption can affect both sides of the law."
Or you could just leap straight into the multiplayer action, trying to pull off the big heist or the big bust as a cop or a robber, although neither heisting nor arresting seem to have much to do with all the bullets flying everywhere. Either way, if you're not shouting "Mendoza!" at least twice per game, you're not doing it right.
