Call of Duty Black Ops

Nails established trends but carves out none for itself.

DEVELOPER TREYARCH • PUBLISHER ACTIVISION www.callofduty.com

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s take on battle royale, Blackout, feels like an unintentional commentary on the series as a whole. It’s a sales-driven version of one of the most popular trends in gaming right now, expertly tuned to the whims of a capricious community. Blackout is a variation on ideas forged by bolder games. But with its usual array of compulsive multiplayer modes and the most instantly thrilling battle royale mode to date, Black Ops 4 has reignited my interest in the series.

Note the lack of singleplayer in that description. If you haven’t heard, Treyarch has jettisoned the usual glossy eight-hour corridor campaign from this year’s game. Though I have fond memories of the Call of Duty campaigns of yesteryear, especially Modern Warfare 2’s, recent entries have left me unimpressed.

The whip-sharp precision and reactivity of Blackout’s shooting easily outclasses the clunky gunplay of PUBG, while the smaller map and the generous distribution of quality loot ensures a much faster, more thrilling game more akin to Fortnite.

I rarely found myself without a pistol or rifle, even in the tense opening seconds of a match. I loved feeling like I had a fighting chance, but the zombies who patrol parts of the map wore on me, especially since it made my preferred stealth playstyle less viable. It’s something PUBG and Fortnite don’t have, but it’s more of a nuisance than a legitimate tactical consideration.

Compared its contemporaries, Blackout might be a refinement rather than a revolution, but it’s still one of the best battle royales that I’ve played. I plan to go back to it for weeks to come.

For its traditional multiplayer modes, Treyarch has ditched the divisive wallrunning and double-jumping of Black Ops III. The simplified movement better suits Call of Duty’s pure, no-gristle take on the genre. Nevertheless, this new entry has doubled-down on Black Ops III’s ‘Specialist’ system, which layers character-specific abilities over the series’ enduring class system. Though comparisons to Overwatch seem inevitable, these Specialists lean closer to the classes of Destiny’s Crucible, where your choice of specific loadout is just as important.

The problem is that Call of Duty has, to me, always represented a ‘pure’ shooting experience, untainted by abilities and cooldowns. Perks and killstreaks are one thing, but area-ofeffect flashbangs, Widowmaker-style wallhacks, and deployable accessories that redirect where your teammates respawn are a strange and clumsy direction for the series. Rather than the race of reflexes that brought the series to the dance, Black Ops 4 has lumbered into an uncomfortable middle ground between a pure FPS and a game of tactical teamwork.

Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed the game’s new mode, Heist, which shunts abilities aside in favour of a Counter-Strike-style purchase menu. After gearing up, two teams compete to locate a mound of cash and bring it to an exfil site. And there are no respawns to blunt mistakes. Rather than the popular Team Deathmatch, where you can endlessly spawn with the same gear without a thought for strategy, Heist makes you consider the advantages and disadvantages of Black Ops 4’s considerable armoury from round to round.

The last part of the Black Ops 4’s trifecta is its Zombies mode. While I admire the complex, obscure subsystems and subgoals that you have to master to achieve a 50-round run on the new IX map, they’re layered over a foundation that boils down to a very pretty but very static shooting gallery – one that’s broken up by bullet-sponge superzombies with little in the way of personality. The lack of clear linear progression makes the mode opaque to newcomers.

The only other option is to strive for mastery through trial and error, figuring out the complexities of the bonus-bestowing Pack-a-Punch machine or the ideal build to synergise with your teammates.

There’s an absolute ton of undead to slaughter in Black Ops 4, including two brand-new maps and a remake of Black Ops 2’s Mob of the Dead. But after over 15 hours, I felt a deep urge to play through Left 4 Dead 2 again. I had much more fun with Black Ops 4’s Rush mode, which pits players against one another in a murder race to see who can gather the most points by offing zombies. For me, this conjured the arcadey pleasures that World at War’s original Zombie mode hearkened back to.

It’s worth noting that I’ve experienced some serious stability problems while playing the game on my PC. Though it runs for hours without incident, I’ve had crashes in virtually every mode, some in the middle of games.

It can be hard to remember that this is the series that redefined the online shooter just a decade ago. Black Ops 4 no longer feels innovative, but the weapons are fun to use and its lighter, faster take on battle royale is best in class. So even though nothing about it is surprising, this year’s CoD still gives me what I want after 15 years of blasting through the series: all-adrenaline, with guns that are a joy to use.

I had much more fun with Black Ops 4’s Rush mode, which pits players against one another in a murder race to see who can gather the most points...