Activision’s latest Call of Duty game attempts to do more with less with the 2018 installment, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
Each year, I wonder what the Call of Duty franchise will do next. It’s been an interesting ride to watch the games go from historical shooter to modern day shooter to futuristic shooter. Each game had its own story to tell while expanding the Call of Duty universe. For the first time, Activision have removed the traditional single player campaign and instead have opted for the “online/multiplayer only” model that certain titles have been running with. The story is now told through short “solo missions” which give a bit of backstory to each of the games “Specialists”. Let’s be honest. Nobody really played the modern Call of Duty games for the story. (Except maybe for the Modern Warfare series).
Black Ops 4 now purely focuses on three game modes: Multiplayer, your bread and butter Call of Duty experience, with all of your favourite modes; Zombies, the fan favourite game mode with 3 mysterious maps for you and your friends to explore while slaughtering endless waves of the undead; and finally, the highly anticipated, Blackout mode a.k.a Call of Duty’s answer to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (“PUBG”).
2018 was definitely the year for battle royale games. After the initial success of PUBG and the continued success of the ever popular Fortnite, it was no surprise that the other big publishers would jump on the fad. It was in May 2018 that Activision announced that the next installment of Call of Duty would have its own battle royale mode. The launch trailer told us all that we would get a battle royale experience that only Black Ops could deliver: a fast pace battle royale featuring the best features from the last 10 years of the series. Essentially, a battle royale the Black Ops way.
Any big budget studio making the next big battle royale game had a pretty easy time, in my opinion. You had two of the biggest battle royale games on the market to look at and take notes from. One of them was doing everything right, and the other, no so much. Epic Games had a visually nice looking game, that ran well, was on all platforms and mixed up the standard BR formula every so often. The PUBG team however seemed to be flailing in the water. The game was buggy and full of hackers/cheaters and the formula was never mixed up. Fans would be clamoring to just have bugs fixed, but the PUBG team seems to be more interested in adding micro-transactions.
Activision was very clearly taking note, and true to their word back in May, released a very Black Ops style battle royale. The map is broken down into fourteen different areas, each with parts of different Black Ops multiplayer maps from the past. Not only that, classic guns from Call of Duty’s long history all appear too. The Cymbal Monkey, Recon Car and the Ray Gun are my personal favourites.
The Black Ops player movement options have all made it across to this mode too with grappling hooks and sliding. If you are a big fan of the original multiplayer, you’ll feel right at home in the Blackout mode.
As mentioned, Call of Duty’s mainstay, yearly multiplayer makes a triumphant return with all your favourite modes. Ten specialists, some old, some new, join the multiplayer fray. For those of you new to the series, specialists are effectively Overwatch champions. Characters with unique ultimate abilities that charge up after a certain amount of time or kills. There are fourteen maps to choose from, with no doubt more to come via DLC packs. A change to the multiplayer mode worth pointing out is that players will no longer automatically heal health after taking damage. Players now have to manually activate a med kit. Not anything major, but this is something that players will have to get used to.
The final mode to mention is Zombies. Four maps. Over thirty different weapons. Endless waves of zombies and secrets galore. When you grow tired of the multiplayer/Blackout mode, Zombies is great to jump into when you just want to hang out with three friends and shoot some things. Perks, Talismans and Elixirs spice up each play through and the new addition of bots who can join you to fill your party are a welcome sight.
To spice up game play even further, the developers at Treyarch launched ‘Gauntlets’, a thirty round zombie mode with a special set of rules including Melee only, Headshots only and plenty of other variations on the standard rules. Again, Treyarch, Activision and the rest of the team seem to be doing one of the most important things in gaming recently, listening to their fans.
Black Ops 4 takes what fans have enjoyed in the past and have continued to make improvements on it. Not only that, they’ve managed to add their own twist to the very popular battle royale mode with great success.
Whether you’re a fan of the old Black Ops games or you’re a newcomer to the franchise, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is a great entry point. Activision have listened to the community and started focusing on the things that players want. At the end of the day, the players are the ones playing and buying the games.