The Games of 2024: Call of Duty Black Ops 6 (Patreon)

Call of Duty is comfort food. It’s laid back fun. It’s not some big, serious endeavor and the people treating it as such deserve just about any ridicule you can throw their way. I believe with an increasing firmness that professional esportists are ruining the perception of competitive games and you need look no further than the league of Call of Duty content creators who hit go on a stream every single year so they can tell you that they’re uninstalling because this year’s game is “so bad” and the spawns “are the worst they’ve ever been” and the weapons are “so unbalanced” and skill-based matchmaking is “ruining the game” while they foment conspiracies about “skill-based damage” or whatever else they want to say to justify why they aren’t winning every round anymore.

It doesn’t need to be this way, and Call of Duty’s popularity and increased availability via Game Pass this year make it the perfect game for just about anyone who wants to fuck around and shoot some people while talking to their college friends about… I don’t know, whatever college friends talk about. How drunk they got at some party 30 years ago, I guess. It’s a good time and that’s all it needs to be. You should check out this year’s game if you haven’t, it’s definitely one of the better ones they’ve made lately. It’s probably the most exciting a COD package has been since the 2019 reboot of Modern Warfare.

They get there this year by simplifying a few systems that had gotten out of control. Like hey, you can attach five things to your gun to make it shoot better, right? In the past a lot of these attachments had pros and cons that you had to balance out, like “sure, this rear grip is better at aiming, but the recoil on the gun is worse.” And it rarely gave you the hard numbers you needed to dig into these things and figure out what’s actually going on. Black Ops 6 course-corrects pretty hard on this point, reducing the overall number of attachments so you aren’t scrolling through 30 different gun stocks to figure out which one is the one for you. It also gives the remaining attachments clear benefits with very little downside. So it’s less about finding balance in each item and more about slapping on the items that cater to your playstyle. It’s a nice change.

The other big new thing is the ability to run and dive in any direction instead of just forward. This “omni-movement” lets you shuffle sideways and dive like a John Woo guy. It also lets you dive backwards down a flight of stairs, where you land (safely, somehow) and can attempt to surprise and shoot people at the bottom. It sets up a lot of neat action movie scenarios… but ultimately the diving and crazy stuff doesn’t feel like it brings anything vital to the game. Faster lateral and reverse movement is really handy, but the rest just feels like a new system for trick shot weirdos who want to spin around five times in the air and try to land a shot in the process. It doesn’t detract from the game, though, so overall it’s working out to be a positive addition.

The campaign being set in the 90s led to a lot of hand-wringing about how the Gulf War and Saddam Hussein would be handled in the context of a Call of Duty campaign. Remember, this is still the same franchise that inspired a lot of discussion around the war crimes they were pretty much forcing you to do just a few games ago. The over-the-top approach of this campaign falls somewhere between Cruise-era Mission: Impossible and full-on Fast & Furious in a way that at least partially neuters most attempts to take its source material seriously. I’m guessing that’s deliberate, but either way they’ve created a high-octane blockbuster sort of thing that puts you in a lot of ridiculous situations that are fun to deal with. They’ve found a way to include quieter moments in the gameplay without it seeming boring or forced. It’s a good time!

This also marks the return of “round-based zombies,” which seems to have been well-received by fans of “round-based zombies.” I could take it or leave it, I guess, but I did team up with a couple of friends (and a matchmade fourth who just kept messing things up) and shoot a bunch of zombies in the face. I think my main issues with the concept remain—they fill it full of easter eggs and things that you either need to look up online or get walked through them by someone else… who probably looked them up online. Long-winded schemes like “go to the bowling alley and hold down a button to open a valve to collect an object and then go blow open a door to the hardware store using a gun that only an enemy drops and then go dig through unmarked piles of trash and then blah blah blah” are fine once you know them, but I don’t know, man. It still works on the “voice chat with your friends while you do some video game stuff” scale, but it’s not really for me. That said, the weird vacuum gun you get at the end of the big, dumb chain of arcane objectives is pretty fun.

My recommendation is to ignore all the online discussions about how much or how little Call of Duty has impacted Game Pass subscriptions and, if you’re able, give it a shot. There’s just a whole lot of video game in here, and most of it is very well-made.