Given its penchant for science-fiction, the Black Ops canon was always a little tough to follow. Double crosses, government secrets, topped off with divergent story paths led to some of the Call of Duty series’ most enjoyable, if not batshit nonsensical, stories ever told. Black Ops Cold War reintroduced series regulars, CIA operatives Alex Mason and Frank Woods, alongside the debonair Russell Adler, as they pursued Perseus, a Soviet atomic spy, during the turbulent, early 80s.
In terms of history, Black Ops 6 is placed nearer to the Gulf War and follows a now maimed, wheelchair-bound Woods, alongside his mentee and agency upstart Troy Marshall. When the latter is deployed on a mission to Kuwait to apprehend an Iraqi minister, the operation is turned on its ear by the emergence of Pantheon, a rogue paramilitary force that has access to a terrible bioweapon as well as apparent ties within the CIA.
Although you’ll drift between the perspectives of many over the course of this globetrotting adventure, you play a substantial chunk of Black Ops 6 as William “Case” Calderon, a handpicked member of Woods’ Black Ops faction. The goal, obviously, becomes to save the world for the umpteenth time while rooting out the mole and getting to the bottom of yet another warped, psychological conspiracy worthy of a geopolitical thriller like this.
The story is a lot of fun and dips to some expectedly bonkers places. The government’s research into mind control, MK-Ultra, has long been a lynchpin for the Black Ops narrative, and this sixth iteration is no different. Heavy artillery is, clearly, still an enormous factor in Black Ops 6, however you could make the argument the real war is psychochemical. Legacy players like Woods and Adler are given good stuff to chew on that respects where their weary characters have been, while newcomers like Marshall attack the game’s events with all the hallmarks of a conflicted leader, searching for truth in a world where the truth lies.
And I won’t lie, seeing Lou Diamond Phillips, star of La Bamba, cameo as the agency’s figurehead got a pop out of me. He isn’t in more than a couple of integral scenes, though his gravitas is undeniable.
As for the campaign itself, I do think Treyarch deserves a lot of credit for always trying to do new things you might not regularly associate with corridor-shooter Call of Duty. The original Black Ops felt like a revitalisation for what a story could look like within the franchise, while Cold War wasn’t afraid to holster the hardware in favour of tense, slow burn bouts of espionage that really sell the Mission: Impossible-like feel, the mission’s stakes, and the importance of the team. While I felt at points Black Ops 6 had a crisis of identity, with how radically it’d leap between mission structures and concepts, I was never bored.
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Whether I was breaking into a government blacksite beneath a cocktail event held by governor Bill Clinton, or grifting my way into the high rollers lounge at a decadent Italian casino, I felt just as formidable in these moments as I did with gun in hand. Of course, when I did have a gun in hand, I was treated to the industry-leading gunplay the series has built its empire on. It’s as tight as ever, and made only more dynamic thanks to omnidirectional movement, the big new game changing feature of this iteration. Granted, its impact is likely to be felt more across its multiplayer suite, though I certainly felt snappy and fresh during the campaign even though, for reasons I can’t ascertain, the feature received no onboarding at all.
All of the quiet moments in between took place at The Rook, Adler’s off-grid safehouse in Bulgaria that he cryptically leads the team towards early on. A stunning, picturesque mansion stradling an oceanside cliff, The Rook affords the player with momentary reprieves to chat with the team, solve black light riddles, and upgrade gear and perks in a very multiplayer-coded fashion. In fact, in any other campaign, Treyarch’s ability to pepper in core tenets from both multiplayer and Zombies would have fallen flat. In a game so driven by science-fiction, it manages to fit like a glove while serving as subconscious onboarding for the game’s long-life, evergreen modes.
With nearly countless studios devoting resources to it, it’s never surprising when the Call of Duty games look as good as they do. The cinematics, in particular, are rendered with lifelike fidelity, and although the in-engine action doesn’t necessarily quite measure up, it’s still one of the better looking games on the market every single year. Once again, the environment artists have gone to work creating some of the most detailed play spaces, kicking off the adventure with the stirring image of smoke plumes climbing into the clouds as Iraqi oil wells burn into the night. I can never quite expect the places these Black Ops campaigns will take us, and while photographing Clinton on-stage with bought-off senators or storming Saddam’s palace should be the peak of how buck wild it gets, I do think Black Ops fans will love a few nods to the older games. With a few instances of stuttering and muddied textures in the busier cutscenes, it perhaps isn’t as optimised as it usually is, however I’d say the frame rate held firm in the moments that mattered.
After the misery that was Modern Warfare III’s launch last year, this campaign felt like a particularly confident foot forward for a franchise under new rule. Not only does it function as the best five-hour onboarding for Call of Duty’s multiplayer ever, it delivers the bonkers twists you’d expect from a Black Ops, a fun cast to rally behind, and it’s rooted in just enough real-world politics to serve as a compelling “what if?”
