Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Let's start with the good. I like the campaign quite a bit. It has to be top 3 in the series gameplay wise, right behind bo2 and MW4. I don't find a lot of new characters to be memorable besides Adler and Park. The side missions feel more impactful than the Infinite Warfare side missions. The zombies have very open maps and good easter eggs. No more random spawns, which really got out of hand in BO4. I like the field upgrades and feel that all of them are viable for different playstyles. Elemental pop is really good, and so is tombstone in this game. I love the perk upgrades. My main problem though is that the maps and eggs are only replayable for 1-2 weeks. After that I feel I have discovered everything and mastered everything the map has to offer. I just get bored with them, unlike BO3 and even BO4. Both BO3 and BO4 have easter eggs that we haven't even solved yet, and I find that to be more compelling and brings me back to those games more. Multiplayer is an awful mess. So many hackers, None of the maps are great and so far the dlc maps have been underwhelming, the weapon balance is atrocious this season, as the MP5 dominates yet again. It was perfectly balanced in the beta, which I loved, but now it's just sad. Overall, this game makes me appreciate MW4 more. The maps are actually better and great for 10v10. This game sucks.

The game draws you in like an abusive boyfriend: The first night is good, but then you get a black eye the second. He apologizes and promises to make up in the honeymoon phase--you have another good night, then another black eye. You love your boyfriend and have a soft spot for him, because when you first met him you fell in love; but you've convinced yourself that hidden behind the abusive monster he's become is still the man you met on your first date--you can't break the cycle.

You do really well for one match, then get a series of punishment games. You get tilted from getting only 1.0 K/D for 4 matches, so you keep playing because you know you're better than that and feel like you have something to prove to yourself. Then you RQ after 4 hours, go to sleep, come home and play again, rinse and repeat. You want to stop, but you can't. You remember all the good times you had with Call of Duty over the last couple of decades: CoD 4, WaW, MW2, and so on; so you buy every new release futilely hoping that this time it will be different--that the old CoD might lurk under the surface, behind the engagement-optimization matchmaking system and microtransactions; but you can't convince yourself to snap out of it. You can't break the cycle.

Welcome to the CoD cycle. It wasn't always like this: There was a time long ago when Call of Duty Multiplayer had server browsers and dedicated servers on PC; Then, after that, when dedicated servers were gone, we at least had connection-based matchmaking that threw random, casual games with wide skill distributions at us. We could hit "find match" and never know what to expect--perhaps an easy lobby, maybe one full of semi-pros freebasing Red Bull. Everything was fair and there was no manipulation happening behind the scenes. When you lost a match, it was your own fault. When you did extremely well, the game didn't tilt the matchmaking algorithm like a see saw, dumping you into the Nth circle of gamer hell.

Really, Cold War (and MW 2019 for that matter) can't be called Call of Duty anymore, because it doesn't share anything other than franchise with its predecessors. I'll call this new breed "Nu Cod." Just like Nu Metal back in the early 2k's, it has an identity crisis: It's not good metal and it's not good rap. Cold War isn't a casual game, but it's not a competitive game either. There is no ranked matchmaking, but there's no casual matchmaking. The game is marketed to hardcore gamers, but it has utter contempt for them.

In a similar vein, nothing in this game is reliable either. The matchmaking is connection-based, except when it isn't. The lead developer promised the community that "connection is king," indicating that the game would prioritize matching players based on connection rather than skill level, yet I regularly get matched in lobbies with over 100 ping, sometimes even overseas, just to keep me in high skill bracket games. The game runs poorly for some reason, even though Modern Warfare 2019 ran just fine for me. My CPU overheats while I play, and if I so much as open my web browser in the background, my FPS drops from 70 to 30 frames. The game crashes frequently and has frozen my PC a few times. I've heard others report that the game bricks some people's consoles.

Cold War is also a wasteland for content. This game at launch has the smallest number of maps in any released Call of Duty game. It has very few weapons, and most of the weapon attachments for the game's gunsmith system, borrowed from Modern Warfare 2019, are just optics reskins that have no effect on gameplay. The campaign is pretty short, clocking in around 4-6 hours depending on the player and his choices. Zombies is fun, at least, but there is at launch only one map available for it. Sparse launches have been a plague for most live service model games, like Battlefield 5, and it almost seems like it's being treated as an excuse to either strip out content and regurgitate it later as a "new" release, or to rush a minimum viable product out the door before it's ready. This game is no exception.

Let me set the stage: I don't want you to see NuCod as a video game. It's an oil drilling platform, but instead of being planted in the Atlantic ocean, it's planted directly above your head.

Most of your games will be pieced together by machine learning algorithms, forcing everyone in the lobby to have a K/D ratio of 1.0--not too high, not too low, but mediocre and boring; however, sometimes, the game will give another player a consolation lobby, and in which case, sometimes you get the lobby and have a good game. Most of the time, you'll be the sacrificial lamb, placed on an unbalanced team full of bad players against an enemy team way more highly skilled than yours. The game rigs every match and determines the outcome before you even press "find game." It functions almost like a slot machine in a casino: The machine is designed to occasionally give you a win so you keep throwing money at it. The people who run the casino hope you leave bankrupt--they're not throwing wins at you as an act of charity. Every match is very sweaty, and this game is downright stressful and exhausting to play, but occasionally the game lets you slip into the protected bracket and score 40 frags in a game, just to prevent your dopamine from dropping too low. When you buy Call of Duty, you're signing up to be a lab rat in a Skinner box--or a delusional career gambler, same thing. In short, playing this game is a totally alienating experience that makes you feel less than human.

If you're not very good at FPS games you might actually find your performance to be better than usual when you play Cold War. The game is designed to throw you easy wins sometimes, and it matches based on skill and play style very strongly, meaning you'll never face up against truly skilled players without also being skilled. However, if you want to join a skilled friend, you'll be thrust into his lobbies rather than the other way around and you won't have any fun at all. Any way you slice it, this system is awful.

It's not like this title is all that bad, however; because underneath the casino-style psychological manipulation algorithm lies what is fundamentally a Treyarch Call of Duty game. I enjoy this game's design so much more than 2019's Modern Warfare in every way. The time-to-kill has been increased, meaning skillful aim is rewarded more often than camping in random corners and happening to shoot first. The maps flow well and lack the "porous" design philosophy that was responsible to some degree for MW's slow-paced campfest--some of the maps are even practically three-lane maps like the good old days! Sniping feels pretty good and is a viable way to play the game, even if ADS times prevent quickscoping. The movement system is fun and allows plenty of flexibility: You can climb pretty generously over walls and onto cars, and slide cancel after sprinting to throw off your enemy's aim. Everything is fast-paced and dynamic as a Call of Duty game should be. That perk that silences your footsteps is back (Ninja) and it's refreshing as hell, enabling run-and-gun gameplay once again. MW 2019's weapon customization system is back, and it actually has a useful stats readout with precise unit measurements telling you exactly what each attachment does (although the customization is less interesting this time around and has some balancing issues.) Some of the killstreaks are really fun, like the returning War Machine, and the VTOL attack ship. And the Campaign isn't all too bad--it's pretty good actually. Zombies is fun and will be even better with additional content as it releases. If it weren't for engagement-optimization matchmaking, I'd actually enjoy playing this game.

But I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: The emperor has no clothes. Stay far away from this and any future Activision releases. They will all have the same manipulative casino matchmaking. They try to bait you in with pretty promotional materials and a healthy dose of nostalgia for the good old days of "boots on the ground" Call of Duty (what a genius marketing campaign.) But what you actually get is the equivalent of jabbing a dirty heroin needle into your veins in a controlled laboratory setting. Sure, you'll get high, but there's a comedown, and by the way you have an immune disorder now, and it was all according to plan. So get excited for the next needle, and the next one, and the next one, all to take the pain away for a moment until you enter back into ceaseless, futile yearning.

multiplayer was alright

To get where BOCW is today was quite a roller-coaster ride, from the late development switch that brought Treyarch and Raven together to rush this game out over what was seemingly just 15 months, BOCW launched as quite a buggy mess with what was at the time lackluster content that was far and few between.

Quite the disappointment given the previous year's 1-2 punch of MW2019 and the later launched and still massive Warzone. Treyarch and Raven had quite a bit of work on their hands to improve the game from the state it was in and after 6 seasons of content and it now being sent to the annual Call of Duty grinder to giveway to the okay at best Call of Duty Vanguard, BOCW is in an decent state with 33 Multiplayer maps that give decent variety and much appreciated QOL improvements from MW2019 (Being able to select multiple gamemodes when searching for a game just being one of them) like it's predecessor BOCW also has plenty of different guns, perks and equipment options to choose from with them generally being decently balanced in regular play with some exceptions.

But despite the variety of MP maps the game ultimately still doesn't feel as polished as it's predecessor or it's successor, it's still stuck on the now rather old Black Ops Engine which somehow runs worse and looks worse than it did with Black Ops 3 and 4, Combine this with rather harsh performance based matchmaking and it can be rather frustrating to try out new equipment or new maps given if you do decently in the last few games you'll be squared up with more even opponents and subsequently crushed.

Fortunately and unlike Black Ops 4 we do have a campaign to talk about this time around and while it does have some fun diversions with side missions and the illusion of multiple choices (but two different endings) The campaign does feel slightly more unique than compared to many other Call of Duty games released in the 2010's era. But it ultimately ends up falling back on nostalgia with a few levels treading through the same old ground we saw in Black Ops 1, with 1 level literally going back through a mission from the 2010 shooter. It is a fun little romp because of the aforementioned fun diversions but it won't leave a lasting impression.

Zombies continues the refinement in gameplay, level design, and qol improvements brought from Black Ops 4 and it benefits so much from it, the game balances being welcoming to newcomers, those who just wanna shoot zombies and minibosses and those who play for the numerous, often challenging and cryptic easter eggs. With Die Maschine being the first map it serves as a great gateway for people new to the zombies formula but leaves things a little lacking with mode veterans. Fortunately later released maps definitely give a lot of love to long time fans of the mode and the variety despite only 5 maps (6 if you count Outbreak as it's own map) and as a nice added bonus leveling up is shared across Zombies and Multiplayer which makes levelling up guns to the max much more satisfying than having to go through the occasionally stressful and unpleasant overly competitive multiplayer.

Outbreak is also a rather unique take on the Zombies formula for the series anyway with it's open world design, hopping through many different maps to complete varying objectives with waves only getting harder with each different map you go to, it's a rather fun diversion but doesn't quite have the staying power as the traditional zombies formula does.

Overall in late 2021 BOCW is a rather decent Call of Duty, a small misstep from the series recent highs but still a decent game all around especially if Zombies is a big part of the game for you. There's still a few technical issues and bugs here and there and the game size is frankly ridiculous with the Xbox One X version clocked at 147.7GB(!) which still isn't as bad as the Series X' 200+ GB install size however.

Whatever this game could have been is totally ruined by the fact that the hit-detection for keyboard and mouse is completely fucked. There are some legitimate improvements over the last game, the maps are slightly less infuriating and less porous, now when you get shot in the back it's because of the terrible spawns instead of the terrible map design. There are some fun little tweaks like including the head to head stats of whoever killed you last, it's fun to see that you've killed a guy 10 times in a row before he got you once, and it's motivating to be in the opposite position as well.

There's some bigger problems that many other people have pointed out, the weird change to killstreaks that feels like a half measure since, at the end of the day, the best way to get points is still getting a kill streak, now you just get insignificant progress from other actions taken in a match as well. However, if you play this game on PC, basically none of this matters. The fundamental problem I, and basically all of my friends, have with this game is that the hit-detection for the mouse just doesn't fucking work. I don't know why or how this happened, but it feels absolutely terrible. I played briefly on my PS4 controller to test if I was just dogshit at the new game but it confirmed my suspicions, these problems disappear once you switch to controller input. The only reason I spent as much time as I did with this shit is to level guns for Warzone, but eventually, I couldn't stand to play this even with that goal in mind. It sucks.

I am going to explain this in the absolute best way I can.

This game is comparable to heroine. Hear me out. This game has one of the worst and most broken skill based match making system which works maybe 2% of the time. It works like a broken car battery. Every time you do well in a game and achieve a KD of literally 1.0, their shitass algorithm will stick you in a game with the 2013 FaZe Clan for the next 5 games. Don't worry though, by around that fifth game, you will become the 2013 FaZe clan and absolutely slam dunk on some poor 7 year old.

This game is heroine because it pumps you with an extreme high then with one of the most dulling and depressing lows of your life, only to pump you with another high. However, just like heroine, those highs become lower and lower overtime until all you feel is anger, disgust, and shame.

This game is a shitshow dumpster fire and I cannot believe that Activision is making this much money off of such a shit product.

This game has absolutely nothing good going for it. Story mode is only 5-6 hours (which is the games highlight), gunsmith is uninspired and boring, zombies is good but then again it launched with a single zombies map and players are being banned for simply playing zombies. These developers obviously do not give a single fuck about their product and only care about outputting a product that will gain them money.

This game is a cashgrap and as a community we need to stop supporting this utter horseshit or else nothing will change.