Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Reviews
The single-player and campaign modes are actually really great stuff. But like nearly all Call of Duty games, that is the content you'll breeze through within your first week playing if even for just a few hours a day. The bulk of the ride ends up being multiplayer and zombies and that is where the problems really lie. This is a game that I'm sure will eventually get the extra content, balancing, and bugs worked out along a series of patches and end up being much better than it is today. But unfortunately the buggy, laggy, unbalanced, and content-sparse game we get at launch is the only one I was given to review. And the balance of the excellent single-player with below average multiplayer ends up for an average overall experience.
As solid as the package is, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has to be one of the safest series instalments for quite some time. Multiplayer is seriously starting to show its age with tired ideas and even duller gameplay, leaving the campaign to rescue things. Its open-ended approach allows player choice to take prominence while Zombies is just as deep as ever. A passable effort for the start of the PS5 generation, but Activision must buck up its ideas for next year.
The campaign brings enjoyable new mechanics to the formula but multiplayer and Zombies both fall short of expectations and needed performance, with weaker gunplay and an unstable framerate respectively.
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.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is a decent entry in the series, but it feels like it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. The campaign is full of underused ideas, while the multiplayer misses some of the magical charm of Modern Warfare, opting for faster paced aggressive battles which just don't feel as satisfying. While still enjoyable, Black Ops Cold War fails to recapture the magic of Black Ops 1 and 2.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is one of the best Call of Duty games in years, with vibrant new gameplay additions and robust multiplayer offerings. Despite that, it still feels hampered by aspects of its approach and tone that would have better been left in Call of Duty's past.
Cold War's dynamic campaign stands out against bland multiplayer, while Zombies is a good co-op time with a few outstanding issues.
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.
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.
Cold War's quiet times are more memorable than the loud ones, even if the story's ambition outweighs its execution.
As ineloquent as this may sound, Black Ops Cold War is a weird game. It plays like a tug of war between the advancement attempts that Infinity Ward put forward in last year’s Modern Warfare and Treyarch’s own mechanical contributions to the series over the years. What results is a product that tries to have its cake and eat it too, except that Black Ops Cold War seems to want to eat multiple, different cakes. It’s a strange entry in the series that lacks polish and quality. Still, I have to admit that I am having a lot of fun with it, in the way I would with a flaws-and-all action flick.
A strong entry in the long-running series and a fascinating dive into the Cold War.
Considering each of the segments that make up the title, it is possible to conclude that Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War is indeed a good shooting game. The campaign is competent and more engaging than the last games in the franchise; the fun multiplayer introduces significant changes, and almost all of them are positive; Zombies mode is addictive, although it needs more different maps.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War takes some getting used to. There are various bugs that will need to be patched, weapons, and equipment that need to be balanced, skill-based matchmaking tweaks to be done, spectator mode has some improvements to be made and there are occasional glitches on the Theatre Mode for older generation consoles, but all in all, Treyarch have delivered a smooth, enjoyable base game that should get better and better with updates.
Don’t worry if you think that Cold War veers too far off from that exhilarating element of Call of Duty you have grown up with, it is still there in heaps!
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does not fully exploit its potential, showing itself with a very short-lived campaign, few maps for multiplayer and a single map for the zombie experience. Treyarch is surprising but still has a lot to do.
Review in Italian | Read full review
As a single player experience, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War offers short but exciting story mode; one with cinematic action missions and new stealth operations that actually work well. But multiplayer is where Cold War falls short. especially after the successful Modern Warfare reboot of last year, the lack of variety in maps and game modes, makes it more of a step back rather that a evolution.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Fans of the franchise and many gamers of a certain age, especially those who have a next-gen console in the hopper, will still find enough to like in Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War. I personally still replay the mission with the arcade shootout just to get a little '80s cheeseball energy going, but I think the strategy of overwhelming people with as much content and as many shooter modes as possible might be starting to wear thin. We're not there quite yet, but I'm hoping the next Black Ops might have just a bit more than poking at my childhood memories of a culturally iconic president.
New mechanics of Call of Duty gives hope for future. But is it reasonable to buy a game with such a short main story for this price if you're only into single player campaign? That's a big question mark.
Review in Turkish | Read full review
My relationship with Call of Duty Zombies has been tumultuous for quite a while now. As a fan of horror and first-person shooters, it was