Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Death, taxes, and a new Call of Duty every year – these are certainties in life. What’s less certain is the execution and reception of the annual entry in the blockbuster shooter franchise. For instance, last year’s Modern Warfare 3 was a bit of a mess in some respects, though I was higher on it than most. Treyarch and Raven Software are back leading the charge for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, bringing back some commonsense design to Call of Duty while also taking a couple of big swings that pay off. The result is an overall great entry in the Black Ops sub-series, and really, the franchise at-large.

My COD experience this year began with Black Ops 6’s multiplayer suite, where things get back to basics structurally while introducing an exciting new movement system. Let’s start with the much-ballyhooed Omnimovement system, an intuitive player physics system that changes the COD formula for the better. Essentially, you can now move in any direction and in any way you can imagine. You can dive backwards onto your back, sideways onto your side, or even dive through a window while simultaneously rotating mid-air to open fire on an enemy. It’s incredible, and a ton of fun to play around with. Sometimes I will dive through a closed door just because I can, and because I feel like a badass doing it. Omnimovement is easy to use, but certainly more difficult to use effectively, which should create a wide skill gap as the year goes on where sweaty players can knock themselves out while casual players can just play the game and enjoy it.

Gunplay is still excellent this year, though it feels a bit more arcade-y, if you will, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Each weapon feels distinct to use and properly weighted, particularly on PS5’s DualSense controller, where strangely, haptic feedback and adaptive trigger support is turned off by default. Perhaps the best way I can summarize the gunplay in Black Ops 6 is that it feels like a culmination of all the best parts of the current console generation of COD games. I struggle to pick out one that feels better to play than this one.

As for getting back to those basics, thankfully Black Ops 6 departs from the ridiculous system of Modern Warfare 3 where unlocking certain weapons and attachments was tied to completing challenges. Instead, we’re back to the traditional system of ranking up your account unlocking weapons and equipment along the way – all you need to do is play the game, just as it should be. Speaking of tradition, we also received a brand-new slate of multiplayer maps this time out, as opposed to remastered maps from an older game, which was the case last year. Though some tweaks to spawn points are needed, this year’s batch of boards is mostly good, both in level design and aesthetics. They’re not too big or too small, except for one, maybe two, but having a stinker or two in the map rotation is a Call of Duty convention that goes back decades now. Like I said – Black Ops 6 is a more traditional COD multiplayer experience.

Moving over to Zombies, round-based matches are back, with squads of up to four players surviving wave after wave of undead, completing a few objectives on the map, and rallying for extraction when it becomes available. Overall, the mode is fun this year, but not better than PvP multiplayer in terms of stickiness. It is chaotic in the higher rounds, providing a ton of tension and run-for-your-life action which is much better if you can play with friends rather than relying on random humans. During one match, me and a Gaming Nexus colleague were ready to extract and live to die another day, but one random in our squad refused to join us at the exfil site, which is an annoying feature of the mode if you can’t communicate with everyone in the group.

At launch, there are two Zombies maps – Liberty Falls and Terminus – and tons of perk augments, ammo mods, and field upgrades to experiment with while trying to perfect your zombie-slaying strategy. Along the lines of progression, a most welcome feature is cross-progression between Zombies mode and the multiplayer suite. So, if you’re someone who enjoys dabbling in both, but dread having to stunt your progress in one mode in favor of the other, fret not. Both you and your weapons will rank up across both at the same time, allowing you to keep rocking your favorite loadouts between both modes.

In a rare move for me, the single-player campaign was the last mode I experienced in Black Ops 6. There was no campaign early access this year, likely to avoid spoilers, which is understandable. Thankfully, linear COD campaigns are back (mostly) in a big way. The Black Ops arch of the franchise has long leaned into the worldwide spy thriller motif, and that’s the case in Black Ops 6, with the usual bit of psychological craziness thrown in to shake things up. Set during Operation Desert Storm in the late 1980s and 90s, Black Ops 6 sees some familiar faces return with Woods and Adler, as the aging duo introduces a new age of special operators to global conspiracies, government corruption, and spycraft. The campaign is a return to form for the franchise, with blockbuster set pieces that at times feel ripped from a Mission Impossible movie, including some of the best performance capture and production value in the entire industry.

While Black Ops 6 is, structurally speaking, a typical COD campaign, the teams at Treyarch and Raven took some big swings with this one. After the disastrous open-world missions in Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 6 has an open-world mission of its own, only it’s far better in its design and execution. Where last year’s missions were a chaotic, garbled mess of enemies swarming you the second you raised the alarm, Black Ops 6 brings structure to the table. Various points of interest are scattered across a map, and it’s up to you to decide if you want to engage with any or none of them. You can certainly choose to stick to the main objectives, but I found myself clearing the entire map over the course of an hour. I’m not saying it’s as good as this, but it reminded me a bit of taking on a mission in Metal Gear Solid V. There is another mission that I desperately want to talk about, but I also don’t want to spoil it for you, so I digress. Suffice it to say that the COD team took a stab at an entirely different genre, and kind of nailed it.

With that said, I did encounter a few oddities during the campaign that stood out. Teammate AI is rather dumb, particularly during the open-world mission where they will stand next to you out in the open while you’re trying to crawl around in cover to remain stealthy. The best part is that the enemies are just as dumb, because they won’t even acknowledge their presence – only yours. There is also the inability to mount your weapons on cover in the campaign, which is available in other game modes, as well as some visual artifacting that occurs during cutscenes that appear to be rendered in-engine, as opposed to the cinematic vignettes that are pre-rendered. And finally, as you might imagine, the game ends on a cliffhanger, but its attempt at shock value doesn’t land for character-related reasons, sapping some juice from an otherwise good campaign.

I had high hopes for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and it did not disappoint. The multiplayer suite is the best part of the package by a decent margin, and one of the best in the franchise thanks to the new Omnimovement feature and finely tuned gameplay. Zombies is a fun distraction when you’re needing a break from PvP, but it’s outshined by multiplayer and the campaign. Thankfully, Treyarch and Raven were able to get Call of Duty back on track in terms of campaigns with Black Ops 6, and even took a couple of big swings that paid off. Black Ops 6 feels like one of those evergreen releases in the franchise that people will be playing for years to come – some might even call it a classic Call of Duty.