Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 review — A quality campaign and wider gameplay variety

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally hit the market, after four years of development. For me, this means there are new ways to die in a video game. For the rest of you, hopefully it means there are more exciting ways to take your enemies out.

It’s a good game with excellent multiplayer from what I’ve seen so far and the campaign has one of the best stories in years for Call of Duty.

The game debuted on Friday and that’s when I started to play. It’s available for download on the Microsoft Xbox/PC, PlayStation, Steam and Battle.net. Those who preloaded with a big download starting on October 21 will be able to jump in much quicker.

You can play the campaign, 16 multiplayer maps and round-based Zombies — all courtesy of nine studios led by Activision’s Treyarch and Raven Software studios. You can also play the game on Xbox Game Pass.

If you’re wondering why this is an important game, Game Pass is a big reason. Microsoft is betting the farm — and it’s why it spent $68.7 billion to buy Activision Blizzard — that Call of Duty content will vastly improve its adoption for Xbox Game Pass, which had about 34 million subscribers as of earlier this year. As of October 2023, Call of Duty sold more 425 million copies in its franchise history, and it had 100 million monthly active players across all platforms. The franchise generated $30 billion in revenue by 2022. Right now, Call of Duty requires thousands of developers across nine studios to make every year, and that is really the benchmark for the game industry on the biggest that triple-A can get.

I’ve finished the campaign and I enjoyed myself because it delivered the wide variety of gameplay and story that I’ve come to expect with Call of Duty games. It has a strong story, choices to pursue missions in stealth or action, the mystery and intrigue of an espionage tale, and hints of commentary about modern society and the unholy alliance of organized crime, spy organizations, and terrorists who seem to be interchangeable as villains in most games today.

The game doesn’t tread too far into controversy. It doesn’t make the Russians or the Iraqis into total villains, as the main antagonist is a multinational shadow group dubbed The Pantheon. We have active wars around the world now, and the game doesn’t tread into those waters. That’s a wise thing, as Call of Duty sometimes gets itself into trouble with its American military bias. Perhaps the worst pro-American thing in the game is that there is a suggestion that Saddam had some kind of bio-weapon after all; on the other hand, it’s really a multinational bio-weapon, and not one that gets used by Saddam’s forces at all.

I do realize that the very idea of playing a military game doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, given the state of the world today. But I would say that this kind of game gives me a much-needed escape from real life, and I believe a lot of people would feel the same way.

It’s not a political game, but it has plenty of commentary visible through tropes like a corrupt senator in Washington D.C. and the Russian mobsters living on yachts in luxury, while the operators — the soldiers with boots on the ground — are trying to do their duty while working for leaders they cannot trust.

This year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has a single-player campaign that, surprisingly, unifies some of the story in Black Ops and the co-op Zombies mode. I thought that was a good direction to go that resulted in a wider variety of gameplay in this year’s Call of Duty.

The Black Ops background

The Black Ops 6 campaign story takes place in the early 1990s, set after the events of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. In this spy-action thriller, you go rogue as Black Ops veteran Frank Woods and a team of trained operatives. There are both new and returning characters and blockbuster set-piece moments, cloak-and-dagger spy work, and fast-action heists.

The original Black Ops (2010) was set in 1961, with characters Frank Woods, Alex Mason and Joseph Bowman conducting Operation 40 during the Bay of Pigs invasion, where the U.S. supported Cuban exiles in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. It all goes wrong, Mason is captured and then brainwashed, and Russian captain Viktor Reznov pursues a vendetta against Dragovich, a rogue terrorist who seeks to set off chemical weapons in the U.S. The story spans the American involvement in the Vietnam War through 1968.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (which came out in 2020) picks up the narrative in the early 1980s, 13 years after the original Black Ops, featuring Alex Mason, Frank Woods and Jason Hudson — as well as CIA operative Russell Adler. Their job is to hunt down Perseus, a Soviet agent who leads a shadowy organization that aims to sabotage and set off Allied nuclear bombs in Europe.

The brainwashing part of the story was always pretty spellbinding, making you wonder if you were playing a Call of Duty game. Akin to Far Cry, there were drug-induced or brainwashing scenes that made it seem like you were in a nightmare, and Black Ops 6 continues that tradition.

A strong narrative for Black Ops 6

I’ve always felt like the Black Ops narratives are deep and its characters are strong. They’re memorable and they hold my attention, like the pure evil and genius of Black Ops 2 villain Raul Menendez. Even when the campaign has been short, like with Cold War, the story has held my attention. This time, the villains are part of the Pantheon, a shadowy organization with Western operatives dressed in American style military garb. This one is no different, and it has the benefit of having a story that is easier to follow.

As is the case with spy stories, you never know who to trust in Black Ops 6. The CIA and other military operatives who are supposed to be on the same side are instead at war with each other in the midst of the Persian Gulf War. This historical setting, when a coalition of 42 allies led by the U.S. drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of Kuwait, delivers the realism behind the story. As the fires burn from the sabotaged oil wells of Kuwait, you feel the reach of the shadowy Pantheon secret army on the battlefield.

Russell Adler, the CIA agent who looks a lot like Robert Redford, has reportedly gone rogue and is being held by the agency as a prisoner. The Pantheon is going after him, and operator Troy Marshall has to decide whether to trust Adler and break him out of prison and set him loose.

Marshall gets some air cover from friendly CIA leader Jane Harrow, but then Marshall’s team does the unforgivable in fighting U.S. forces in the middle of Washington D.C., while rescuing Adler from prison. After that, Marshall’s team has to go on the run, trusting no one while it tries to thwart the Pantheon and escape from its hunters at the same time. Ironically, by going on the run, the team has to trust Adler, who didn’t have such a good reputation in Black Ops Cold War.

You play as a new character, William “Case” Calderon, who also seems to be brainwashed and triggered by memories that were planted in his mind. In Case’s nightmares, you can take on enemies who look like Pantheon agents for a second and like zombies the next moment. The combination of the gameplay, where you shoot the fast-running but vulnerable zombie hordes while you’re fighting armored human elite bosses, makes for some very difficult single-player battles. I like a good challenge in the campaign that stretches it out longer.

My view of the campaign

I tried out different modes of action and stealth. I was entirely successful carrying out the mission in the Washington D.C. level in stealth mode. I had to pose as a journalist and take photos that helped me mark where the enemies (in this case beefy bodyguards) were. I had to sneak around coat check booths to grab secret messages, snag a U.S. senator in a compromising affair in order to break into a secret black facility. And then I finally went out guns blazing on motorcycles in a car chase scene that was one of the best blockbuster-style action scenes in the game.

It sort of felt like like a mix of frenetic and quiet moments. I’m not sure how I felt about hanging out at the safe house, which is an abandoned manor and former KGB black site, and having longer conversations with the other characters on the team. But they fed me some good intel and the characters came to life better than they otherwise would in the campaign. Still, on the downside, it felt like I was having a flashback to Mass Effect, where you get three questions to ask and three answers and absolutely no variation to the conversation. That part was not so fun.

One of the good things that makes the single-player combat harder is that there are elite soldiers you have to deal with, such as heavily armored elites with chain guns that are akin to bullet sponges. You have to shoot them far more than you do ordinary soldiers, and that gets you killed because the ordinary soldiers are there fighting alongside the elites. There are also elite Zombies. For these elites, you have to get a hold of heavy ordinance like a mortar or air strike, a rocket launcher, or grenades and flashbangs.

I was worried about the game until I played the open world map set in Kuwait, where you’re liberating territory from the Iraqi army. I had to locate and take out SCUD missiles being fired at Israel and then take out SAM anti-aircraft batteries as well. I loved the variety with which I could tackle the missions. In one mission, I took out a bunch of guards around a SCUD compound as a sniper. I liked how the maps and situations did a good job of balancing sniper and close combat.

I took out some SAMs and SCUDs with C4, or I painted them for mortar attacks or air strikes. I also died a lot in the mission in Hard mode, and that made me feel like it was a tough challenge. Once, I was attacking into a narrow rift in a cliff wall against enemies above me. I kept dying until I drove my vehicle around a side road and took out the enemy camp from behind. The tough missions and their variety helped stretch the experience into a longer fight, and I liked that.

I’m not sure how long I played the campaign, but I started Thursday night and finished by Saturday morning. Eight hours sounds about right. There are 12 missions, if you count each part of a multi-part mission as one each. There are a similar number of conversational and leveling up interludes at the safe house and a few extra things that we won’t spoil. You can pick up cash on the battlefield and use it to level up your weapons and gear at the safe house. That lets you customize your experience more. I invested heavily in better shields. Overall, adding these additional choices to the campaign means that players can get more of what they want.

It was quite satisfying to play a mission with a battle tank again. If I could ask for more, I would say give me more tank missions. And there were some epic battles in places such as the aforementioned desert mountains, an airport terminal and the safe house.

In contrast to last year’s Modern Warfare III, the open world maps of Kuwait were more interesting with both the mountainous desert scene and one of Saddam’s palaces. In the desert, you could drive your squad to the right spot of your choosing and initiate the battle in a space where you had to use both stealth sniper and heavy action weapons. I also thought the surprise rescue mission where you have to save the crew of a downed helicopter was well done.

If there’s any gameplay elements I didn’t like, it was that the enemy’s gas grenades were way too overpowered, virtually paralyzing you, and the Disruptor shots also made you way to powerful as well, as it put the enemies, including the elites, into slow motion and that made them too easy to take down. Fortunately, you don’t get that many Disruptor shots to take.

Multiplayer variety

I have had some good exposure to multiplayer both during the beta (when I leveled up to the max on my character level and my weapon levels) and as the launched game as well. I enjoyed how the sniper rifles worked and I could dispatch enemies with great speed in the places with long draw distances. But I’m pretty sure these sniper rifles are going to be nerfed in Warzone, where the distances are way too long.

In multiplayer, developed once again by Raven Software, players can battle across 16 new maps at launch, including 12 core 6v6 maps and 4 Strike maps that can be played 2v2 or 6v6. There are also 12 new weapons. You can now move the mini-map or remove HUD elements as you wish. The global weapons approach means you can save your loadouts and access them across all modes. You can also level up to Prestige more than 10 times, which would take tons of hours to achieve.

So far, I’m hovering pretty close to one kill, one death, or 1.0 kill-death ratio, as the initial assault rival levels up pretty quickly and the weapon feels good. I hope that means I’m getting better, but I think it also means that multiplayer has good balance for average soldiers like me.

Last year, MW3 debuted with a lot of older maps. In this case, we’re getting brand-new maps that feel pretty good. I’m enjoying the Kill Order mode, where both sides have to take out each other’s high-value target (HVT) to get more points in the match. I’ve enjoyed the matches I’ve played so far in that mode, and it’s great that everyone gets a turn at being the HVT.

Zombies

This game takes us away from the open world Zombies experience of last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which took Zombies into the Warzone battle royale maps. Instead, this title brings back the round-based Zombies where you fight in co-op mode against hordes of the undead. Up to four human players can be in a squad.

I’m going to play a lot of multiplayer for sure, but we’ll see if Zombies really holds my attention. The story carries on the Dark Aether story in 1991 after the events of Black Ops Cold War.

I am curious about it as it plays a role in the single-player campaign this time. There are two brand-new maps: Liberty Falls, a daytime map set in a small town in West Virginia, and Terminus, set on an island research facility in the Philippine Sea. There’s a new Augment upgrade system with more than 100 upgrades to unlock. I’m a bit more motivated to find out the details of the Zombie lore this time as it figures on the campaign.

Some turnoffs

There are some small bugs that brought the game down for me a few times. On the first night, it took a while to log in for the single-player game. But usually the worst delays on opening day have to do with big downloads. Activision wisely spread the download burden across multiple days, first revamping the user interface and then setting up a preload period ahead of the game’s launch. Still, as noted, the game went down a few times for me.

I didn’t, however, lose any gameplay saves and I continued on my journey. I’m not such a big fan of the Omnimovement. I admire the skillful players who can master diving across a corner, turning their heads and aiming sideways while flying through the air. I can’t really do that. But I did like the notion of being able to spin around more naturally while prone.

You can move around on the ground and take out multiple enemies trying to come at you from different directions — while not standing up and making yourself a target. This kind of counterbalances the flying experts with the not-so-skillful folks lying on the ground.

Conclusion

Overall, I would say that multiplayer is still a good reason to play the game, and that’s what most people do for the longest time with any annual Call of Duty title. If you’re a fan of the franchise, you’ll like this game. And I feel like there are more loyal Black Ops fans out there like me who need the occasional break from Modern Warfare for something with some historical focus. And so yes, I still appreciate my annual installments of Call of Duty and I’m glad Black Ops 6 is here to play for many more hours to come.

I played the game on a PC on a PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor running at 4.70 GHz. The machine had 96.0 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. That got me to a solid 60 frames a second, and so far I haven’t had too many problems getting into multiplayer matches.

After I play more games on multiplayer and dive deeper into Zombies, I can give this a final score. But I felt like it was useful for readers to say that this game is better than last year’s title and one of the best in years. Last year, I rated Modern Warfare III at 4.5 out of 5 stars, as its great multiplayer made up for the weaker single-player campaign.