Another year, another Call of Duty game.
Activision has been riding high on Call of Duty for years, with the original Modern Warfare and Black Ops games being some of the best-selling video games of all time. Not to mention, Warzone is basically a license to print money these days.
Hearing that, one would be inclined to think that they are constantly putting out great and polished games, but in recent years there have been plenty of releases and changes to the formula that have had mixed, or downright bad, responses.
This begs the question, how does Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 measure up?
Now, for the sake of this review, I will be predominantly focused on the campaign, while lightly touching on the multiplayer and zombies game modes.
The campaign takes place in 1991 at the start of Operation Desert Storm. Your rag tag group of soldiers will travel across a variety of levels, including underground bunkers, open desert, arctic military installations, and so on. It shows that Treyarch isn’t falling into the same mistakes that Infinity Ward made with Modern Warfare 3, which is all around a positive. The campaign is a full length Call of Duty campaign, with several missions that take place in several new areas, and overall It’s pretty fun.
There are the standard linear Call of Duty levels, but there are also some more sandbox environments. “Hunting Season” in particular is a mission that sees you navigating the Iraqi desert as you attempt to gain access to Saddam Hussein’s palace. There is a main objective to complete, but there are also side objectives that give access to ordinance and other perks that will assist in completing the mission.
I am torn on this style of mission, because while it is done well, it’s not what I personally want to play in a Call of Duty campaign. The first objective I completed gave me access to a drone strike, which made the rest of the mission a breeze. The main objective was to destroy several scud missile launchers, which could easily be destroyed with the drone strike without even setting foot in the enemy encampments. It detracts from the major set pieces that made older Call of Duty games a lot more enjoyable.
Now, before this devolves too much into an older gamer yelling at clouds scenario, I do want to give Treyarch credit for making a fairly dense map with some interesting components. In fact, some of their other missions, those which focus more on social stealth, are extremely enjoyable. Again, it doesn’t really fit in what I would traditionally expect from a Call of Duty game, but once I stopped thinking of Black Ops 6 as a “Call of Duty”, I actually started enjoying it more.
There are still some design choices, like how assets and references to the Zombies mode have become very integral to the campaign, which don’t work for me. But those aren’t necessarily deal breakers.
There are a lot of concepts that are fun. A safe house acts as a hub for the campaign and this allows for upgrades to be purchased that increase damage or improve survivability, such as increased bullet penetration, carrying additional armor, and so on. Documents can be found that add background to the characters and story, and there are a series of puzzles to solve that make it feel like a big escape room.
One mission sees you infiltrating a political Gala, where stealth and discretion are vital to being successful. There are restricted areas that will result in detection and failing the mission, but it’s also possible to knock enemies out and drag them to other areas to avoid detection. After accessing the black site in the same level, it then transitions to more traditional call of duty gameplay full of shoot-outs and room sweeps. The stealth feels good and works well, detection never feeling unfair, even while playing on veteran. In fact, there’s a solid balance between stealth and gunplay
While the gameplay is polished though, the actual game itself struggles in way too many ways. During my playthrough, I had to restart several missions because of the game crashing. Even worse, I actually had to completely uninstall and reinstall the game because a scripted sequence in a level kept causing the game to crash. The base game and campaign are around 70 GB, and while I have good internet, it still resulted in sitting around for an hour to redownload it. It’s a ridiculous problem that a multi-million dollar game should not have.
There is also the matter of the new omni-movement system that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 introduces. This allows players to sprint and dive in every direction, and I am not a fan of it. Instead of quickly proning or going into a crouch while running, the player character dives. On Veteran difficulty, where taking cover quickly and precisely is essential, running often leads to accidentally diving past or on top of cover instead of sliding into place. It’s a mechanic that is purely motivated for multiplayer, and as a more casual Call of Duty player, I don’t use this system nearly as much as the surrounding hype would lead me to expect.
Beyond that, the multiplayer is very much what Call of Duty multiplayer is expected to be at this point. I didn’t have any issues with connectivity and the game modes are all there. It’s Zombies that have ultimately had the biggest changes since its original appearance though; over the top and wacky, which I get can be an odd criticism for a Zombie game mode, but the focus on Easter eggs and comedic content is way more than I want. Furthermore, it feels more like a way to grind experience on guns, than an actual intense game mode to play with friends.
It’s hard to objectively look at the new Zombies maps without comparing them to previous ones. As someone who last enjoyed the mode in Black Ops 2, this version just doesn’t do it for me. However, if you are someone who likes the newer direction of the game mode and has been following it in previous entries, then it’ll probably be something you enjoy. It just misses the mark for me personally.
At the end of the day, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a better game than the other more recent Call of Duty games, but if you hark back to the classics like MW2 and the original Black Ops games, then you won’t find it reaching those same heights. It’s Call of Duty though, and with Xbox owning Activision, anyone with Game Pass has access to it, so it doesn’t hurt to try. If the campaign doesn’t crash on you, then it will, for the most part, be a pretty enjoyable experience.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Deploys a Mind-Bending Spy Thriller to Xbox and Game Pass – https://www.thexboxhub.com/call-of-duty-black-ops-6-deploys-a-mind-bending-spy-thriller-to-xbox-and-game-pass/
Download Black Ops 6 – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/call-of-duty-black-ops-6-cross-gen-bundle/9PF528M6CRHQ/0010
