It’s the numbers. It’s the code. They wash together in an amalgamation of iterative design that springs from the brook of an eternal truth about game mechanics: keep it fast; keep it tight; and keep it moving.
Developed on the bones of the IW 9.0 engine, structurally BO6 has most in common with the latest incarnations of the Modern Warfare remakes. It moves and animates just as those games do, with the addition of an Omnimovement function, allowing for sprinting, sliding, and diving in all directions. This opens up the play, keeping it fast, keeping it tight, and keeping it moving.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 features the first Treyarch developed campaign since Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015). Since then, Raven and Sledgehammer have developed their own campaigns. The return of Treyarch (and co-developer Raven) marks a return to ambition in the Black Ops sub-series. The new campaign plays with a series of open-ended maps that allow more player choice.
Black Ops 6 is about CIA operatives investing a rogue paramilitary group. It’s about psychochemical weapons and conspiracies tied back to the CIA. It’s about Desert Storm and Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton.
From an operating base hub, we take on standard military missions along the Iraq-Kuwait border, multiple character story arcs within colorful and active casinos, Bill Clinton reception dinners, surrealist mutant-filled biolabs, small open-world maps, stealth funnels, and several maps with multiple choice scenarios.
The variety is good and refreshing. The open maps do not lend themselves perfectly to the mechanics. Sometimes it has to stop and tell you that there are choices. Because in playing the game, that will not be obvious. You’ll just complete the objective and the way you’ll complete it will not have a longterm impact necessarily — this is more on the side of design ambition as opposed to the narrative player agency ambition of a Black Ops II (2012).
The more open environments do stretch the campaign. There’s a good eight hours of content and all the game mechanics are used within that time. Some stages fare better than others and the narrative itself is not innovative, but it’s enough, and it takes enough risks, asides, and dips into psychochemical hallucinations, CIA conspiracies, and surrealist freakouts, to make it more than just a straightforward military shooter.
The forward operating base provides a structural hub and space where characters co-exist outside missions and provides a few options for progression systems within the campaign. Eventually, this space also plays into the action of the campaign, and those later segments are implemented into some clever new multiplayer map layouts. Built on the back of the tech of the Modern Warfare remakes and developed in conjunction with them, Black Ops 6 bridges the gaps between the game-feel of the two sub-series and seems to unite the franchise as one standard thing that it can be going forward.
Multiplayer remains the calling card and strong suit of the series and comes in two forms: competitive objective modes and the return of round-based Zombies maps.
What you’ll be doing most of is playing Nuketown 24/7 but there are also new competitive maps. The best is Payback, based on the forward operating base of the campaign. It’s built for tactics and the enhanced movement system and is the showpiece design statement of Black Ops 6. The other two great new maps are Scud, a multilayered series of tunnels and paths leading to a big radar overlooking the map, and Skyline, an aesthetically rich map designed around combat choke points made for team skirmishes. There are also terrible new maps… Red Card is one of the worst in series, with absolutely no game flow or map direction, lots of random byways and paths, a centralized but unexciting choke point, and feels undesigned. There is also Lowtown, flooded with water but we can no longer fire from the water like in Black Ops III, rendering the map a hazard-spotted missed opportunity.
The best maps and play still rely on meaningful engagement and creating a game flow that funnels players together in a meaningful contextual way. That is why Nuketown is still king: it’s built so singularly around the mechanics of the sub-series and is further enhanced by the increased role of score streaks and fun ways those play into the mechanics of Black Ops 6.
The two offerings for round-based Zombies maps are good if not formal and methodical. Terminus is a biolab prison complex featuring operatives from Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020), taking place where that game ended. It’s fun and full of tentacled monstrosities and the danger of your team locking themselves into a deadly situation. Liberty Falls is the second map, as a fast-growing small town set circa 1991 in West Virginia is ravaged by the zombie outbreak. So you have two options: a dark and dingy prison system and a light and friendly American town. Both are well-designed, although are built around the early rounds of zombies, and the weaknesses of the map designs reveal themselves the further the rounds progress — something that’s easy to fix in patches.
Holistically, Black Ops 6 is the most complete that a Call of Duty package has felt in a long time. Microsoft’s bid for Activision makes further sense when you realize this higher ambition stake in the future of Activision’s signature franchise. The diversity of campaign content and meaningful investment in competitive modes and Zombies fuels a new Call of Duty entry that is uneven but ultimately a satisfying new direction after the series has recently felt stymied by the Modern Warfare remakes casting a long shadow over the other recent games, seeming to say: look at these first two campaigns and how things used to be. Now Black Ops 6 can continue that sentence: it’s just how things used to be and how they might just feel again, going forward.
Reviewed on Xbox