➤ Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the review 🎮

This year it is particularly difficult to write the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 review. With the previous chapters, the slavish re-proposition of the contents had made it almost mechanical to write an article: we started from the campaign, listed the various technical elements that made it up and differentiated it from multiplayer, we observed and judged the direction, the acting, the choice of the protagonists and the pace of the game, and then move on to multiplayer with its novelties and the zombie campaign to close the circle. These three elements may or may not be appreciated, high quality or problematically crafted as they were with Call of Duty: Ghosts, but the pillars of the Activision brand have always been there to give the certainty of hundreds of hours of gameplay to an audience of enthusiasts grown out of all proportion over the years, to the point of ensuring the series a success that could be regardless of the sum of its components. This obviously does not mean that all the games of the brand had the same quality, on the contrary, but at least the public already knew what to find as soon as they bought the game and then started it on console or PC.

This year, as we said, things change, given that the new Call of Duty completely abandons the singleplayer campaign to follow a market that is now the ram's heads of esports and spectacularity to break through between communities and influencers. Just watch Twitch over the past few years to understand how the campaign's advertising boost had lost any strength, leaving only competitive modes and zombie maps to drive the title's popularity in the months following its launch. Activision with Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 makes a particular move and, instead of trying to trace a path of success that can be imitated by other shooters, he subverts the rules by bowing to the market, inserting the much discussed Battle Royale mode within the production. This year, therefore, we find ourselves with the need to evaluate a product that loses an important piece of its essence, gaining others, for a final package that today more than ever will be difficult for the public to digest but that can easily be understood, justified and accepted. willingly by those who approach the game without prejudice.

The campaign disappears, the multiplayer remains

No more singleplayer campaign therefore: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, with a swipe of the sponge abandons all the protagonists of recent years. No Alex Mason, no Captain Price, no Frank Woods and not even any bad guy to stimulate that patriotic spirit that has always drawn a deep groove on the entire narrative line of CoD. And all of this happens just when development is in the hands of Treyarch, which with the last three episodes has been able to demonstrate that singleplayer campaigns could still have an extraordinary value, so much so that they could offer breathtaking moments, epic scenes and new surprising ideas, such as the crossroads missions of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 just for do an example. Yet all this fanfare Call of Duty players have almost never heard, because the appreciation statistics and especially the completion statistics say that the CoD series campaign has always been marginal for buyers. With a cold mind and with choices to make on the plate, then, right to cut it, right to push on the contents that go the most at the moment, right to insert Black Out and leverage on Battle Royale and right even more to experiment new mechanics in the multiplayer that, in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, is not only fun and successful but will also thrill those who watch and play it for dozens of hours a day.

Treyarch has therefore abandoned the double jumps, the jetpacks and everything that exaggerated the strategies of engagement, to find a perfect blend between the famous "feet on the ground" seen in Call of Duty: WWII and the time to kill of Black Ops III. If you have tried the beta of Call of Duty Black Ops 4 you will discover on your skin that in the final version of the game you die a little faster, leaving the habits unchanged for those who come directly from the old chapters. Certainly in this way the heals, which are now no longer automatic but must be activated through a special ability, are no longer so easy to use and almost always require you to stay out of combat for a few moments in order to benefit from them. The amendment to game system it still managed, it puts in place more things to think about and new strategies to be implemented in order to grind kill on kill. Kills that are needed and indispensable to recall the new Score Streak, which refer to the canons of the series. Reconnaissance UAVs and supply crates are the easiest to obtain, until you can make use of swarms of drones, battle helicopters or automated bombers, nothing really new under the sun. Remaining in line with past chapters, the pick ten, the possibility that is to choose ten between perks and attachments in order to create your own favorite class, a solution that is always promoted and definitely valid both for variety and for the flexibility offered to players.

Adding to all this comes the role of the specialists, nothing more than a new way to equip fighters with a devastating special move in cooldown. Ten characters and the same number of skills, more or less useful depending on the game modes, with, in addition, a second additional skill to be used with an accelerated frequency. The aforementioned skills are nothing shocking or particularly original and draw inspiration from other shooters on the market, such as Destiny 2 or Overwatch, just to stay at Activision. It is an effective solution to bring freshness and align with other successful titles without risking excessively.

In short, many elements for one gameplay di Call of Duty Black Ops 4 which first of all amuses, is spectacular and seems not to be boring, with lots of specialists to use as specific counters and in team strategies, useful in this fourth chapter as never before. The fog of war closes the circle of the big news on gameplay, an element that is structured around the mini map, showing on the radar the enemies within our and teammates' field of action and vision, placing communication and collaboration to new levels.

Maps: since the dawn of time the heart has not changed

The entire play system holds up over the years and still works sublime especially thanks to the new additions, but Treyarch has not limited itself to renewing the gameplay mechanics. The Call of Duty Black Ops 4 maps they are more extensive and offer a variety never seen before: with the arrival of specialists, in fact, it was necessary to give each game area different solutions to access and hide, so as to favor a large number of strategies. We can then rely on thermal sights and keep the long corridors under fire or choose assault rifles for hand-to-hand combat, remaining aware that with such a wide range of solutions we will need our comrades to back us up to win. Don't get us wrong, Call of Duty: Black ops 4 has not become a team game à la Rainbow Six: Siege and neither does it want to be, but it is clear that in competitive, effective and complementary compositions will be sought, much more than in the past. of classes and specialists.

And then there are new game modes to flesh out the offer as Heist where, with an eye winked at Counterstrike, we will have to steal a bag of money and gradually buy more and more performing equipment; Control that will ask instead to conquer two objectives before the time runs out; the great classics such as Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed and Hardpoint also return. You could then try to come up with something strange like the old Uplink or Gungame, even if in all probability these marginal variants will be added at a later time. Finally, for singleplayer lovers, know that you can play a whole series of challenges for specialists which will then unlock the related skins on Black Out, short tutorials to get a general and complete picture of the skills available and useful to give a background to each character present, with always very violent scenes and the typical action of Black Ops, obviously based on multiplayer maps and modes.

The biggest zombie pack ever

And here we are to deepen the Call of Duty Black Ops 4 zombie mode, a mode that has not only stood out over the years for being the real engine of Call of Duty's downloadable content, but has always shown that it has a huge slice of fans ready to squeeze every square inch of the maps to steal all the secrets. Black Ops 4 then, to make up for the lack of the canonical singleplayer, throws three brand new campaigns into the cauldron, each with unique mechanics and settings.

This zombie year has made a lot of talk about itself, if only because the setting shown during the reveal in Los Angeles showed clashes in ancient Rome based on axes and flails, letting the imagination roam free towards a new system. hand-to-hand combat or other peculiarities of the genre. Let's say that reality is slightly distant and if it is true that there are some very powerful specific weapons for close combat, the mechanics at the base will be the same for all three campaigns, with the need to kill the zombies, discover the secrets and survive to the waves so as to arm themselves to perfection and arrive to complete the tumultuous path.

It is nice to discover while playing that the maps present all have particularly different level designs: IX it is circular and makes little use of verticality, pitting explosive tigers and gigantic gladiators against you; Voyage of Despair, set on the Titanic, will have you running back and forth from stern to bow between demonic portals and Oscar-free DiCaprio hungry only for your brain while Blood of the Dead, inspired by the Mob of the Dead map of Black Ops 2 will throw you within the walls of Alcatraz with well-known characters and cerberi to feed.

Very varied settings therefore, united by a system of character growth extremely thorough. More than the mechanics of the individual maps, in fact, which we will explore in depth in a series of subsequent specials, we would like to point out that in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Zombie hides a system of Perks all new. In fact, it will be possible to choose four elixirs to bring into battle, permanent cooldown power ups to be activated at the most propitious moments. The recovery times are usually short and allow you to implement interesting strategies and to facilitate the game on the most complex difficulties: you can unlock them through ampoules to be mixed, receiving the ingredients at the end of each match, or buying them through the shop, with more bonuses. rare products offered in the form of consumables. Then there are consumable talismans able to give you a buff for the whole game, perks to select for passive bonuses to damage or statistics and even special weapons: ultra to use at the most propitious moment to cause great damage and untangle yourself from the most situations. complicated.

As for the multi in short, everything seems to have been made more modern, without ever distorting the game and always giving players so much quantity and possibility of customization, apparently essential elements for this latest Call of Duty. Complete the whole special Rush mode, a sort of score mode, where to kill zombies in series in the aforementioned maps as quickly as possible, for the sole purpose of setting new records and climbing the world rankings.

Blackout Mode: Hunt for 60 FPS against 100 other players

The market has moved in a very clear direction over the past couple of years, fully promoting i Battle Royale as a new entertainment flagship genre. Whether it is a fashion or something more, this is not the right place to sanction it, but what interests us is that Treyarch has not been able to resist the charm of these mega XNUMX-player battles, so much so that we want to propose them also in their new title.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 therefore welcomes the Blackout mode and it does it in the most classic way possible: a hundred challengers will be thrown on an island and will have to do everything to survive as a deadly zone tightens around them. The game mechanics they are not innovative at all, if we exclude the presence of zombies in some specific areas, but the effort made by Treyarch to adapt the gunplay to a game system completely different from multiplayer games and which, in fact, lives in a completely autonomous system. Although Blackout still does not drive us crazy, the commitment to completely rewrite a physics system for bullets must be acknowledged to the developers, a factor not trivial if we think about the good number of weapons involved. Yes, because Blackout takes inspiration more from Playerunknown's Battlegrounds than from Fortnite, allowing the player to mount attachments of various kinds on their favorite guns, including optics with differentiated zooms, silencers, increased magazines and so on. Blackout is a huge playground for fans, but technically it has to make some compromises to stay fluid and playable.

Not all textures are of high quality, a necessary choice in order not to excessively weigh down the game map which is really huge, functional and full of differentiated biomes, but above all to be able to keep the 60 FPS that distinguish the whole package fluid. As soon as you touch the ground you immediately understand how the pace of the game is completely different than usual, without the map illuminated by tracers and explosions. Blackout, in its current form, leaves you time to think, to stock up on medkits and armor but also gives you the feeling of being in constant and pressing conflict, with blows hissing in the distance and a considerable viewing distance from which to glimpse. the enemies. There is also no shortage of vehicles and aircraft, from the arcade driving model and not too successful, especially for the four wheels, for a mode that, at least at the moment, would seem to be an end in itself.

It will therefore be necessary to see over the next few months how Treyarch will decide to support Blackout, if new skins will be introduced, perhaps for a fee, and if this project will be able to become so important for Activision to transform into something bigger than a simple alternative mode to multiplayer. . We'll find out in the coming months, obviously when the servers fill up with players and the community comes to life. The seed has been planted, we look forward to the first sprout.

Comment

Tested version PlayStation 4 Price 66.90 € Resources4Gaming.com

8.5

Readers (136)

6.1

Your vote

As we wrote in our review Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 loses the singleplayer campaign but this does not diminish the value of the package for the millions of players who flock to online servers every year. It is precisely in multiplayer then that there is a quantity of content at the launch never seen before, with three zombie campaigns, a competitive refined and enriched by many new variables and the Battle Royale mode capable, perhaps, of attracting new audiences. Call of Duty becomes a de facto exclusively multiplayer title, taking a well-defined but risky path, a value package that has been able to entertain and conquer us. Our advice is to welcome it with open arms without thinking too nostalgically about the past, the rewards are all there waiting for you.