CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS – COLD WAR

Luke Kemp has some hot takes on the cold war

We only review finished games, so in Viewpoint we go hands-on with near-final code of a game that just missed our review deadline. After sinking 250 hours into Modern Warfare, Luke Kemp braves the trenches of the Cold War beta to see if it’s worthy of a similar investment.

A soothingly familiar constant in a year of uncertainty, the annual Call Of Duty is almost upon us. While code arrived too late for a full review this issue, the pre-release beta sessions gave us a good idea of what to expect from Treyarch’s latest pull of the online trigger (Raven Software is handling the campaign). It’s clear the company is determined to distance itself from 2019’s Modern

Warfare – with mixed results.

Unless something changes drastically between the open beta testing and the final code, Cold War doesn’t reach out far from Modern Warfare’s shadow. The graphics are a surprising step backwards, and little touches that MW players have grown accustomed to are thrown out of the bulletproof window. No longer can you get a brief burst of speed by double-clicking . Nor can you trigger a needlessly, amusingly brutal finishing move by sneaking up behind an enemy and holding . What does Treyarch have against clicking triggers?

I can’t help but feel, too, that the weapons I get to play with in Cold War don’t quite have the satisfying and individualistic punch that those in last year’s entry offered. Still, controls remain excellent, and there’s one welcome change: aerial support vehicles – at least, the ones I came up against in the beta – are now rather fragile. You need no longer fear a single attack helicopter taking out your whole team twice before it’s brought down.

It’s just as well that planes and helicopters are more vulnerable, as swapping killstreaks for scorestreaks means you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of them. Although they cost a lot of points, your total score persists through death. At one point, I looked up to see three enemy spy planes trying to avoid crashing into one another.

It’s impossible at this stage to say how the online meta will develop, though sniper rifles were in need of a thorough nerfing in the last version I played. There’s plenty of incentive to use them, too; each of the maps made available had plenty of open spaces surrounded by cover and sniping spots. This means that generally speaking, if you want a positive k/d ratio, you’ll need to adopt a slower style of play than you may be used to.

It’s surely no coincidence, then, that the mode which leans most heavily into this slower pace proved to be the star of the beta. VIP Escort is a 6v6 single-life game with revives. Each round, a randomly picked member of one team is made the VIP. This means that they’re equipped with a pistol, a knife, and one use of a spy plane (ie UAV). The round is won when the VIP is killed, successfully extracted at one of two objective points, or the defending team is wiped out. It’s tense fun with short, punchy rounds.

PRESIDENT RAY GUN

Old favourites Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, and Domination return, but there are some twists on them. Combined Arms: Domination is a 16-to-24 player version on maps with vehicles, like a scaled-down version of MW’s Ground War. Combined Arms: Assault, meanwhile, squishes together Domination and Team Deathmatch.

There are zones to take control of, but teams can earn faster captures by taking out enemies, encouraging everybody to remain aggressive.

There’s decent variety in the weapons; my favourite proves to be the Stoner LMG, which thunders through enemy players and enemy scorestreaks with equal ease. The maps made available for the beta sessions are all distinctive, too. The sandy Satellite contrasts nicely with the snowy Crossroads, for example, while the Battlefield-like map Armada impresses with its sea vehicles and ships connected by zipwires. I enjoy exploring the resort to be found in Miami, if only because there’s a swimming pool complete with diving board.

It’ll be interesting to see how the final product turns out. It’s great that the multiplayer experience is anything but a copy of last year’s, but everything points to snipers being given an unfair advantage, especially as the inferior graphics make picking out enemies at distance harder than before. This war’s leaving me a little cold.

“WHILE THE WEAPONS LACK PUNCH, THEY’RE VARIED ENOUGH,

AND THERE’S A GOOD RANGE OF MODES TO ENJOY ONLINE. BUT SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE ABOUT THOSE SNIPERS.”

We’ll have our full, in-depth review of COD: Black Ops – Cold War next issue.