by WWhoever thinks of building this game’s campaign around a safe house that resembles a haunted house on an abandoned estate deserves an immediate raise. After each foray into a shootout, your team of militarized misfits are returned to this vast land pile, which for some reason is filled with intriguing mysteries and puzzles: What happens when you play the piano? Where does that passage lead? What is this, scrawled on the wall in invisible ink? It’s like Scooby-Doo crossed with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – a comparison I could never have made to a Call of Duty game.
Lead developers Treyarch and Raven have had four years to work on this title and it shows. The multiplayer mode is both familiar and fresh thanks to the “omni-movement”, which allows you to run and jump in all directions, radically changing the sense of movement and tipping the balance of deadly encounters in favor of those with spatial reasoning skills in instead of lightning-fast trigger fingers. The small maps, featuring dilapidated radar stations, strip mall forecourts and penthouse apartments, are intricately constructed to provide combinations of labyrinthine corridors, long sightlines and sneaky booths. The weapons, including 12 newcomers, are designed to suit different playstyles, from fast super-snipers to Red Bull-guzzling SMG teens – and the gunsmith offers countless ways to customize them all, with real tangible effects on your play.
The single-player campaign is set in 1991, during the Gulf War, where a mysterious international terrorist organization called The Pantheon has acquired a deadly weapon of mass destruction – possibly with the help of corrupt CIA agents. The only people who can stop the Pantheon are a bunch of gun-toting ne’er-do-wells, including an ex-Force Recon hard-core idiot, a troubled assassin, and a very bouffant secret agent, the latter of whom may have had a sideline. Hair products from the 80s.
It’s rather refreshing that Call of Duty, too often a chauvinistic standard-bearer of American exceptionalism, is now looking inward for its enemies. It’s probably also a good idea that the Iraq conflict is more of a backdrop (with Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, and George Bush all appearing in cameo roles) rather than a focus, given how complex that conflict was. However, there are several controversial scenes, including the helicopter gunship massacre of dozens of Iraqi soldiers, and the unnecessary interactive interrogation of a terrified prisoner, that are poignant for their lack of moral context or analysis.
How does it play differently? Well, Oscar Wilde famously said that “genius steals,” and he might as well have been the design consultant for this game. ‘Most Wanted’ is essentially a Hitman mission set during a Democratic party fundraiser where you are given three different ways to blackmail a senator into giving you information: mafia hitmen, a disgruntled woman or a mysterious note in his jacket pocket. Hunting season is Far Cry 2: an open-world quest set in a desert full of enemy bases to plunder and secrets to discover. Under the radar is Metal Gear Solid – a heady mix of stealth and social engineering that follows the assassin as she infiltrates a Pantheon base in Vorkuta (a small Russian town previously featured in the original Black Ops campaign).
These are short, sharp genre exercises, each adding a different flavor to the central gameplay conceit of killing as many soldiers as possible. But the real treat is Emergence, the narcotic-induced hallucination mission that every game in the Black Ops series must include. It’s a tense, riveting and truly disturbing tribute to a certain Dr Who episode that will strike a fear of crash-test mannequins in anyone who plays the episode.
Finally, Zombies mode has returned to the standard format, ditching the unpopular open-world design introduced in Modern Warfare III. It’s a wave-based shooter, where teams of co-op players try to survive against incoming zombie hordes using weapons and items discovered while exploring the cramped, atmospheric locations. Once again you’ll have to battle the crawling corpses, aim your guns at the Pack-a-Punch machines, collect special weapons and battle boss monsters, all while keeping your eyes peeled for fun Easter eggs, like a hidden bowling alley where you try to get as many as you can to take down clumsy brain eaters. It’s fraught and incredibly stressful, but with three friends it’s really great.
Black Ops 6 has been the best title in the series for years. It’s still a maniacal first-person shootfest that many players will absolutely hate; no critic of games that glorify the military-industrial complex will be converted at this stage. However, the design team knows its audience and caters to them accordingly, while doing just enough to move things along and try out some intriguing little segments. I’d love to play an entire game where I could customize the flamboyant safe house to make it more comfortable for my cute little family of spec-ops sociopaths; I would play a whole survival horror adventure set in the world that Emergence comes up with. Nothing in this series has ever stuck with me as long as the nuclear bomb explosion in Call of Duty 4 – but these violent delights, in my opinion, have staying power.
