Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 sets a new bar for the long-running first-person shooter series. Its lead developer, Treyarch, was given three years to develop the game and that extra year of development time really shows not only in the level of polish, but in all the myriad ways the game gets creative with its systems, stories and gameplay.
Black Ops 6 launched last week with 12 ‘Core’ multiplayer maps, 4 smaller ‘Strike’ maps, 2 Zombies maps and a full-fledged spy campaign set in the early 90s. All three modes are incredibly impressive, with no aspect of the game undercooked. Classic round-based Zombies returns and both maps are incredibly fun to play through with friends. The multiplayer is fast and dynamic, with the new ‘Omnimovement’ system really shaking things up by amping up your movement options and creating an incredibly fluid shooting experience. Meanwhile, the campaign is absolutely bonkers, giving players one of the weirdest, most varied campaigns in Black Ops history. We’ll start there.
The Single-Player Campaign
Black Ops 6 picks up after the events of Cold War, though it’s also a sequel to Black Ops and Black Ops II (other games take place later in the timeline). There are a number of returning characters, including Adler—one of the principal spies from Cold War—and Frank Woods, one of the only remaining original characters we met in Black Ops. Now confined to a wheelchair, Woods is out of action and behind a desk, directing his small team on a rogue mission after being framed and hunted by the CIA.
Players primarily take on the role of Case, a character who never speaks and who you never see throughout the campaign. Case has a mysterious past that we learn bits and pieces about as the team investigates a diabolical organization known as Pantheon, a murderous cabal that’s managed to infiltrate the CIA and possibly other branches of the government. Leading operations on the ground is Troy Marshall, a new character to the series. An odd-ball team of misfits and foreign agents fill out the roster.
While you mostly play as Case, various missions will have you rotate through most of the characters as you infiltrate galas and casinos, often using stealth or trickery to complete objectives. These slower-paced moments stand in stark contrast to all the big, bombastic set-pieces, some of which involve hallucinatory journeys into the mind, or zombie-filled missions with monsters and demons as foes. It’s a wild ride.
The basic mechanics present in multiplayer are here as well, though you’ll have access to toys you won’t find in online mode. There’s a grappling hook that was a lot of fun to use that I kind of wish would make an appearance in a special multiplayer mode, because grappling hooks in video games are pretty awesome.
With a twisty-turny story that I won’t spoil here, plenty of secrets to unravel and puzzles to solve, and a healthy dose of action, there’s never a point in the story that I felt bored or letdown. Most missions are fairly linear, but some give you options on how to proceed, and one mission is fully open-world with dozens of optional objectives. It’s a lot of fun, though we all know it’s not the core of Call Of Duty’s appeal. That belongs to . . .
Multiplayer
The above image is my combat record, showing my stats for Black Ops 6. As you can see, I have 19 hours in the multiplayer portion of the game. I’m Prestige 1, level 20. I have a KD of 1.03 and a Win/Loss ratio of 1.30. My KD is lower than it would be if I wasn’t an objective fanatic. I routinely have the most time on the point in Hardpoint, the most caps in Domination and so forth. I’m not the best player out there, but I hold my own for a 43-year-old guy playing against a bunch of youngsters with better eyes and faster reflexes. My main guns in the game so far have been the XM4 Assault Rifle and the C9 SMG. I’ve been playing with those primarily to level them up, unlock camos and so forth. But I’ve tried out most of the other guns, all the different lethals and tacticals and all the Field Upgrades, including the absolutely amazing Sleeper Agent, which makes you appear as one of the enemy team, allowing for some amazing flanks and stealth assaults. One time I was actually defusing the bomb in Search & Destroy and an enemy saw me, didn’t realize I was an opponent, and I was able to stop defusing, shoot him, and go back to defuse the bomb.
It’s stuff like this that really makes multiplayer shine. This is the best multiplayer in Call Of Duty history as far as I’m concerned. The Omnimovement system is so fluid and natural, it feels weird to play shooters that don’t have it. You can dive to the side shooting. You can dive backwards and land on your butt, allowing you to jump past enemies, turn and fire while sliding backwards among other neat tricks. It’s definitely something that higher-skilled players will use to their advantage to juke and outgun enemies, but it adds flavor and dimension to the shooting that no other CoD has had before. I thought Modern Warfare III was a huge step in the right direction compared to Modern Warfare II when it came to movement, but this is so far beyond that it’s honestly hard to describe. You just have to play it. I realize some players will hate it, but as far as I’m concerned it makes the game wildly more engaging and fun.
The maps are also great, though I like some more than others and that really depends on the mode we’re playing. My squad tends to play modes like Domination, Hardpoint and HQ when we’re trying to grind and level up guns. S&D is a favorite when we have a full six-pack, because that requires more strategy than any other mode and team coordination is key. The new Kill Order mode, which rotates a High-Value Target (HVT) on each team, provides a spin on TDM that’s a lot more fun, if only because that extra objective—kill the enemy HVT while protecting your own—gives it purpose. But all the maps are quality regardless of mode. I think Scud is my least favorite, while maps like Payback and Rewind rank on top.
Alongside 6v6 MP there’s 6v6 Faceoff on the smaller “Strike” maps, as well as 2v2 Gunfight. This is all good fun, but the game definitely needs more small maps to keep things interesting for long. Four is not enough, even though I like all four small maps. They have great variety, for one thing. Gala is big and open comparatively. Pit is a cramped, two-story series of mining shafts. Stakeout is an upstairs flat with tight corridors and narrow balconies that’s an absolute frenzy on Faceoff. And Warhead is just Nuketown after the bomb goes off, with destroyed buildings and buses covered in sand. I’m hopeful that we get Gunfight Tournament and lots more post-launch small maps alongside new core maps.
I’m also hopeful that the excellent Cutthroat mode from MWIII is added. I know this was a Sledgehammer mode, but I think Treyarch could add it with relative ease to the game, and give players who loved that mode a chance to play it on these maps with this movement system and arsenal. The 3v3v3 mode was the best thing about last year’s game as far as I’m concerned, and I’d love to see its lease on life extended and made into a Call of Duty staple.
All told, multiplayer has never felt better in this series. From the tight gunplay and awesome movement system, to the small-to-medium three-lane maps, to the sound design and other little innovations, this is just a blast to play. The only caveat here is that we may see even more of a skill-gap between the best players and the worst, but for the most part matches have been pretty close and well-balanced, with only a few swinging heavily toward absolute bloodbaths (sometimes we stomp a team pretty severely, and sometimes we’re mowed down by sweats—so it goes).
Zombies
Black Ops 6 launched with two new Zombies maps—Terminus and Liberty Falls—and I’ve played both with my squad. I’ve never been a huge Zombies fan, but it’s a nice break from Multiplayer and Warzone from time-to-time and I’m really impressed with what Treyarch has done so far with the co-op mode. For one thing, we’ve returned to classic round-based Zombies, where you fight against increasingly difficult hordes—with increasingly challenging mega-zombies—to earn money, unlock new areas of the map, beef up your weapons and survive as long as humanly possible against the undead.
The two maps are strikingly different. Terminus is dark (almost too dark) whereas Liberty Falls is all sunshine and blue sky. One is an isolated research station with tunnels and sterile looking facilities, whereas the other is a small American town with a gas station and a church and a bowling alley. I like Liberty Falls more because I find it much easier to see things, but it’s nice to have variety. The zombies on both maps are the same, but different monsters appear. Giant flying bugs will descend on you in Terminus. Massive spiders crawl out in Liberty Falls. Larger, scarier creatures punctuate later rounds with enormous difficulty.
To counter all these fell beasts, you can bring in custom loadouts, equip armor and Gobblegum perks, upgrade your weapon to Pack-a-Punch which makes it far, far more powerful and use workbenches to craft killstreaks, armor and so forth. You can buy armor upgrades, a special perk that makes your melee attack much stronger, elemental weapon damage and lots more. You also have a special skill that can be used to level enemies or heal teammates and the like. There are lots of options and ways to tinker with your team’s composition, all while unlocking mysteries and battling wave after wave of enemies.
This time around, there’s even an exfil option, though once you activate an exfil things get really, really hairy. It’s an option, not a guarantee. All told, this is a nice return to classic Zombies that’s certainly the most fun I’ve had with the mode in a long time. Maybe since Black Ops 3.
Post-Launch
The difference between Modern Warfare III at launch and Modern Warfare III after a couple seasonal updates was huge. That game launched with remade maps, but quickly added a bunch of original maps to the rotation, many of which I liked more than the older offerings. After a year of updates, that game was entirely changed, though its deeper problems—a lackluster campaign and perception that it ought to have been an update to MWII rather than its own game—remained.
Black Ops 6, on the other hand, launched with lots of content and an unrivaled level of polish for this series. By this weekend, we’ll have the classic Nuketown map. Infected mode has already been added. Season 1 begins on November 14th and integrates the game with Warzone, adding the Area 99 map based on Nuketown as a new Resurgence offering. New multiplayer maps and modes will also drop. And then, every five weeks or so, more new maps and other content will release (along with Battle Passes and lots of stuff to purchase in the store).
What we have today is already a great game, but with new maps—free to all players—at this cadence, it should remain pretty fresh for the next year. I’m sure I will put hundreds of hours into it before the release of Call Of Duty 2025. I’ve also played Area 99 in Warzone and really enjoyed it. So I’m very optimistic about this game’s lifecycle. When you start with such strong footing, it can only get better from here.
Verdict
All told, this is the best Call Of Duty game I’ve reviewed since I began reviewing games. I rank it up there with Modern Warfare and Black Ops II as one of the series’ all-time greats. I thought Modern Warfare 2019 was a great series reboot, and began laying the groundwork for a modernized Call Of Duty. Black Ops 6 is the result of the intervening years of innovation, investment and refinement, as each subfranchise within the series has adopted a single game engine, and the many studios behind these games have begun working more closely together. As much as I enjoyed Cold War, Black Ops 6 is a vastly superior game in every respect, with better gunplay, movement, maps and campaign—though I liked that campaign also.
I think this is the most impressive military FPS I’ve played since Titanfall 2, another game that I felt was pretty much perfect with only minor flaws. I have had a couple of game crashes and my squad has encountered some weird bugs from time to time, but compared to years past, this is a very polished product and the launch was almost flawless for all of us. Modern Warfare III had a similarly excellent launch, but go back one year to Modern Warfare II and you’d see a very different picture, filled with constant game crashes and other problems. Black Ops 6 is fun, polished and innovative and proves that each of the studios headlining yearly Call Of Duty releases should be given three years to develop and fine-tune each title. That extra year really shows.
Score: 10/10
Tl;dr: Black Ops 6 innovates in incredibly effective ways with the Call Of Duty formula, while returning to many of the foundations that made the series great to begin with: A strong campaign, well-crafted 3-lane maps, excellent gunplay and round-based Zombies mode. Most of all, it’s really fun.
A review copy was provided for the purposes of this review.
