Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a fantastic first-person shooter game and one of the best installments in the popular franchise yet.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 feels like a throwback in the very best of ways. Lead developers Treyarch and Raven Software have smartly combined some of the most successful elements from entries across the long-running first-person shooter (FPS) series to craft a highly polished experience that excels in almost every regard.
Classic systems such as the traditional prestige mechanics, which offer the most dedicated online players the opportunity to partially reset their progress for exclusive rewards, or the simple but effective weapon attachments still haven’t lost their luster in 2024. It’s not all things that we’ve seen before though, as a handful of clever new innovations, like the flagship ‘omnimovement’ system, and the most high-fidelity graphics we’ve seen yet successfully drive the franchise forward and keep each facet of the experience feeling fresh.
The result is one of the best FPS games in almost a decade and a must-play for fans of the genre. There are still a couple of sore spots, like a handful of poorly designed multiplayer maps, that hold things back from total perfection, but, with plenty of new content on the way through a barrage of seasonal updates, the next twelve months of Call of Duty are well-positioned to be some of the greatest yet. On the run
The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign picks up roughly ten years after the story of 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Set in 1991, it’s loosely centered around the events of the Gulf War, though with more of an eye towards covert espionage than boots-on-the-ground conflict. You play as a group of CIA operatives, sent into Iraq to intercept the Iraqi Minister of Defense and bring him back to the government in one piece.
As you might expect, this simple task goes wrong in a matter of minutes when a mysterious military force emerges from the shadows to thwart your mission. Reunited with the fan-favorite rogue spy Russel Adler, it soon becomes apparent that this organization, known as Pantheon, has close ties with the CIA, forcing the team off the grid. It’s a classic Mission Impossible-style premise and, while nothing particularly complex or sophisticated, is a perfectly serviceable framework for a series of absolutely stellar set pieces.
Variety elevates every moment campaign, with all manner of surprising mechanics and environments crammed into its roughly nine-hour runtime. There’s a refreshingly open assassination segment early on, with a variety of possible approaches that incentivises at least a couple of replays. Later on, you’re stealthily infiltrating a political fundraising event, investigating different possible leads, and scanning clues with a high-tech spy camera before a hair-raising motorcycle chase.
One highly memorable mission even takes on a wholly unexpected survival horror edge, equipping you with an overpowered grapple hook and bombarding you with legions of imagined zombies and powerful boss monsters.
In between each mission, you’re sent back to your safehouse, which offers its own suite of activities. Levels are littered with cash, which can be hoovered up and spent on safehouse upgrades to unlock new perks and gear going forward. Quite a few puzzles are hidden across its grounds too, giving achievement hunters plenty of incentive not just to blitz through the story.
