As a yearly blockbuster, Call of Duty, through sheer expense and effort, would like you to think it is the Die Hard of video games. Or, depending on the setting, the Saving Private Ryan of video games. But it is barely Black Hawk Down. This latest campaign in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 reminds me more of the forgettable Netflix shootfests that thumbnail their way across your TV screen as you try to find some gritty nothing to aid you in zoning out of life. Still, there is an anecdotal contingent of casual sofa sitters for whom Call Of Duty is the game. A balls-to-the-wall shooter to return to every winter and rinse through in a weekend. Ed has already gestured at its multiplayer, announcing: “yup, it’s COD”, like a deeply tired Captain Birdseye inspecting the day’s catch, wondering when his life will change. But never mind that. How does the single player story mode hold up? Some are calling it the best campaign in years. And I guess that’s true, in the sense that it is the least worst.
Even getting Call Of Duty as a program up and running is a damning indictment of games as a hobby in 2024. A pointless launcher that constantly wants to restart itself, a bunch of user agreements to not read, an Activision account to create if you haven’t already, advertisements for merch to dismiss, shaders to “pre-load”, updates to apply (maybe this third restart will be enough?) and the flickering Marvel-style logo intro that so many companies are aping recently.
Once you make it through this airport security ordeal of a launcher, the campaign’s story presents itself with the usual tacticool flair. A mission has gone wrong and the CIA has taken away your spy gun and your spy badge. You’re off the case, Case! (Your name is “Case” by the way). As a result of this suspension, you and a gang of other disaffected spooks (some familiar, others new) decamp to a safehouse to plan their next globe-trotting gun jaunt. They want to find and shoot the shady paramilitary group that ruined everything on their ill-fated mission – a group of baddies called the Pantheon.
It falls in and out of a classic corridor shooter rhythm, with most missions feeling more like a heist than a military operation. This is down to a noticeable increase in the undercover levels that have become a mainstay of the series. Here you’ll be shmoozing at political fundraiser parties (look, Bill Clinton!) or chatting to bad guys as they patrol a snowy compound. One of these levels is a baroque casino, lavishly decorated and full of the ambient noise of gambling. Chips and dice clink off one another, waiters wipe down bars, and poker hands are dealt with James Bond panache. It’s all proof as ever that the 3D artists, animators, and sound folk put to work on these games are incredibly skilled. The instafail stealth sequence that occurs later in this level somewhat cheapens the day out. How, in 2024, is instafail stealth still happening?
These undercover missions often get praise from critics who appreciate the novelty of doing something other than shooting skulls. But to me they often feel like a parrot in a balaclava squawking “Hitman! Hitman!” They borrow the atmosphere and the multi-tiered layers of public vs private space from IO Interactive’s contract killer series, without ever actually engaging in the systems-driven design that makes Hitman work. In the political gala level, you get a camera that can tag enemy guards and make them visible through walls. All the better to see their patrol patterns, my dear. But guards only travel a few metres then turn and walk back, a patrol path so simple it makes any need to see where they’re going completely redundant. In fairness, the camera becomes a little more useful in some later levels – where it essentially functions as a slightly crap version of Far Cry’s famous spotting binoculars.
This is the ongoing difficulty with Call-o-dutes. For anyone deep into the hobby of gaming, it is a kind of scarecrow, cobbled together from the remains of the straw from last year’s instalment, then expensively patched up with whatever parts of other games the developers found cool enough to crib. We’ve seen the Far Cry camera tagging in COD before, but some other inspirations feel newly acquired. The RC car deploying enemies of The Division games show up, for example. The nippy remote controlled floor-cars of Rainbow Six Siege also appear, if lacking the multiplayer mind games that make Ubisoft’s voyeuristic scout cams compelling in the first place. It even goes full Metro Exodus for one mission, deploying you in a broad map of the Iraqi desert, full of SAM sites to disable and downed helicopter teams to rescue. If you liked playing Big Boss in Afghanistan, you’ll really tolerate this! Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has the weird distinction of being the only video game I know that includes fast travel for precisely one level.
I think this is what makes COD a spectacle for those who only care about one game per year (to reuse my own assets from 2020, it is the “bulletpointed newsletter of an industry”). It’s also what makes it so trashy and superficial to anyone who plays games beyond the military FPS genre. It says a lot about the creative potency of this long-running series when you notice it is at its best when it’s pretending to be other games. But the highly scripted routes to completing undercover levels are far removed from the improvised murdering and panicked body-secreting of Agent 47. And the weird hallucinogenic levels that channel Prey and Control do not have the interesting movement or playground-meets-labyrinth level design that makes those games work.
Someone who doesn’t play as many games as we dweebs at RPS may be wowed by these levels in which you go roaming enemy compounds, making strictly limited choices, completing superficial anti-puzzles, and placing C4 only in the preset spots the game allows. But that just makes me want to shake such blissful first-person dabblers and scream at them to go play Metal Gear Solid V, for heaven’s sake. Go play Hitman 3. These are games which actually invest in the systems and designs that create interesting moments of play. Call Of Duty has always been on-rails, yes. But it also tries to pretend it is not. And it is frustrating to see so many people praise it for offering a thin illusion of player freedom. As if it were Activision that is reviving the immersive sim, and not the countless indies or shuttered studios actually responsible.
Even the transparently gamey character upgrades are ineffectual. You can unlock these at work stations in your safehouse, using stacks of cash you find hidden in corners during missions. Perks include being able to aim down sights 25% faster. Or recharge health a little faster. Or fractionally reduce flinching when you’re hit. It’s a classic case of giving you a bunch of percentages that don’t actually alter how the game plays in any significant way. I can’t tell the difference in my shooting after buying many of these upgrades. Some simply feel like “quality of life” features you’d otherwise expect by default. For instance, you normally have to pick up armor plates “by hand” with a press of a button, but one unlockable upgrade lets you pick them up automatically as you pass. A clear case of “unlock this gizmo on the tech tree to make the game slightly less annoying”.
The thing is, these are all expected complaints. Ironically, this very review is saying nothing I haven’t already expressed in coverage of Cold War or Infinite Warfare. But if I can get away with cliché anywhere, it’s in a COD review. The impeccably mocapped chitchat of the story includes all the usual Calling Cards Of Duty. A villain kneels and monologues to you while you lie on the ground, vulnerable and dazed. A weapons expert needs to be captured (alive, dammit!). A team mate is wounded and you must drag them from a fight while firing bullets into scripted waves during a last stand. Your hardass friend Adler shoots someone in cold blood without explaining why (he’s a maverick, but by God he gets the job done!!). All this considered, the story is probably the least insidious it has been in some time, in the sense that it has swapped out many global boogeymen for fifth columnist-style villains, indulging in much fast ‘n’ loose deep state conspiracy theory silliness that is (maybe) less repulsive than Cold War’s fawning for US interventionism.
This doesn’t mean you won’t be killing plenty of Iraqis, of course. The story is set in 1991 and the Gulf War is in full swing; every CoDpiece must have its internationally blinkered fun in the sun, after all. “America’s wars are good, actually” has long been my interpretation of this series, and that’s not much different here. Some armchair moralising comes from one character – a former Stasi with a case of the mild regrets, who refuses to carry a gun and has sworn not to kill again. His theatrical handwringing is undermined by the fact he still works willingly for a gang of off-the-books bloodletters, towards a goal of killing hundreds of people, but shhh, don’t say that to his face. The words “necessary evil” fall from the mouth of this former secret policeman like rotten fruit. Call Of Duty is, yes, a little less jingoistic this time around. But its seasonal message remains intact: to kill is cool, but only if you do it for the United States Of America.
Shaken down for individual parts (the lighting, the motion capture, the voice acting, the reload animations, etc) Codblops always proves itself an impressive piece of work. But examined holistically, the campaign is still a hackneyed Frankenstein, a monster that loots the interesting organs from other games, then squeezes the juice from those organs in some contrived and limited way without understanding what it is that makes many of those stolen parts work. By the time the game’s biggest bombs land (on a big statue of Saddam Hussein) Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 proves it has no surprises to offer. It remains an expensive and overcooked taster menu of other, more interesting games.