Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Reviews
At launch, ahead of the release of the game's first season, Black Ops Cold War is a good shooter and a wonderful achievement, but it is far from being the great competitive multiplayer shooter it should be. I'm confident it can get there. Modern Warfare ended up with some fantastic updates during its first year of life, after all. So I'm sticking with Black Ops Cold War - for now.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will be a great game with time, but its launch is disappointing thanks to technical issues and a lack of content.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's Zombies mode has some of the best moment-to-moment gameplay in the series but its single map and lack of split-screen multiplayer sap its endurance.
This year's Call of Duty multiplayer is somewhat of a backwards step for the series.
Cold War is an inessential distraction from the best Call of Duty on offer.
Cold War's quiet times are more memorable than the loud ones, even if the story's ambition outweighs its execution.
A Call of Duty title that reigns everything in and is afraid to try something new, Black Ops Cold War gets the basics spot on but doesn't have enough content to warrant the price tag.
A laudable shake-up of the Call of Duty campaign formula, but Black Ops Cold War misses some targets.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War serves up a great campaign, solid multiplayer with fresh spins, and the zany zombie modes that we've come to expect from Treyarch
On their own, all of these things would have been significant improvements over the Zombies modes from the recent past. But when added together, they feel like a massive leap forward for the whole mode. By streamlining the overly complicated mechanics this time around, Treyarch is placing the focus back on the mode’s bread and butter: killing zombies.
Cold War's dynamic campaign stands out against bland multiplayer, while Zombies is a good co-op time with a few outstanding issues.
Then, as your character nears their breaking point, a door opens to your side, revealing a small dark room with an arcade cabinet in it. It's a game of Kaboom!, which involves catching an endless cascade of bombs as they are dropped by a tiny figure at the top of the screen. Offscreen you can hear your handlers sigh in relief as Bell's stress levels ease back down to the baseline, absorbed, as you are, by a simulated arcade game from 1981. Even resisting the programming winds up being its own kind of programming.
Cold War takes all those positives from Modern Warfare, and now we’re one step further with pretty much cross-everything. The multiplayer and Zombies matches are crossplay and cross-generation, meaning no one gets left behind if they couldn’t score a new PS5 or Xbox. There’s also cross-progression, so you can switch platforms without losing your progress.
Call of Duty: Black Ops lost its way post-Black Ops III. While Black Ops III and 4 were fun in their own ways, they were also a massive departure from the core Black Ops experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the guns feel great and the maps are equally well designed, but I need more, Treyarch. I can’t even customise my Operator, and there’s like, hardly any to choose from really. It didn’t take me long to unlock practically every weapon and see every map, and I can’t envision myself sticking around for too much longer if the game doesn’t get updated pronto. And I think this is the heart of the issue. It’s like Cold War has stalled on the way to a patch it scheduled in advance to save time, and we’re now just awkward passengers growing more impatient as we wait for it to lurch forwards.
But CODBLOPS: Cold War doesn’t reach the levels of self-awareness required to overpower its poor taste. It feels written to justify the actions of ruthless men and doesn’t offer the most basic character development required to give its deathsquad the benefit of the doubt. As a game, it’s a predictable ride. As a piece of fiction, it is servile.
But it’s not the best Call of Duty game I have played, and the specter of returning to Warzone battle royale games looms large over this game. That’s why I rate this game as 4-out-of-5 stars (and yes, I might rate it much closer to 4.5 stars out of 5, as it is a shade better than the Watch Dogs: Legion game I played recently). I don’t think it’s as good as last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which was so disturbing and thoughtful and had an excellent and long single-player campaign.
Whether you're buying Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War for the campaign, multiplayer, or Zombies, there's so much to enjoy, with great handling, cross-progression, and much more.
What I didn't expect from the new Call of Duty was downtime, and the suggestion, at least in the first half, that guns, while great for going in blazing, can provide just as potent a thrill when holstered.