Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Review

Let me remind you that Black Ops Cold War and Modern Warfare are different offshoots of the series, which until recently were completely independent. In the COD you will meet one of the villains you know from Modern Warfare. It tells about the events that took place between the first and second Cold War.

We Have A Job To Do, 1980s

The collapse of the USSR is close at hand, but this is not yet obvious, because the Cold War is gaining momentum again. According to American intelligence, a Soviet secret agent with the code name Perseus has been spotted in Europe. He has threatened the entire “free world” more than once, and during the Vietnam War he managed to escape.

This time, President Reagan allows the CIA to do any outrageous just to stop Perseus, and Agent Russell Adler, as if he came from the movie “Spy Games”, gathers a team of characters from previous Black Ops.

However, the main character in Black Ops Cold War- a newcomer, whom the writers did not prescribe in advance. It can be constructed in the editor, just like Shepard from Mass Effect. The dossier includes name, surname, gender, skin color, personality traits and professional experience.

Agent Bell may be a former MI6 or KGB operative. Unfortunately, this almost does not affect anything – a couple of passive bonuses and a few new lines in dialogues.

But Call of Duty has a choice of responses! True, the hero is not voiced. It seems like this should help you get used to the role of the character, but in practice it looks strange not a word comes from your lips, and the characters answer you with lightning speed.

In Fallout: New Vegas or other RPGs of this type, it’s organic in Black Ops Cold War– no. And you can hardly manage to get into a role in the short six hours allotted for the campaign.

In a couple of evenings, you will visit Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Vietnam and Cuba. I especially liked East Berlin. The GDR is a rare guest in the games, so walking on the German subway of that era and shootings with the secret service Stasi look colorful. Only the mission in the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka is not inferior to them.

I think very few people know how these rooms really look, so Treyarch’s artists did not restrain themselves: there are busts of Lenin, and pompous balustrades, and solemn red carpet. Each passage is guarded by the Red Army, and in the basements victims of the bloody regime are chained to chairs.

Lubyanka – not only the most exotic level of black ops cold war but also the most branched. In the guise of a Soviet general, you need to complete a couple of tasks for the CIA and not get caught by your colleagues. 

There are five ways. Including you can hide strangled sentries in closets, as does Agent 47 from Hitman, and climb the ventilation shafts. Mikhail Gorbachev appears here even for a few minutes.

The final part of the level is a bloody carnage in the spirit of No Russian from Modern Warfare 2… With one difference, The Soviet government does not react in any way to such audacity. So much for a superpower.

Generally, in Trey arch We tried very hard to dilute the shootings and the standard Hollywood stuff like “a helicopter explodes” and “a man with a machine gun was hit by a car”. We got the almanac “1001 clichés in game design” and went: breaking locks, photographing strategic objects, stealth with non-lethal weapons, shelling of infantry from the AS-130.

Made simple and quickly annoying – you don’t feel the challenge in mini-games.

To open the same lock – move the mouse back and forth a couple of times. It is also useful to look for classified documents – they contain valuable information that slightly affects the plot.

Although a branched story is not worth waiting for – it simply has nowhere to turn around. Before you can blink, the final credits will creep across the screen. The main plot twist can be calculated in the middle, too many clues are thrown up by the scriptwriters.

In a sense, it is even better – there is no feeling of a piano in the bushes. Several versions of the ending show gray morale much better than last year’s Modern Warfare awkwardly did… Have you ever seen this – the Soviet super-agent in some sense turns out to be a much more decent person than the watchdogs of capitalism!

Arrows Position Close to Midnight

After the campaign, there is only one way – to multiplayer. If you have three friends, you can play “zombie mode”, where the experiments of the Nazis once again got out of control. With each wave of zombies faster and fatter. Gradually, survival becomes completely unbearable, but not because of the difficulty, but because of boredom – it’s a pity to waste time shooting monsters.

The new Dirty Bomb mode is another matter entirely. Ten teams of four people each compete in who will detonate the most bombs. Some of the rules are inherited from the royal battle, severely wounded comrades can be lifted with a syringe injection, and the plates of the body armor protect against minor injuries.

The luckiest teams can steal a tank or a buggy. True, the fussiness and randomness greatly harm this regime. Opponents bring down from all sides, and in general what is happening seems absurd. If all teams want to detonate the bomb, why are they fighting?

New hostage rescue mode – a touch of nostalgia for Counter-Strike. The rest of the entertainment is a copy of the previous Call of Duty: team battle, capturing points, and so on. The lack of originality, in fact, does not matter, in the same Modern Warfare the developers added a dozen time modes, which were quite entertaining.

Treyarch saved on the most important thing – weapons. By the time Black Ops Cold War came out in Modern Warfare there were more than 60 units. In addition to this, after simple modifications, almost every machine gun changed beyond recognition, the AK-47 could become the RPK or AK-74U, for example. Black Ops Cold War roll the same ball.

In arsenal – the next MP5 and M16. PPSh-41/43 no! Apparently, because of this scarcity, “pumping” is going at a snail’s pace. To open the kit for one “gun”, you will need to run on the same maps all day. Of which, by the way, there are only eight.

And in general, I periodically had the feeling that the authors did not have enough six months of development. The situation, of course, is not as dire as that of Battlefield 5 but the blockbuster gloss of Cold War lacks.

Sounds, animations – everything is much weaker than in Modern Warfare… Even the technical performance is uneven. On the new RTX 3080, the frame counter periodically dropped to 40 per second. And what is there to slow down?

The picture does not have enough stars from the sky, even if it matches the shooters of the last couple of years. Perhaps the developers were prevented by the corona virus, although this is somehow not easier.

Paying $69.99 for a mediocre story campaign, multiplayer, inferior in everything to last year’s part, and a “zombie mode” with one card, I do not recommend. Better try the free War zone as part of Modern Warfare… Characters from the new Call of Duty have already appeared in it, and equipment will probably be added next.

Now it is, perhaps, the most fun royal battle – 150 players, many weapons, tasks and modes. In addition, it is cross-platform – owners of the Xbox version can play with friends on PC.