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IIt's weird to think of Call of Duty as an outsider. It used to be the largest entertainment franchise in the world, bringing billions of dollars each year to its publisher Activision. But in recent times, the military shooter has fallen out of favor, usurped by the thrills and brilliance of Overwatch and Destiny and by the more user-friendly multiplayer charms for the Minecraft and Fortnite families.
At first glance, Black Ops 4 looks like a sad anachronism, desperate for relevance. The single player campaign was dropped, leaving us just the multiplayer experience. Or, more specifically, three experiments: the traditional range of fights to death and domination matches of the CSD; The Zombie mode, in which four players try to survive as long as possible against hordes of undead eventually insurmountable; and the new Blackout mode, a variation of the royal battle genre so successfully explored by Fortnite and the PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds (PUBG).
We get the incredible speed, fluidity and diversity of CoD lineage weapons successfully grafted onto the Royal Battle Jig, where 100 players parachute into a closed environment and continue to enter. -tuer until it remains more than one. The map is narrow but varied, with construction sites, railway stations and beautiful modernist mansions. Unlike the world of Fortnite theme parks, everything is natural. This adds a tension reminiscent of PUBG, but the Blackout mode adds benefits to Call of Duty such as silent movement, improved health and the ability to spot loot through the walls. This adds tactical depth to the battles, especially as the map is small, forcing players to last-minute desperate engagements.
It's frenetic, exhilarating and enormously fun with friends. Slipping into deserted buildings and along quiet highways, trying to cover all angles while spotting intact buildings for cleaning is deliciously tense. The shootings, fueled by a vast array of rifles and grenades, have the traditional turbo-lethality of the CoD series: a second you and your teammates are healthy and relaxed, the second, two of you are in breakdown and the others are desperately searching for where the machine gun is coming from. Add to that the controllable helicopters and you get a game that really displays its own stamp on the ground of the Royal Battle. I can count the number of times I cried laughing while playing a video game, and trying to hide myself in a tiny bathroom with three friends to avoid much more skilled players in Blackout was certainly one.
Meanwhile, Zombies offers a selection of short narrative challenges in which to get involved. My favorite is Voyage of Despair, a gallop soaked in steampunk around a sinking liner, where the undead pop out of the cabins as you desperately search for better weapons. The cards are riddled with secrets, traps and Easter eggs, and part of the fun is exploring and developing new methods to escape your decaying and stumbling enemies. The visual design is charming, the surroundings are labyrinthine and interesting, and there are some decent jokes of the cabal of strange characters. Playing with friends, there is a brilliant game of camaraderie and selfish panic.
The traditional multiplayer mode offers Team Deathmatch, Control (which allows teams to protect two vital points on each map), a selection of derivatives capturing the flag and the newcomer Heist, a tense, round-based, reluctant game. Challenge where the teams face each other to recover and extract a bag of money. Here is a raw and unrepresented experience of CoD: an extremely fast online shooting action, in which most players will cross the respawn cycle at a hypnotic speed, as if they were trapped in an internal combustion engine. the military horror. The maps are correct, ranging from ruined souks and courtyards in Morocco to Gridlock's sprayed Japanese cityscape, and fluid animation at 60 frames per second never falters. But there is nothing surprising here, and public servers have always been and will always be dominated by 14-year-old, empty-eyed players with snake-like reaction speeds. The experience is a bit like playing in a shabby casino: fun and exciting, as long as you know you're going to lose.
Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII is a strange game, reminiscent of its past, alters the present and thinks of the future. Its fusion of narrative, cooperative and competitive multiplayer experiences tells us where big-budget games are invariably heading – towards vast, streaming, super-monetized entertainment platforms. Activision has not yet added any loot system or in-game store to Black Ops 4, but you can bet that it will happen. Although "specialist" characters with unique skills possess unique skills, PUBG, Fortnite and Overwatch rely on well-known CoD experiences: responsive controls, incredible speed, varied and balanced weapons, frenetic and nuanced commitments.
It's like when Porsche started making SUVs: they worked a lot like other successful all-terrain vehicles, but they definitely look like the way they look, feel and handle each other. This may not be a complete escape from Overwatch or Fortnite, but it offers a tactically rich alternative to players who want something more brutal, naturalism and sweaty risks. It may be strange, or even guilt-free, to take such pleasure with a game that carries its gung-ho military fetish as a sign of honor, but as it stands, it's the most entertaining game of Call of Duty for several years.
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