You’d think there would be nothing left to be said about an annual franchise on its 19th entry. But for Activision‘s resilient Call of Duty franchise, there are certainly things to be said about the state of the franchise over the past half decade. Ever since its technological facelift with 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot, the Call of Duty franchise has seen a slow, steady quality decline that correlates with the breakneck pace in which these games get developed and released every single year.
From 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War to last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, the cracks at the seams have shown more and more, with last year’s entry with its cobbled together campaign, rehashed maps in multiplayer, and a Zombie DMZ reskin being the nadir of the franchise. While there were still some positive things about last year’s game (especially when it came to addressing movement feel from the prior entry), at release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was an embarrassment and showed a series in desperate need of a quality uplift.
Enter Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 from developer Treyarch and Raven Software, who after being granted the blessing of developing their latest game over a 4-year period, allows the franchise to reclaim some of its faded glory. Though not without its flaws, the Call of Duty franchise feels reinvigorated with this installment, delivering better campaign and multiplayer content that hasn’t been seen since the franchise’s heyday more than 10 years ago. For a 19th annual entry in a long running franchise that hasn’t stopped pumping out games since 2005, that is quite impressive.
Bishop Takes Rook
Both a direct sequel to the “good” ending of Black Ops Cold War and a sort of sequel to the present day storyline of 2012’s Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 puts you in the shoes of new character William “Case” Calderon during 1991 in the midst of the start of the Gulf War. Case and his fellow new cast of characters join longtime Black Ops mainstay Frank Woods and Black Ops Cold War’s Russell Addler as they have to fight against a new conspiracy that alleges the existence of enemies within the CIA and other branches of power. Smartly building on established events from the entire pre-future Black Ops timeline, Black Ops 6 manages to add cohesion to the campaigns in Treyarch’s ever twisty franchise sublabel. While the story itself is nothing you haven’t seen from a spy or military movie (especially when it comes to “bioweapons”), it’s more fun and entertaining than most of the campaigns have been in a while.
As a big fan of the Call of Duty campaigns dating back all the way to the 2005 release of Call of Duty 2, I have to admit the past half decade or so of them has not been the rosiest time for my favorite pre-multiplayer diversion. 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot was far from my favorite campaign, but I found it fairly successful in bringing back the Modern Warfare line of the franchise with a grounded fresh angle despite its lacking spectacle and pretty irresponsible storytelling. The campaigns in its two sequels in 2022 and 2023 being glorified reheated rehashes of past glories, but done worse, popped the balloon on my excitement for further campaigns in the Modern Warfare sublabel. And the less said about 2021’s Vanguard, the better.
I’m singling out 2020’s campaign for Black Ops Cold War because out of all the campaigns in this rough half decade period, this was the one campaign that showed the most promise. The team at Raven Software showed they got the chops to try and shake up the usual Call of Duty campaign formula, and a lot of its interesting ideas unfortunately got cut short and were fairly underdeveloped for a game that was clearly rushed to market. But second time has been the charm, and with Black Ops 6 we get the campaign Black Ops Cold War clearly wanted to be, with new ideas being thrown at you constantly that calls back to the variety seen in one of best campaigns in the series, Black Ops 2.
I have to give a special shoutout to Black Ops 6 managing to unify the campaigns within the label again after Black Ops Cold War made it seem like a restart. Since 2019’s Modern Warfare, it has felt like Activision and its franchise developers would rather just restart/”reboot” their two most popular sub brands, with Black Ops Cold War, in particular, feeling like a new “starting point” from the original 2010 Black Ops campaign that would “ignore” the events of Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 3. While that third entry will always feel like a lame duck considering how far into the future it’s set in and not including any overt references to events and characters from the first games, Black Ops 6 manages to smartly weave the new characters and developments from Black Ops Cold War and makes them work in the context of the “present day” storyline from Black Ops 2. While definitely a “retcon” of some sorts, it smartly weaves the fallout of Alex Mason and Frank Wood’s dealings with Raul Menendez and makes that fallout work in the context of the new story being told in Black Ops 6. It gives an air of confidence that there is still new story to be told within the already established frame work, and it’s much better than the member berry reheated rehashes 2022’s Modern Warfare II and 2023’s Modern Warfare III ended up being.
Unlike last year’s Modern Warfare III that cobbled together a campaign from parts of other modes, Black Ops 6 feels more assured of itself when it provides missions outside the standard linear set piece design for Call of Duty. In its 11 missions with different sub-missions within it, it’s wild how varied the flow of the campaign goes from mission to mission, where you begin with a traditional military linear mission, to then do a traditional Splinter Cell-style stealth mission, to a Mission Impossible multiple pathway sleuthing on a political event, to an extended open world mission in Iraq complete with side missions and “fast travel”, to the game’s obligatory “trippy” mission that’s always a must in the Black Ops sublabel that goes wilder than they ever had, and so on and so forth. And considering this is actually one of the longer campaigns the series has seen since 2006’s Call of Duty 3, the pacing at which this variety comes from feels very even keel and keeps it entertaining throughout.
On top of the variety on display, Black Ops 6 also adds that distinct Raven Software flavor to add missions with multiple approaches to completion, which, in turn, can lead to rewards where you can upgrade your character in many different ways. Call of Duty has experimented a few times with ways to do some sort of character upgrades in their campaigns, and this feels like a more fleshed out version of the concept, where actual challenge completions and collectible discovery in the form of different safes you find can give you money to upgrade your base in-between missions, which then gives options to specialize on specific traits more tailored to your style. At a time where one could have argued Call of Duty campaigns were just coasting and going through the motions, Black Ops 6 revitalized this third pillar of play with more meaning and purpose than what’s been seen in years.
Even with all the improvements and variety on display, some Call of Duty design quirks have still made their way into the campaign that will slightly spoil the fun from time to time. Some of these issues are actually seen more when the campaign is at its most linear, where signposting in specific instances is lightning quick and confusing, which can lead to cheap trial and error restarts. I can count many times I got killed by grenades where the grenade indicator clearly showed I was very far away and I still got killed as if the grenade was beneath my feet. And as over the top and fun as the story can be, it still does end up feeling a bit “predictable” and loses itself a bit in technobabble nonsense halfway through.
But, unlike how Call of Duty campaign’s have felt lately (considering I’ve played all of them), I’m pleased they still managed to produce one of their better ones this late in the game that harkens back to the franchise’s golden age in the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era. While I don’t think it’s the best Black Ops campaign, it’s damn near close, which says a lot for a sub label whose first two entries are top tier in the campaign pantheon, but whose third entry got lost in the shuffle of futuristic nonsense, whose fourth game skipped a campaign altogether, and whose fifth entry had to be cobbled together at the last minute in the first sign of trouble the series has seen from a development standpoint (the fact that it still was good was a great sign of Raven Software’s development chops). For a franchise that has made multiplayer its bread and butter for so long, if this is a sign of a new, recommitted focus to the campaign side of things, then there still may be plenty of life to be had in this 20-year-old annualized franchise.
Omnipresent
As it’s been since 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the meat and potatoes of the Call of Duty experience is its competitive multiplayer, and that hasn’t changed in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. With a franchise always in the yearly churn, the big question when it came to multiplayer was always the same: which developer’s turn was at the helm, and what changes/subtractions were they adding to both the gameplay and the progression systems?
Prior to the engine revitalization of the entire franchise with 2019’s Modern Warfare, you could easily pinpoint what some of the changes to multiplayer were going to be on the developer alone. Infinity Ward would always bring in the progression tweaks, and Treyarch would always bring in the movement quirks. When Treyarch became a more vital Call of Duty developer in the wake of the dissolution of the original Infinity Ward team back in 2010, their games would retain their distinct movement and add things like the “Pick 10” loadout system to more fully differentiate themselves from the more static Infinity Ward efforts.
Their changes wouldn’t always hit, like Black Ops 3 doing away with one-hit melee kills in one of the more consequential (and frankly, worse) changes to the gameplay loop that has remained ever since, to a “hero shooter” style character kits that did nothing but unbalance the gameplay in the third and fourth entries. With Black Ops Cold War being a more “back to basics” approach that stripped down the bloat of the third and fourth game, Treyarch has definitely honed back in on keeping a more traditional, simple progression system and leaned on their original strengths with movement by creating their most subtle but important evolution in the form of Omni Movement.
After 2019’s engine rehaul, the Call of Duty look and feel became more uniform and static from entry to entry, with the only notable changes being the controversial nerf to slide speed and slide canceling in 2022’s Modern Warfare II that was immediately reversed the year after with 2023’s Modern Warfare III. The Omni Movement introduced in Black Ops 6 is both a small, subtle extension to the faster movement of Modern Warfare III that has also proved pretty vital in making Black Ops 6 feel even smoother than ever before to play in all areas (I didn’t even mention it in the campaign, but Omni Movement is also implemented there to great effect). While the concept of 360 degree sprinting may seem ludicrous at first, it comes close to eliminate any semblance of stiffness from all areas of movement, and you will eventually enter a “flowstate,” where you’ll forget there was ever any stiffness in this game’s movement. It adds that extra flavor to Call of Duty‘s tried and true fluidity, and it would be hard to ever go back to the more static flow from prior entries.
With the extra flare of movement also comes the caveat that, almost from match to match, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has become a more ultra-sweaty experience with all these movement options available. I know this is going to be music to the ears of those that love to sweat their hands out in all their matches, but those that want to play more casually will definitely have some adjustment time on their hands. On the other hand, I feel the game’s implementation of skill based matchmaking has worked much better than prior entries, where playing with my more competitive group of friends has put us in many matches that have ended with scores in the 100-99 range on normal Team Deathmatch than usual.
As for the variety of different modes available, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 continues its traditional selection of modes that range from Team Deathmatch, Domination, Search and Destroy, Kill Confirmed, Free-for-All, Hardpoint, Gunfight, Headquarters, and “newer” modes Kill Order and Control. From those two new ones, the one that is the most interesting is Kill Order, in which it’s a Team Deathmatch variant with a rotating High Value Target that, when killed, will grant extra points. Black Ops 6 also includes a modifier-less selection of modes in Face Off, which gives you variants of Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed, and Kill Order in the smaller selection of maps. Kill Order, itself, is a mode not fully suited for the chaos that ensues in the smaller environments of Face Off with how quickly a match can end. And with the ever growing list of modes that will be added over time (like Infected being added to the rotation the week this review goes live), it’s definitely gonna be a robust affair with its wide variety of modes on top of the 16 maps available right now.
The map selection is the one area of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 I’m between positive and mixed on. Unlike Modern Warfare III where I thought the excellent group of maps from the 2009 game that returned didn’t quite work well with the game’s artstyle and movement abilities, I feel the map selection for Black Ops 6 definitely has made a stronger impression at launch to me than last year’s entry. When the maps are middle-sized like “Skyline”, “Subsonic,” and “Warhead,” amongst many others, the maps have that sweet spot of size and design that works well with the movement abilities at hand. Unfortunately, the map selection gets slightly more aggravating the smaller or bigger it gets, where the fast movement in smaller maps becomes a confusing quagmire of readability in the middle of combat and the bigger maps bringing the camping problem for Call of Duty back in full force (pointing the finger squarely at “Protocol”, “SCUD” and “Vorkuta” in this instance).
Still, I feel liking a good 8 to 10 maps out of 16 is a solid batting average, and when I consider many maps from some of the recent entries haven’t made an impression on me whatsoever, I feel this is a step in the right direction despite the nagging feeling that I believe the previous Black Ops entries actually have a slightly stronger map selection. But perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good in this instance, and I can only hope the map selection continues to grow stronger and more in line with the design ethos of this game.
Fetch Me Their Souls
As tradition dictates, the third and final pillar for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the return of Zombie mode. Having been the developer that introduced this third pillar of the franchise as an easter egg in 2008’s Call of Duty: World at War before massively growing in popularity, the Zombie mode for Black Ops 6 sees Treyarch attempt to bring the mode back to its wave-based basics compared to last year’s Zombie mode being an open world DMZ reskin with zombies in it.
But for the fans that have been wanting the zombie mode to return to the flavor of the peak of the mode back in 2015’s Black Ops 3, the zombie mode is absolutely building more upon the Black Ops Cold War design ethos for the mode. I know there is a contingent of fans that consider the old pre-loadout version of the mode the peak, and while I understand yearning for those days, I feel the newer version of the mode is not bad by itself. With the two maps on offer (Liberty Falls and Terminus), it definitely is a far cry from the outlandishness of a “Shadows of Evil” in terms of style. But when it comes to the basic act of gunning down the endless hordes of the undead, the zombie mode of Black Ops 6 certainly benefits on Omni Movement alone. With the many times I’ve played the mode from previous games where I got stuck in poorly placed map geometry that, realistically, my character should have been able to vault over, this Zombie mode has definitely taken the new gameplay design into consideration, and it feels that much better to play.
The other area that I continue to appreciate, which I know diehard Zombie fanatics don’t, is that they are continuing the penchant for actually giving you real objectives to follow as you go through the map. It’s a far cry from the series’ heyday where what you could do in a given map was the vaguest of vagueness, with mechanics so incredibly obtuse it always shocked me players could figure them out without some guide. What’s interesting is that, while not available at launch, it seems like Treyarch will want to placate both sides by introducing a mode that will be as vague as the mode tended to be. While I’m personally confused why that kind of mode wasn’t available at launch, for Zombie fans that did prefer the obtuseness of yesteryear, that’s coming soon, maybe alongside the new map launching November 14th with the new season.
Overall, I find Zombies the same way I’ve always found the mode: a fun diversion that eventually loses steam due to the lack of map variety at launch that gets more fun as the year goes by with further additions. For my money, nothing has topped the co-op excitement of the 2009 and 2011’s “Spec Ops” modes for the original Modern Warfare trilogy. While 2022’s Spec Ops modes got close to recapturing some of that feeling, I’m still chasing that co-op high. But for Zombie fans that enjoy the eccentricities of the mode, I found what was there perfectly enjoyable, if in need of further robustness that’s absolutely going to come.
If there is something you can always count for Call of Duty, it’s that it will always be a solid visual package. The technology uplift the franchise got in 2019 is still serving well here, and they continue to pursue high levels of fidelity and performance that’s also suited the franchise well, even when its art style and direction has gone more to the pedestrian side than I would like. What’s always been interesting of the Treyarch side of the equation is that they have consistently had a slightly cartoony artstyle to their “photorealism” that gave their games a clear identity compared to the games made by Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer, and it’s funny how some of that distinct look has kind of carried over into Black Ops 6 now that the technology amongst all the games has become so uniform. Environments are certainly more colorful and distinct with great lightning effects, which gives the game more of a visual pop compared to the blandness of last year’s Modern Warfare III. With that said, the engine is showing a little bit of its age at this point with some cracks along the seams, with an inconsistent level of detail in certain environments and faces, and a dynamic resolution that can become muddy at inopportune times that does spoil the high fidelity look the game clearly strives for.
For this review, I had the chance to test the game on the two main console platforms (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X), especially with the promise that both platforms would each have feature parity following Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. Having tested last year’s game on both platforms and finding the differences pretty negligible, I can say that the tradition of nothing separating both systems to the naked eye has certainly been retained. Regardless of where you are playing Call of Duty Black Ops 6, unless you are playing on a Series S where fidelity will certainly be lower, or on PC where your beefy machine will certainly yield great results, you’ll still get the same great quality on your platform of choice.
EMERGENCE
When something has remained on a downward quality tailspin for quite a bit, it’s notable when that something finally corrects a trend that wasn’t changing with each passing year. Despite its continuous financial success year-on-year, as a fan dating back to 2005, it was hard to continue justifying a series that was clearly coasting on the popularity of its name alone with weaker quality year-on-year, especially when, for 19 years straight, it has not missed a single release. Considering the series’ long-tail, the fact that Call of Duty finds itself revitalized again this late in the game with one of its overall stronger entries is quite remarkable for such a long-in-the-tooth franchise. I hope the 4-year development has opened the eyes to what’s needed for the franchise to maintain its quality in the competitive shooter landscape.
And for a developer that has had development troubles over the last decade, having to scrap the campaign of the fourth Black Ops game and cutting support of said game to get the 2020 entry out of the door quickly, this is a true return to form for Treyarch and a great showpiece for Raven Software as an additional developer powerhouse for the franchise outside of “Warzone”. The hope now is, after an extended downward spiral, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 begins a new era of consistency for the franchise again.
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