Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Review

In many ways, Activision’s Call of Duty series reminds us a lot of pop act, the Jonas Brothers. Before you blow our heads clean off, hear us out. Frontman and heartthrob Joe Jonas is like the Modern Warfare series, the biggest attention grabber in the Call of Duty universe. There’s Kevin Jonas, the often overlooked older bass-playing brother who reminds us of the World War II series – important and recognisable, but woefully underappreciated. Lastly – there’s Joe ‘Black Ops’ Jonas, the younger brother who made the Cold War his Roman Empire. Since then, he’s not only doubled down on his narrative, but matured into a pop superstar who can shine equally in the spotlight alongside Modern Warfare.

And like a new album by the Jonas Brothers, you pretty much know what you’re getting in a Call of Duty: Black Ops title. The latest outing, Black Ops 6, relies on a tried-and-tested formula, sprinkled with small improvements and tweaks that makes for a fun package, even if it invariably feels like more of the same.

For a shooter, there is a lot of story going on in Black Ops 6, clocking in at around eight hours – roughly twice the length of Modern Warfare III’s dud of a campaign. However, unlike being lulled to sleep with the same bedtime story for the sixth time, Black Ops 6’s plot manages to tuck us into bed – barely.

As part of a covert mission during Operation Desert Storm, you play as silent protagonist Case, alongside your trusty CIA operatives Marshall and Harrow. Running into a familiar Russell Adler from Black Ops: Cold War, you learn about The Pantheon, a paramilitary organisation laden with ex-soldiers, scientists, and highly-skilled operatives – operating secretly within the CIA as the evil within. The rest of the game is about killing bad guys, learning that there are good guys who are also bad, which is pretty much what you’d expect from a James Bond/Jason Bourne movie.

However, Black Ops 6 also feels like a celebration of the almost two-decade-old franchise, paying homage to some of its most iconic campaign missions and repackaging them in a Cold War setting. Without spoiling too much, there is a chase and high-octane mission that feels like the “Vorkuta” level from Black Ops, in an airport terminal setting that stirs up memories of the iconic “No Russian” (from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). Remember the stealth sniper missions like “All Ghillied Up” (from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) and “Vendetta” (from Call of Duty: World at War)? Well, there’s a mission that’s awfully similar to these classics but now, there’s a certain level of player autonomy to these missions as well. During one mission, the climax occurs when you assassinate an operative, Sniper Elite style, but you’re free to get to that point however you wish, either blasting or stealthing your way through an Italian town to get to your watchtower.

Even though it’s fun identifying various ways to approach scenarios based on your playstyle, the biggest problem with the stealth in Black Ops 6 are the foes that you’re coming up against – they’re dumb as hell. Like racehorses with their blinkers on, they can only see what’s in front of them, and for some inexplicable reason, only see you. There was one instance where Case was lying prone behind a truck parked beside a heavily fortified dirt track. His squad crouch-walked, in plain sight, across the road to meet up with Case and remained virtually undetected. With the sheer amount of comically bad stealth in Black Ops 6, we had to do a double-take on the cover of the game, to make sure we weren’t playing a Looney Tunes version of Metal Gear Solid.

Somehow though, the weak stealth mechanics work because the sheer density of enemies in each mission often means that you’ll have to resort to violence after a botched stealth attempt. It also pulls you right into what makes Call of Duty iconic, by focusing on gunplay. Imagine lining up headshots with your silenced pistol to take out a group of henchmen mere seconds before they call for help – it leaves you feeling like an efficient cold-blooded hitman.

However, we can’t count the number of times a variation of the same NPC sentence, “Alright, we can either go sneaky-peaky, or make a scene – it’s your call Case”. Black Ops 6 focuses too much on giving the player’s a false sense of free will, with linear storytelling where your decisions don’t have sizable impacts on how the story will turn out. This would’ve been okay if the story itself was as compelling as the likes of The Last of Us, or even like what we experienced playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but this was far from the case. Granted, Black Ops 6 does feature some interesting level designs, including a horror-themed level that actually does get quite spooky, and one in the ‘90s Middle East where you’re given the task of destroying three SCUD missile sites in any order, and by any means of your choosing across a vast desert landscape. Points of interest are dotted all over the map, and those can reveal themselves to be anything from supply drops, to SAS scouts marking out enemy locations within hostile encampments for you.

Although a breath of fresh air, we wished Black Ops 6 played more into the socio-historical context of the Cold War and Operation Desert Storm. It functions as a fun stage on the surface level, when it could’ve dove deeper into the controversial Gulf War as an enthralling context rather than just a backdrop. The game doesn’t delve into, or addresses in a meaningful manner, any of the human and political issues that shrouded the First Gulf War, which is a bit of a missed opportunity considering the context of what we’re seeing in the world today. This is evident in the characters who accompany Case, each with interesting backstories full of potential that often don’t get explored, or end up being half-baked.

By the time you get to the end of the game, you get the sense that there’s not much point to the story. Black Ops 6 makes obvious attempts to allude to the historical context, by throwing in segments like a Bill Clinton cameo and an epic gun-ablazing raid on Saddam Hussein’s palace but these often seem out of place, and only act as novelty tributes to the past rather than substantial plot developments.

It’s somewhere in the mid-point of the story where things really start going downhill as out of nowhere, you suddenly find yourself in the mind of the main antagonist, learning about her past childhood traumas before frolicking through her subconscious, which looks like a triple-A production of the viral game, Only Up. There’s no explanation of why or how and perhaps the most annoying part is that you end up feeling extremely uninterested and unsympathetic to the villain because we barely knew her to begin with. This character jumping, when intertwined with  Case, who has Alex Mason-esque brainwashing flashbacks and seizures that don’t have any bearing on the story up until the very end, results in a narrative that is very weirdly paced and constructed.

Still,  we can appreciate good intentions over bad outcomes, and the campaign in Black Ops 6 scrapes by mostly due to its willingness to test out different ideas and approaches to levels, carried by the series’ infectious gun action.

This adrenaline and unrivalled sense of control is the hallmark of its multiplayer experience and here, the cherry on top of the cake is omnimovement, as players dive into Mission Impossible mode and can run, sprint, slide, and dive in any direction, regardless of where they’re facing or wherever their momentum take them. 

Firstly, it creates an absurd amount of fluidity where nothing feels scripted, as you go in full Rambo, diving head first backwards in order to protect a point during a round of Domination, only to get shot in the head by someone vaulting over you mid-air. Second, and more significantly, is the way that omnimovement compliments the already hectic fast-in-fast-out nature of Call of Duty’s online gameplay to a tee. It also can be considered as the developers embracing community inventions like the drop shot and Dolphin Dive in previous iterations, building on it and presenting it with gusto.

There’s a strong argument to be made that speed is what makes Call of Duty multiplayer so addictive. You get into a lobby in minutes, catch an enemy within your sights in seconds, and see them drop in mere moments. Then you ragdoll immediately after as another player cosplaying as a wild coyote sprints up to you and knifes you in the back. Omnimovement only adds fuel to the fire that is Black Ops 6, giving the quintessential multiplayer experience a carton of Red Bull, making for an extremely intense and action-packed affair.

The major drawback would be that Treyarch, this year’s main developer, might’ve added too much fuel – making multiplayer feel like an inferno at times. With omnimovement being a departure from realism with players granted the gift of superhuman feats, you’ll thrust mid-match into a lobby filled with roadrunners, flying across your screen in an attempt to disfigure your face with shotgun pellets. You can only wish for the good old days when there was actually some strategy involved in playing Call of Duty, where teamplay and working together was the key to success. Now, it’s about who was the twitchiest and had those controllers with the buttons on the back that make it easier for you to jump, dive and shoot – all at once.

On the ground, the map designs also add to this chaos as none of the 12 maps available at launch are especially large, facilitating a lot of close-range standoffs. With most not having a central larger location, and each having a good mix of indoors and outdoors with varying levels of verticality, it’s never a dull affair.

However the biggest issue with this is that maps can often feel too cramped, and with the introduction of omnimovement, using long-ranged weapons become virtually impossible unless you’re a member of Optic Gaming. If you get caught in a bad spawn, you often find yourself launched back into a firefight that you just died from, from the same disadvantageous approach. With Call of Duty maps often offering tons of pathways through any given area,  you’ll often find yourself getting shot in the back of your head the moment you spend more than three seconds scoped in your sniper rifle.

Other than that – it’s business as usual for the perk and create-a-class system, with the game adding a few new Scorestreaks like the guided Archangel missile, and the Watchdog helicopter that marks and shoots enemies. Perks have also been split into three categories: Enforcer, Strategist, and Recon – and if you equip three from the same group, you get a bonus perk that fits in the style of the others. These encourage you to pay closer attention to the perks that you’re bringing in, and actually cater to your playstyle, rather than just gravitating towards the meta builds in years past.

A return to form, Black Ops 6 also brings back the iconic zombies experience. With two entertaining and exciting maps, killer Easter Eggs, ridiculous amounts of creative gun variety, and a return to round-based gameplay, it’s the closest evolution of what the original Nazi Zombies in World at War some 16 years ago wanted to depict – an outrageous, haunting, and thrilling hordefest.

Remember how previously it was all about finding efficient run paths so that you could get a zombie trail, and missing your path by a couple of inches could mean the difference between round 25 and getting swarmed by in a rugby scrum of zombies? Well, omnimovement has opened up the much needed variety for players to jump, vault, dive out of tight spots and tricky situations. You’ll seldom find yourself in chokepoints, making it possible to traverse the two maps in ways you never could in previous years. Once you get the hang of it – you’ll feel like a ballerina, dancing amongst waves of the undead. That being said, omnimovement is what hooks you, but it’s the design of the two maps that make you stay, each with a very different feel from the other.

Liberty Falls is a small American town built on the side of a hill, meaning you have to traverse heights often, hopping from building to building via ziplines and an array of pathways. On the other hand, Terminus is an island prison that hides a sprawling laboratory beneath it – flanked by smaller islands that you can reach via boat. Engulfed in rain and darkness, the corridors and cramped spaces juxtaposed with large underground areas makes you feel equal parts adventurous and claustrophobic in a good way.

Enemies also come in various shapes and sizes in Black Ops 6 Zombies. Besides the average grunt, you’ll come up against three-headed abominations, spider-like creatures, and flying parasites that add a bit of much needed spice to the enemy type. It’s no Black Myth Wukong in terms of enemy variety, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The decision to return to what made zombies so good to begin with, and intertwining it with new systems and customisations expand your options in combat, which is a far cry from the one-size-fits-all solutions in the past, on how best to survive a wave. You’ll see the familiar chalk outlines of guns you can buy off the walls, mystery boxes, and the Pack-a-Punch machine to upgrade your guns, all mixed together with new features, like collecting Salvage to craft weapon attachments. There’s also an Augment system which provides specific buffs to perks and ammo types that can be researched over the course of a few rounds, and it makes the mode more fun by putting games within the game itself.

The biggest qualm with all these new systems and familiar features is in making them digestible for those new to the game. Zombies has always catered to a die-hard group of fans that exclusively play this mode and spend hours coming up with guide videos on YouTube, and making it more convoluted only makes it harder for the casual player to fully grasp. Sure – some students skip a grade because they’re smart, but zombies aren’t for the faint of heart, and you often end up feeling overwhelmed even if you had played the mode before. Imagine having your first interaction with a Rubrik’s Cube be the 5×5 version – the mere sound of it, littered with all its enhancements, is scarier than the game mode itself.

All in all, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is leaps ahead of last year’s Modern Warfare III, but it relies too heavily on a formula that has since grown stale. You can’t just keep masking stellar gunplay and firefights with unimaginative storytelling, and have more of the same. Each year, fans of the fabled series come back hoping for something new and while the Call of Duty legacy lives on in Black Ops 6, it’s merely another routine Call of Duty experience rather than a defining game in the series itself.