W.Anyone who thought about building this game’s campaign around a safe house that resembles a haunted mansion on an abandoned estate deserves an immediate pay raise. After each foray into a shooting spree, your team of militarized misfits is deposited back in this sprawling country, which for some reason is full of intriguing mysteries and riddles: what happens if you play the piano? Where does that passage lead? What is this scribbled in invisible ink on the wall? It’s like Scooby-Doo meets Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a comparison I never imagined making with a Call of Duty game.
Lead developers Treyarch and Raven have had four years to work on this title and it shows. Multiplayer is both familiar and novel thanks to its “omnimovement,” which lets you run and jump in all directions, radically altering the feeling of movement and tipping the scales of lethal encounters in favor of those with spatial reasoning skills. instead of lightning-fast trigger fingers. The small maps, showing abandoned radar stations, shopping mall courtyards and attics, have been intricately constructed to provide combinations of labyrinthine corridors, long sightlines and stealthy cubicles. Weapons, including 12 newcomers, are designed to exploit diverse playstyles, from quick-range super snipers to Red Bull-guzzling SMG teens, and the gunsmith allows for countless ways to modify each one, with genuine tangible effects on your gameplay.
For the single-player campaign, the scene is set in 1991, during the Gulf War, where a mysterious international terrorist agency called The Pantheon has its hands on a deadly weapon of mass destruction, possibly with the help of corrupt CIA agents. . The only people who can stop the Pantheon are a selection of gun-toting ne’er-do-wells, including a crazy ex-Force Recon strongman, a troubled assassin, and a very arrogant secret agent, the latter of whom may as well have had a sideline as a model. . Hair products from the 80s.
It’s somewhat refreshing that Call of Duty, too often a jingoistic standard-bearer of American exceptionalism, is now looking inward for its enemies. It’s also probably a good idea that the Iraq conflict is largely a backdrop (with Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton and George Bush appearing in cameos) rather than a focus, given how complex that conflict was. However, there are several controversial scenes, including the massacre of dozens of Iraqi soldiers with helicopter gunships and the gratuitous interactive interrogation of a terrified prisoner, that are disturbing for their lack of context or moral analysis.
Otherwise how to play? Well, Oscar Wilde famously said that “the genie steals,” and he might as well have been a design consultant on this game. “Most Wanted” is effectively a Hitman mission set during a Democratic Party fundraiser, where you have three different ways to blackmail a senator into giving you information: mafia hitmen, a disgruntled wife, or a mysterious note in the pocket of his coat. Hunting Season is Far Cry 2: an open world mission set in a desert full of enemy bases to attack and secrets to discover. Under the radar is Metal Gear Solid, a heady mix of stealth and social engineering that follows the assassin as she infiltrates a Pantheon base in Vorkuta (a small Russian town that previously appeared in the original Black Ops campaign).
These are short, precise genre exercises that bring different flavors to the game’s core concept of killing as many soldiers as possible. But the real treat is Emergence, the narcotic-induced hallucination mission that every game in the Black Ops series must contain. It’s a tense, riveting and genuinely disturbing tribute to a certain episode of Dr Who that will induce fear of crash test dummies in everyone who plays it.
Finally, Zombies mode has returned to its standard format, abandoning the unpopular open world design introduced in Modern Warfare III. It’s a wave-based shootout, where teams of cooperative players try to survive against incoming zombie hordes using weapons and items discovered while exploring tight, atmospheric locations. Once again, you’ll face off against a swarm of corpses, level up your weapons in Pack-a-Punch machines, collect special weapons, and take on boss monsters, all while keeping your eyes peeled for fun Easter eggs, like a hidden bowling alley where you try to take down as many brain eaters as possible. It’s tense and incredibly stressful, but with three friends it’s a real blast.
Black Ops 6 is the best title in the series in years. It’s still a manic first-person shooter fest that many players will absolutely detest; No critic of games that glorify the military-industrial complex will be converted at this stage. However, the design team knows its audience and caters to them accordingly while doing just enough to move things forward and try out some intriguing little transitions. I would love to play a full game where I could customize the extravagant safe house to make it more comfortable for my cute little family of special ops sociopaths; I would play an entire horror and survival adventure set in the world that Emergence invents. Nothing in this series has stayed with me as long as the nuclear bomb explosion in Call of Duty 4, but I feel like these violent pleasures have staying power.