Call of Duty has culminated in becoming a standard yearly event with the series alternating between Black Ops and the mainline Modern Warfare series. While some entries try to incorporate new ideas into each new game in the series, more obvious now than ever, it needs a long break and has to go back to the drawing board. While they are all entertaining in different ways, they are trying to please everyone rather than a select crowd. Bloated multiplayer modes, mediocre maps, and entertaining albeit short and contrived campaigns are keeping the series back.
Black Ops 6 has a pretty entertaining campaign. Although it surpasses Black Ops III in terms of gameplay, it maintains the innovative concepts from Cold War, a feature I truly appreciated. The story itself is fun, but nothing memorable or anything well written. This won't be winning anyone over in that department. This is the first Black Ops game to pick up the story from the second game, which is the only one to actually matter. It also incorporates events from Cold War, and it's pretty cool to see characters like Frank Woods return. Those games came out so long ago that the new generation of gamers probably won't even know or care, but fans of the series will.
There is a main hub area that all the characters hang out in. This is a house in the woods and eventually plays a role as a level itself towards the end of the campaign. Treyarch tried making something out of this house by adding an in-depth puzzle that incorporates running around the house and finding clues. I find it ironic that the core gameplay of this game requires players to not think, but wants them to think critically and solve puzzles. Call of Duty has always been the opposite of thinking or lack thereof. The reward is pretty decent, but I won't spoil it, and the puzzle itself takes the entirety of the campaign to solve. I found the whole unlocking of benches kind of unnecessary for how short the game is. You can buy benches to upgrade weapons, such as more ammo and health, or increase melee damage. I really wouldn't have noticed if I had never used them here. These are unlocked with the cash you find in the game.
There is also a large open map that is a new experiment for the series. It's not like the terrible levels from Modern Warfare III that copy the Warzone maps. You get a vehicle that is stocked with ammo, and you can go around completing side objectives for more XP, such as clearing out camps or saving scouts. You can then fast travel back to the truck via the map and go back to the main campsite to swap weapons and get more ammo and equipment. It was a refreshing change of pace, and that's kind of the pattern I was seeing with this campaign. There are more options for pacing, rather than relying solely on mounted vehicle segments to change the pace. This time around, the design of a few stealth missions has improved. I felt I could get through them without having to be perfect with my route. I could jump into the water and swim close to the objective, get out, kill a few enemies, and kind of worm my way to where I needed. The stealth missions are also not stealthy all the way through like in Modern Warfare II and become a chore. At a certain point in the game, it might be acceptable to go guns blazing.
There was also a reconnaissance level that involved a political party for Bill Clinton, which was cool. It felt fresh, broke up the pace of constant shooting, and helped slow things down so we could see the story build more. What I wasn't a fan of was the Zombies mode-inspired level in which you become intoxicated with a hallucinogen, and you must find four key cards and fight four zombie bosses. The level felt cramped, reminiscent of an office building, and it was not particularly enjoyable. Hey, you can't win them all. At least they tried something different. It also felt completely out of place compared to the grounded realism of the main story.
The overall feeling and gunplay have minor tweaks and adjustments, but it mostly feels the same as Cold War or any other Call of Duty game. Sadly, these games are conjoining and starting to all feel the same outside of features and modes. The gunplay is still top-notch and hasn't been beaten yet by any other AAA arcade-style first-person shooter. It feels good, and the weapons have a good amount of weight and realism to them. The details on the weapons, from dangling keychains and decals to smoke blowing around from the barrel when you run to shell casings dropping on the ground, are all things most players will take for granted, but these minor details are something the series doesn't get enough credit for. I also didn't find too many bugs outside of some post-launch crashes. I ran into an issue where I had to turn off my overclocking on my GPU because it would crash the game every 10–15 minutes or in specific areas. By now, most patches have addressed these issues.
As for the multiplayer mode, there isn't much to talk about if you already are familiar with the series. The typical modes are all here, from Team Deathmatch to Hardpoint. I actually love Call of Duty's multiplayer mode, and I have my favorite mode types. I always rotate Team Deathmatch and Kill Confirmed. I might throw a Hardpoint in there sometimes, but it's the maps that always make or break the game, and Black Ops 6 maps aren't amazing like Modern Warfare (2019), but they're not nearly as bad as Modern Warfare III or Cold War's maps. They all feel fairly generic, and I'm tired of the constant cop-out of using stripped-down campaign maps to make multiplayer ones. Let's make unique maps that work just for multiplayer for once, please.
Of course the returning Zombies mode is the only reason why a lot of people will buy this game. This is the most robust mode, and it feels unique to Black Ops. There are a bunch of new additions, such as the Gumball perks that allow you to equip a specific gum pack, and then you can randomly get a ball from a machine on the map. There are also Cola cans that give you perks such as superpowered melee attacks, but these can stack. On top of that, there's the usual overly grind-heavy weapon progression system. I honestly hate this so much in the entire series. I can never stay invested long enough to unlock a good amount of items, as the XP grind is unfair and needs to really change. While the skins and other cosmetic items look great, to actually get them is another story. This is for people who only play the game online and can put 6–10 hours a day into it to actually unlock things and feel like they are making progress.
The same goes for the monetization system of weapon packs, blueprints, operators, and cosmetics. I want to be able to use these cool-looking items by unlocking them by playing, not paying money. I'm guilty of buying the odd pack here and there, but the insanity of the Battle Pass on top of buying $15-20 item packs is absurd and needs to really change. There is so much to the multiplayer mode that is locked away behind a paywall. While you can still enjoy the game itself without paying anything, you never feel like you are making progress and get stuck with the same basic weapon sets for dozens of hours that most people will not want anything to do with. Additionally, the inconvenient launcher system necessitates launching the most recent Call of Duty in order to access modes from earlier games. We need to overhaul and change the entire Call of Duty ecosystem. The ecosystem is experiencing a state of bloating and internal degradation.
With that said, the visuals and audio in the game are fine. The graphics aren't terrible, but they also need an update as they are starting to feel a bit dated. This is in part due to still needing to be playable on 15-year-old hardware and scale accordingly. Call of Duty needs to abandon previous-generation consoles, or the series will seriously fall behind. While the graphics don't look awful, you can tell they are dated. There's no ray tracing, no advanced lighting effects, and the textures up close look a bit grainy and blurry. I also think that the series needs a gameplay overhaul. While the gunplay feels good and has a fun factor to it, how many times do we need to play the game like this? Let's try to make Black Ops feel a bit different from the mainline series again. Black Ops 6 is probably the best game in the series to date, but the short campaign (about 4 hours) and the uninspired maps might put a lot of people off for the high price tag.