‘Black Ops 6’ Is the Best ‘Call of Duty’ Game In Over a Decade

For millions of people, Call of Duty is not just a video game — it’s a lifestyle. If you’re like me, the fall season is Call of Duty time, even down to my diet. For this year’s launch of Black Ops 6, I “celebrated” with Little Caesars, a place I’d never touch outside of this season. 

But I wasn’t paying for the pizza, rather for the code that comes on the receipt: A double XP token for the game plus an exclusive Little Caesars skin to dress my operator up in a “Hot-N-Ready” hat complete with a tactical pizza cutter. It was worth it.

As someone who’s been playing Call of Duty since before I could read, this is all taken very seriously. Like many, I’m a diehard; Call of Duty is my fallback after a bad day or just the best way to fill the time. So, when it’s bad, it spells a very rough 12 months ahead.

So, please understand how huge it is for a player like me to say that Black Ops 6 is by far one of the best Call of Duty games ever. It is a simply massive package with three distinct modes, each hearty enough to be their own game, yet somehow working in tandem as a unified experience. It’s not without flaws, but it is evident that developers Treyarch and Raven Software were given the freedom to cook long and hard on this one.

Mission: Impossible – Call of Duty Edition

For its main campaign setting, Black Ops 6 takes players into the early Nineties amid Operation Desert Storm, but that’s merely a backdrop for the deeper story. A black ops group composed of Russell Adler, Frank Woods, and newcomers William “Case” Calderon, Troy Marshall, Sevati “Sev” Dumas, and Felix Neumann has gone rogue after discovering a conspiracy within the CIA. They believe the CIA has been infiltrated by a shadowy group known as the Pantheon and will kill them before unleashing an unknown apocalyptic weapon. 

Outgunned, it’s unclear who players can trust, and the stakes are catastrophically high. It’s going to require a bunch of over-the-top missions filled with cinematic cliches to ultimately save the day. 

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Despite the multiplayer being the most popular aspect of Call of Duty, the campaigns have always been a solid draw for the franchise, but the last few entries have been huge let downs. What used to be a fun appetizer to the larger Call of Duty experience eventually became sloppy messes built on empty calories.

Thankfully, Black Ops 6’s campaign is immensely more fulfilling than recent ones. Call of Duty campaigns are historically very linear shooting galleries that will occasionally shake things up with a mission where players control a powerful vehicle like an AC-130 or quietly stealth their way behind enemy lines. Black Ops 6 definitely has plenty of shoot ‘em up set-pieces, but it also aims for more.

There are entire sections of the game that omit the gunplay, instead relying on subtle gadgets, branching dialogue trees, and creative problem solving to progress. Black Ops 6 makes a case for itself as a great Mission: Impossible game because it’s not really about warfare, it’s about spies. Players will visit a couple of active war zones throughout this story where they’ll participate in explosive battles, but there’s also big parties, casinos, and secret bases to infiltrate with disguises.

But these aren’t just standard Call of Duty levels dressed up with a funky theme — the gameplay completely changes too. Early on, players must get a retinal scan from a sleazy senator attending Bill Clinton’s gala. However, there are multiple ways to accomplish this objective, including using a stolen sex tape to blackmail the senator. It all comes across as more tongue-in-cheek than most Call of Duty games. 

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Black Ops 6 also features optional puzzles, hacking and lockpicking mini-games, and tools such as a spy camera to mark enemies with, further emphasizing the espionage core of the game’s story. There are even huge tonal shifts such as a mission that dives head first into the horror genre with shades of Doom (2016) and another that is clearly lifting inspiration from Inception.

All of these things culminate to create a rare level of depth and variety to a Call of Duty campaign, adding things players never even knew they wanted in a game like this. It does what Call of Duty does best with hair-raising set-pieces and then goes a step further, without falling flat on over promised and under delivered innovations.

New Heights for Multiplayer

However great the new campaign may be, a lot of people will only ever pick up Black Ops 6 for its multiplayer, and while it has some blemishes, it is a lot of fun when it works as intended. 

Treyarch — the team behind the Black Ops sub-series — has always done an incredible job at providing a great arcade-y experience for Call of Duty fans while Infinity Ward aims for something more “grounded” with their Modern Warfare games. For fans of the faster-paced, punchier gunplay in the Black Ops series, this new iteration doesn’t disappoint.

The biggest new feature in Black Ops 6’s multiplayer is “omnimovement,” a complete overhaul of Call of Duty’s control system which will also be applied to the free-to-play battle royale, Call of Duty: Warzone, at a later date. It allows players to slide, dive, and sprint in any direction, allowing for more control of their movement rather than being forced to simply run forward and adjust accordingly.

Players can even roll around on the ground, with a wider aiming radius that makes it easier to freely protect an objective or a certain angle. In moment-to-moment gameplay, it allows for diving away from a grenade or sliding into cover, but it also opens up ways to make sick plays.

During a match, I ran down a lengthy staircase, about to be sandwiched by foes. One was rapidly approaching the bottom of the stairs and another one was coming up behind me at the top. As the one behind me began unloading his submachine gun into my back, I dove head first down the stairs and shoved my shotgun barrel straight into the enemy at the bottom before blasting him backwards while still in mid-air. After hitting the ground, I managed to quickly roll over onto my back, switch to my sidearm, and empty my clip into the guy at the top, all in one seamlessly fluid play.

These types of moments happen constantly in Black Ops 6. It’s an incredibly dynamic game filled with frenetic action that stimulates the brain in all the right ways. If you’re a Call of Duty player that can’t keep their hands idle, Black Ops 6 is like the video game version of a fidget spinner. You are constantly sliding, jumping, diving, running, shooting, and bouncing around as there’s not much downtime in any given match.

There is still some clunkiness to the omnimovement, however. Players will often accidentally go prone instead of diving or sliding, which can result in a frustrating death when trying to quickly escape harm’s way, only to end up lying down directly in its path. This is because diving, sliding, crouching, and prone are all attached to the same button on a controller. 

These kinds of hiccups are a stark contrast to the smooth, highlight-worthy moments that you get when everything works perfectly. Though these moments are few and far between, it doesn’t change how annoying it can be when it gets you killed.

Another big issue that’s become apparent in the launch window is that hit registration is wildly inconsistent right now, meaning that firing at enemies doesn’t always guarantee you’ll hit them — even when it’s clear that you did. It makes the time to kill (TTK) difficult to judge time, and it’s tough to identify if bullets are hitting someone more because of the range, the weapon’s firepower, or if because the game is simply acting up. Where one enemy may go down with just a few shots, another requires putting a quarter of a clip in them, even if that weapon’s been reliable before.

It’s hard to deny that Black Ops 6’s multiplayer is super slick to play despite some of its problems. It feels like a perfect balance for the neck-breaking speeds of futuristic Call of Duty games, which had wall-running and jetpacks, and the more traditional entries. Black Ops 6 is a perfect way to introduce players to more advanced movement without abandoning what they expect out of Call of Duty.

The Return of the Undead

Lastly, Black Ops 6 also brings back the sub-franchise’s beloved Zombies mode, which was originally introduced with 2008’s World at War, but doesn’t appear annually. Treyarch launched this year’s game with two new round-based maps that are pretty large in scope; one even features a boat that players can use to drive to different islands and other points of interest. While I don’t typically dive too deep into Zombies, I can see myself returning to this one for a while. 

Modern Warfare III attempted an open-world Zombies experience, but like with the main campaign, it felt boring and disjointed. Black Ops 6 isn’t fully open-world, just larger in scale, still feels like a very intimately designed experience, with tons of details layered into its level design and playable story that builds on years’ worth of Zombie mode gameplay while also trying plenty of new things.

Black Ops 6’s Zombies builds on features introduced in previous games like Black Ops 3 (2015) and Black Ops Cold War (2020), allowing players to put together a comprehensive loadout before jumping into the game and upgrade skills over time with thorough progression systems.

There are a lot of new layers to the Zombies mode this time around with elaborate boss fights, randomized, time sensitive power-ups, upgradable items, and multiple ways to explore. There’s even a big mech suit that players can acquire to slay the undead with.

As an entire third of the Black Ops 6 experience, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into with Zombies, and it could easily become a fan-favorite that players return to well after the game’s overall life cycle ends next fall. Previous Zombies modes have gone bigger without being better, but Black Ops 6 ensures it does both to make for a rewarding and fun co-op experience.

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The best at what it does

Ultimately, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a fantastic step forward for the series. All of the modes sing in harmony, ensuring that no one part of the game feels weighted better or worse than the rest. It’s an incredibly dense package that features a top-tier campaign, a dopamine-addled multiplayer, and a premium Zombies experience. It’s been a while since Call of Duty has felt this complete and well-rounded, which will hopefully register with the game’s publisher, Activision.

Black Ops 6 had four years of development instead of the standard three. All of the teams had time to innovate, polish, and build something that injects fresh air into a storied franchise that many thought was on its deathbed after a rough few years. Hopefully, future entries will get the same treatment so that 2024 isn’t remembered as the fluke year where Call of Duty was briefly good again.