Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 | Multiplayer + Zombies Review

Győző "FairyEmpire" BakiNovember 13, 2024Last Updated: November 13, 2024

0 562 15 minutes read

After our Jesse blasted through the bombastic single player campaign of the latest Call of Duty for our review, I’ll tackle the social experiences: multiplayer and Zombies, that is. Can the most ambitious Call of Duty in many years hit a home run, like in the good old days? Find out in our Xbox Series X review for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which for the first time is also available on Game Pass from day one!

A long lineage of Black Ops games

It’s Fall again, that means a new Call of Duty is upon us. This time, it’s a new Black Ops set in the early 1990’s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. If you’ve read my previous Call of Duty reviews, such as the one for the 2023 title, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, you know I have my gripes with the current direction of the franchise, especially when it comes to the multiplayer suite. For all its perks like amazing graphics, excellent sound, insanely fast and precise gameplay loop, a myriad of customization and accessibility options, there also comes a huge list of problems.

In terms of multiplayer, the “Infinity Ward school” of map designs was, quite frankly, terrible. Many of the latest games feature, arguably, some of the worst maps the franchise has ever seen, with often only the remakes of old maps that kept the overall experience afloat. A mixture of busy visuals, too many lines of sight, unbalanaced sides for team modes, chances for spawntrapping, camping becoming a dominant strategy, even a lot of important quality-of-life and balance changes that were introduced in the 2010’s have simply been wiped; almost as if a player managed to get a 25-kill streak and dropped the nuke on a decade of improvements to the Call of Duty formula.

Of course, I don’t speak for everyone in the community, and I know there’s a lot of people out there who prefer that style of fast-paced, low TTK, “fastest hand in the Far West” style of gameplay. When it comes to the multiplayer, our first focus in this review, Treyarch have always tried to bring Call of Duty towards a more balanced, more tactical, very much eSports-oriented experience. Speaking of eSports, I’ll anticipate a bit of a detail, and point out that this year’s COD has it all for tournaments and eSports: private matches, bots, CODcaster, and all the goodies that should be included every year, yet they aren’t always around.

Anyway, said COD formula takes more cues from the arena shooters of old like Unreal Tournament or Quake 3: Arena, rather than the “everything is akimbo” approach of 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 – of which, Infinity Ward’s games still largely take inspiration from. Black Ops 6 goes back to the roots, but also doesn’t, trying to balance the brand new fast-paced Call of Duty movement and shooting of recent games with a design philosophy that is closer to the Treyarch games of old: most notably, Black Ops 2. But I guess most of you know this fuly well already, so let’s see how they fare with that!

Omni(Movement)-Man

The biggest new feature that inevitably steals the spotlight is the omnimovement system, which Jesse already touched upon in his review too. It’s a system that promises a complete 360 degrees freedom of movement, and very much delivers on it. Players can sprint in any direction, regardless of where they’re facing – again, this is something closer to arena shooters of old. But perhaps more intriguingly players can turn mid-air in an instant, even during a dolphin dive, making for some quite ridiculous entries into hot areas at times.

It’s a system that feels intuitive, fast, precise, and it absolutely changes the way you can approach certain difficult firefights. As pointed out in my multiplayer beta impressions a while back, it was hard to go back to a more “classic” COD-style shooter like XDefiant, after spending hours with the new movement system. The flipside is that many of the firefights look, frankly, quite stupid. Players have already been jumping around, laying on the ground at high speed and turning around in an instant quicker than a grasshopper. Now, people are getting used to dolphin diving at high speed into every door or window, as half the enemies you’ll encounter come into your line of sight flying horizontally and shooting at you, as if it was a John Woo action sequence – just without the obligatory slow motion and pidgeons.

Still, this refined movement system makes the latest Call of Duty feel even better, even faster, even more precise somehow than previous entries in the franchise already did. Activision’s infinite resources thrown to the franchise are paying off in terms of pure gameplay feel for sure, because the competition simply can’t come up with an arcade-style military shooter quite as advanced, snappy, precise, yet fun as what’s found in Black Ops 6, and chances are they won’t anytime soon. That alone elevates the game to a practically must-play status for all fans of the genre, as even the various game’s flaws still are laid upon an incredibly satisfying gameplay foundation.

The TTK, time-to-kill for short, as in how long it takes to kill somebody on average, is lower in Black Ops 6 than it is in most Treyarch titles, but it’s still a bit higher than what’s found in the previous two Call of Duty games. This approach offers a chance to fight back when being shot at, though a lot of weapons still are largely OP, predominantly due to the Gunsmith system allowing every weapon to become a practically flawless machine with just the right upgrades. As cool and ambitious the Gunsmith system is, with Black Ops 6 changing very little in the formula there, I think that this excessive freedom over crafting killing machines has negatively impacted the balance and general readability of the Call of Duty action.

Just one more lane bro

Another Treyarch classic is the 3-lane map design which, aside from the odd map or two, is back in full force – at least in the traditional 6v6 modes, the bread and butter of a Call of Duty multiplayer suite. While in most maps the lanes are certainly larger than they used to be in, say, Black Ops 3 days, the general philosophy of having flank routes to every location, very few optimal camping spots and a natural flow of being able to cross around in many ways makes each map flow very well, with even long climbs, swimming areas and interactive elements, such as metal doors that can be shut to ensure nobody is getting through that particular route anytime soon.

A positive highlight would be Lowtown, a map set around a fishing town with vivid colours, markets and more, where the action flows in very well flowing corridors and even a bit of verticality. A negative one would be Babylon, already seen in the beta, where players fight around a very square-shaped building with enemies constantly coming up from every angle and having little time to make tactics. There seem to be multiple news maps that feature a very wide and symmetric shape that technically does feature 3 lanes, but also a million lines of sight and camping locations that don’t at all fit the flow of the game, making Modern Warfare (2019)’s flaws resurface immediately. The spawn system (clearly not designed for such maps), the inconsistent netcode and so forth can turn these matches into real nightmares, sometimes just making me bail the lobby if I see that a certain map is being voted. The quality gap between good and bad maps is rather high, though I guess there’s nothing as hilariously broken as Piccadilly, right?

So far I mainly talked about the classic COD experience of 6v6 battles, but 2v2 strike maps exist too, on which Face Off matches can be played. In this very obviously Warzone Gulag-sized maps, two teams of two players face off with predetermined and identical loadouts that change round after round, in quick rounds of single life chaos, with a timer and a flag to capture ensuring the end if someone is still standing after a little while. This mode ain’t really my jam, but with several other core multiplayer modes like Team Deathmatch, Domination, Search & Destroy and so forth, I can just focus elsewhere. On the funny side of things, however, the 4 small maps meant to be played in 2v2 can also be played on a variety of 6v6 modes in a specific playlist. While there’s no killstreaks there (well, pointstreaks), it’s a hilarious, if completely broken and unblanaced rush of non-stop action that makes matches on Rust look like relaxing picnics on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a good way to level up things quickly, and it can be quite the adrenaline rush, but the game’s netcode and spawn system really doesn’t play well in this context.

Some may be disappointed to hear that big maps, such as the ones for Ground War, which used to feature up to 64 players in some of the recent games, are completely gone – at least at launch. Hard to say if future seasons will reintroduce this mode or something similar, but Treyarch focused on making Black Ops 6 a pure Call of Duty experience first and foremost, and the “Battlefield with low TTK and killstreaks” chaos that characterizes Ground War matches seemingly did not fit their vision. It’s an absence I personally don’t mind, especially because not having to add Ground War maps means the game already features twelve distinct 6v6 maps and four 2v2 ones, a number that was way lower in episodes that also had to ship a few big maps in the process. I can think of a few maps where perhaps a middle-ground of 24 players could have quite easily fit in, but I don’t mind them not diluting the experience.

It’s a keeper

The Pick 10 system still hasn’t come back unfortunately, but the loadout formula of recent COD titles is back with various smart changes, such as the addition of the 3 perk bonus. If you happen to have 3 different perks of the same category/colour, such as 3 Enforcer perks or as many Recon ones, the player gets a 4th, particularly exciting power, such as Recon being able to see enemies through walls for a short time when spawning and leaving no death skulls when killing. The Wild Cards are also back, allowing bonuses such as three extra weapon attachments, an extra perk or two primary guns.

Expect the usual barrage of challenges, unlockable calling cards and skins (of which there’s a shockingly high amount already, with over 100 to boot already), and the upcoming seasons will obviously have battle passes to grind, new maps, new events and so forth. As always, I expect the new weapons and new Gunsmith builds to drastically alter the game’s so far solid balance for the worse, as this has happened in virtually every episode of the last decade. We’ll see where all that goes.

A lot of Call of Duty players will be wondering: where does the Black Ops 6 in terms of broken builds, netcode, and most importantly cheats? As said, the weapon and perk balance is so far pretty good, but the issues with netcode and cheating seem to be on par with the usual. The slightly higher TTK and better map design does reduce the “strange” deaths somewhat, but in general, the game’s inconsistency remains. At this point, I don’t know when this will ever be solved. While the idea of a unified launcher for the various new games is sound, I think Call of Duty needs a new backbone sooner, rather than later, as the infrastructure here is clearly not optimal in many ways – with even the UI that, at this point is a huge mess. If Call of Duty wants to shake off the technical flaws it keeps carrying on year after year, I think they need a fresh start, but I’m not sure when that’s gonna happen.

I find Black Ops 6 to be the strongest multiplayer entry to the franchise since before the Modern Warfare (2019) era. While it doesn’t shake off many of the flaws that were introduced since then, the refined TTK, the much improved map design, the improved Loadout system and plenty of content to boot from day one make this a far more enjoyable experience out of the box already. Omnimovement aside, it’s hardly a transformative Call of Duty multiplayer, but it’s the most fun I’ve had with this mode in years. Shame that a lot of the map designs, Gunsmith and to an extent the exploitability of the new movement system ensures that what you didn’t like about Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty philosophy is still largely found in here too, which can turn a fun multiplayer romp into a frustrating and broken mess with the single flip of a metaphorical switch at any given time.

Undead apocalypse

That leaves us with Zombies. Oh boy, I have mixed feelings about this one. After many Call of Duty titles with troubled developments, Black Ops 4 was the first in quite some years that felt like it would come out complete, with a proper development time, no major shake-ups that we know of and so forth. This obviously left many of us hoping that Treyarch would use this chance to deliver us a classic, round-based Zombies experience, like they’ve done from World At War all the way down to Black Ops 4. Indeed, they abandoned last year’s frankly baffling “DMZ with zombies instead of soldiers” experiment, and they did go back to a more traditional Zombies mode. Sort of.

The game launches with two maps – let’s start with Liberty Falls, a place that visually very much reminds me of Alan Wake’s Bright Falls. Set in a small little town in West Virginia, this map features various 2-lane streets, colourful house blocks, small gardens, all the way up to explorable rooftops and buildings. The map is fairly big and has large spaces for a Zombies experience, but on paper it’s very much a classic Zombies experience: doors to open up by spending credits, weapons to buy off walls, some easter eggs and other progression to solve while trying to fend off the undead.

This is what we wanted, right? Well, it doesn’t take long to figure out that not only the wide map design and the verticality make for a much less tense and much more exploitable zombie survivor experience, but the map itself doesn’t feel too great. While graphically impressive, the setting is stale, and certainly not as creative or creepy as most of the classic Zombies maps from old. There’s some cool twists and events here and there, such as a seemingly possessed church and various very powerful traps that can be activated. There’s even a neat musical easter egg. Yet, it all feels a bit unexciting, as if someone modded some of the Zombies rulesets into an unrelated semi-open map, without much of the incredible visual and gameplay variety of many Zombies maps we love and adore.

As said, there are easter eggs, things to interact with. You get to obtain random weapons, you can find the Ray-Gun, you can upgrade everything via Pack-A-Punch, get all sorts of perks and even the gobblegums are back. Yet, it doesn’t really feel like a huge mystery going on at all times, with a map that just seems like a barricaded version of a Warzone area. There’s no crazy hidden paths, shortcuts or anything fancy, and the DMZ-inspired extractions are once again back, with players being able to leave with the stash they have every once in a while while calling in a chopper.If players fail to clear the landing area, zombies take down the chopper and the match is lost. I don’t think this really has much of a place in a Zombies mode, which should be all about trying to survive as long as possible while micromanaging your resources and using the map’s weird perks to go on. Even killstreak/poinstreak abilities can be found, some of which don’t gel all that well with the cutthroat pace of the mode.

Asylum presents…

Black Ops 6 ships with two Zombies maps, a rarity in the series which often only had a single map at launch. The second one is Terminus, and this one certainly feels closer to a regular Zombies map, at least in terms of level geometry. The players are thrown into a blacksite, hidden somewhere on an island in the Philippine Sea. As the zombies invasion hits, the captives form an alliance to try and escape, as they traverse prison cells, secret laboratories, creepy hallways and more. This map’s design is certainly tighter and more in the vein of classic Zombies maps, with even a handful of moving parts, an underwater segment and more at disposal. It doesn’t take long before even stranger, experimental creatures start popping up, with the map’s general spooky vibes making for a more classic, if again not too inspired Zombies experience. Most of the other gameplay elements are virtually the same as the Liberty Falls map.

Both maps have their own lore, and the Zombies-centric operators all have their context-specific dialogue that gets triggered many times per match. This is optional, as any other operator, free or paid it may be, can be used in any Zombies map, though in this case without dialogue to boost the experience. Gone is the convoluted lore of the Zombies maps until Black Ops 4, this one is once again more of a standalone experience with new characters, with however some very well-made CGI cutscenes that set them up. The level of detail in these small little movies definitely is on par with the polish and budget the campaign shows, shame the actual maps aren’t that memorable in the end. In the end, both maps are some of the more classic and intriguing ones seen in the franchise in years, but they absolutely pale in comparison with the mysteries, creativity and shocking twists of older levels. If you were waiting for a new Treyarch Zombies to really compete with their classics, this still ain’t it – yet, anyway.

As far as the technical side of the multiplayer and Zombies packages go, I have to echo Jesse’s positive words from his campaign review. Throughout years of iteration and a near unlimited budget, Activision’s many studios put together an increasingly photorealistic and high performance engine, that delivers beautifully detailed worlds with excellent particles and more, all while even allowing for a 120fps mode, custom FOVs, and virtually every accessibility option, HUD element placement, colour choices, audio tweaks that exist from launch already. Even full input-based crossplay has been available for many years now, and Black Ops 6 doesn’t break the cycle either. The iffy netcode aside, recent Call of Duty games are an absolute technical marvel that many games should learn from, with Treyarch’s latest that further improves in a handful of areas. This is one of the reasons it’s hard to go back to other shooters after Call of Duty: the level of technical quality, smoothness, precision and customization is equal to no other. Now if they fixed the netcode and cheating problem, we’d really be golden.

The usual question at the launch of a new Call of Duty is… what about Warzone? And the answer is, once again – just you wait! The final season of the Modern Warfare 3-themed Warzone is ending around now, and a new season should drop pretty soon with a brand new map, the new Black Ops 6 weaponry, its operators and whatnot. We don’t yet know much about what will happen, only that microtransactions and such carry over as they did in the last two games already. Coinciding with the launch of the new season of Warzone, we’ll also get a proper new season with its own battle pass (one that’s hopefully less grindy than the previous games’), new operators and even new content for the regular multiplayer modes. But, as always, we can’t judge that just yet, so we’ll have to wait. One thing not to forget, at least, is that from this year on, Call of Duty games launch day one on Game Pass on Xbox and PC alike. Certainly helps jumping in day one, regardless of what exactly is offered year in, year out.

The new Call of Duty formula at its peak, for better or worse

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is certainly a widely mixed bag. It is easily the most impressive game on a technical level yet, and almost everything it does is vastly better than seen in previous years. As Jesse’s review pointed out, the campaign’s the best one in a while, and as I did, the multiplayer and Zombies experiences are certainly the peak of recent years, too. And while most of the techical background is sound, with a lot of trademark Treyarch improvements to the Call of Duty formula that are here, a lot of the core, fundamental flaws of “the Modern Warfare (2019) formula” just can’t seem to be shaken off, no matter how much good will the developers put into it all. Treyarch’s efforts here are certainly appreciated, and it’s their most ambitious and impressive title since 2015’s Black Ops 3. But whereas that game stood out from the masses and became its own beast, Black Ops 6 struggles to move away from what makes Call of Duty hit and miss lately, with welcome but not always sufficient upgrades. It is the best iteration of Call of Duty since 2019, that’s for sure, and perhaps that alone will turn this into a 10/10 unmissable masterpiece for you. It’s an evolution, a step in the right direction. But there’s no reason to pretend both of these pillar gamemodes weren’t in a much better place in the mid-2010’s, and I guess I’m glad that games like Sker Ritual and XDefiant are trying to keep that era of COD Zombies and COD Multiplayer alive – because Activision don’t seem to be interested in that experience anymore.