Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
SINGLEPLAYER? NOPE. BATTLE ROYALE? DOPE.
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 nakedly sales-driven version of one of the most popular trends in gaming right now, expertly-tuned to the whims of a capricious gaming community. Like every Call of Duty since Modern Warfare, Blackout is a rendition of ideas forged by bolder games. But with its usual array of compulsive multiplayer modes and the most instantly-thrilling battle royale mode to date – which saw me lose all the members of my squad, commandeer a helicopter, and then immediately crash into another firefight within 30 seconds of deploying – Blops 4 has reignited my interest in the franchise.
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 CoD campaigns of yesteryear, especially Modern Warfare 2’ s, recent entries have left me unimpressed. Still, its absence leaves the singleplayer relatively meager this time around, limited to solo zombie-stomping with bots or lone missions that star the game’s cast of multiplayer ‘Specialists.’ Black Ops 4 is solely a game about shooting your friends or shooting with your friends, and if the battle royale mode weren’t so fun, it’d feel a little thin for its $60 price tag.
Compared its battle royale contemporaries, Black Ops 4 might be a refinement rather than a revolution, but it’s still the best version of a realistic battle royale (or at least, more realistic than Fortnite) that I’ve played – zombies aside – and I plan to go back to it for weeks to come. The messy gunfights and clutch finishes make me want to jump back in repeatedly, and that’s ultimately the metric that matters the most to me.
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, along with a remake of the original Black Ops’ Five that comes with the optional season pass. But after over fifteen hours of headshotting the undead, I felt a deep urge to play through Left 4 Dead 2 again.
It can be hard to remember that this is the series that redefined the online shooter just a decade ago. Black Ops 4 is what it says on the back of the box, and little more, but the weapons are fun to use (particularly Prophet’s shock rifle, which never gets old) and its lighter, faster take on battle royale is best-in-class, at least at this early juncture for the genre. 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. That’s good enough for me.