Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War Review
need to know
What is it? Call of Duty in the Cold War Era
expect to pay $60
developer Raven Software, Treyarch, Beenox
Publisher Activision
audit date RTX 2060, Ryzen 5 2600 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM
multiplayer game? 12-40 players
go out November 13
association callofduty.com/blackopscoldwar
Talking about the new Call of Duty with friends and colleagues is never the same as our banter about other games. As an annual series defined by incremental changes to the formula, nitpicking is ingrained in the discourse. That’s certainly the case with Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, a game that isn’t quite as good as its predecessor. It’s not marred by unforgivable sins, but rather the accumulation of smaller flaws, like the feel of the gun or the way the map flows.
Despite a welcome tweak to Create-a-Class and a fun (if brief) campaign, Call of Duty was far better before. In fact, an even better Call of Duty game was released this year—the free-to-play battle royale Call of Duty: Warzone.
The longevity of the war zone made the Cold War harder to sell. There is no longer a de facto CoD. Starting in December, Activision will unify the progression of Warzone and the Cold War by sharing teams, weapons, battle passes and cosmetics. A rank earned in one will automatically go into the other. Both games have prominent home menu buttons that launch into the other game or seamlessly bring your party together. By merging into a bizarre FPS android, Call of Duty evolved in its own way into a single-service game center centered on Warzone.
The technology that brings the two together is impressive, but it’s not a steady transition for these very different shooters. Guns appearing in games like M4 and MP5 have mismatched ballistics and recoil patterns under different developers and engines. Looks like nearly identical attachments don’t change the same stats. Casually switching to Cold War after a few Warzone games is like jumping from a bike to a skateboard — the same idea, but different in every way. It’s no secret which of these competing philosophies will leave the greater legacy. Activision is betting the future of the series on Warzone, and for good reason. Cold War is good, but it distracts me from CoD that I’ll still be playing a year from now.
troublesome adjustment
Call of Duty has evolved in its own way as a single-service game center centered on Warzone.
One of the biggest problems with the Cold War was the time period itself. The 80’s setup works for recognizable guns like the MP5 and M4, but the effect on attachments is obvious. Since red dots and holographic sights were still early technologies at the time, there were far fewer long-range options with clear laser sights. The omission of other offbeat modifiers, like the below-hanging launcher, weapon perks, and hybrid sights, really stings. The weapons of modern warfare are malleable blueprints. In the Cold War, I was adjusting the sliders and didn’t see or feel much of the result. The sense of discovery and experimentation is diminished.
Aside from some neat 80s map destinations (like Miami or Moscow), the Cold War setting just gets in the way of multiplayer. Weapon selection is an odd middle ground between high-tech and historical, neither satisfying any extreme. Is it too much to ask for the humble AK-47 with its under-mounted shotgun and variable thermal range? Yes, since the 80’s.
Treyarch’s latest Create-a-Class does bring some improvements. Wildcards, class modifiers that have appeared in past Black Ops games, let you change the rules in some fun ways. I like the absurdity of Gunfighter, which lets you stick eight attachments to the gun instead of the usual five, although I doubt most players will stick with the Perk Greed wildcard to get three extra perks for free. I think that’s part of the reason why the perks were less impactful this time around. The perks in the first two slots are secondary bonuses for grenade resistance and cooldown. All the stealth-based perks I usually use to avoid drones (like Ghost) are relegated to the third position. The need for Ghost or Cold Blooded wastes a slot I’d rather use on a fun perk that lets me shoot while sprinting.
This is a roundabout way of saying that the killings are still there and unfortunately still prominent. Cold War switches back to Treyarch-style scoring, which counts all points, not just kills. Except now, streak progress doesn’t reset on death (making “streak” a completely false term). Keeping the streak going will help get them faster, but the new system even allows an idiot like me to carpet-bomb the map with napalm at least once per game. If this sounds like a recipe for messier than ever, you’d be right. In four different games, I shot down a helicopter just to watch another fly into airspace ten seconds later, and then again. Thanks, I hate it!
Ballistics was also a big step back from the Cold War. Call of Duty games have always struggled with low-tick servers that get you shot after dodging cover, but this is the worst feeling in years. Hit detection is slow, taking 5-7 frames after shooting to record a hit in Cold War (Modern Warfare consistently had a 3-frame lag in my tests). It’s hard to tell if this is the result of the server or just the lower bullet velocity.
Treyarch discovered a wealth of useful weapon data hidden in Modern Warfare. (Image credit: Activision)
Hit detection is only half the reason why gun shooting wasn’t fun during the Cold War. Modern Warfare (and Warzone’s expansion) sets a high bar with its deep, gritty sound. The LMG’s screams are louder than your teammates in your ears, and the near misses pop open the sound barrier like rubber bands. By contrast, Cold War-era guns sound like plastic knockoffs. My AK-47 rattles like a hollow aerosol can every time I shoot it, no matter what muzzle I put on it. Even the bass XM4 has the same qualities that have been around since the first Black Ops. Informational sounds like bullets are also less satisfying. MW’s bullet is a hypersonic drill bit that bites through Kevlar, while Cold War’s bullet is a softer impact.
By contrast, Cold War-era guns sound like plastic knockoffs.
Most of the modes you’d expect, like team deathmatch and domination, haven’t changed here, and it’s still a good time. Out of habit, I spend most of my time on the classics, but also because Treyarch’s new offering is a series of embarrassing failures.
VIP Escort is a turn-based single-player life mode in which a team must escort a pistol-equipped VIP to a pickup helicopter while the enemy hunts them down. I know from other shooters that this pattern of his can be fun, but it’s limited to the kind of cooperative teams that rarely come together in random pairings. I’m praying at every game that the VIP doesn’t just get caught in a hail of bullets and end the game in seconds.
I prefer last year’s Cyber Attack, a twist on Search and Destroy, where both teams can place bombs and revive teammates. It has a great tug-of-war dynamic where advantages tend to change multiple times before anyone emerges from the pack. VIP isn’t a worthy replacement, but at least the standard Search and Destroy is still there. There’s also Dirty Bomb, a turf war on a squad-based 40-player map. It’s a bit like Ground War, with free squad rules for battle royale. Like Ground War, it’s a messy mess and I probably won’t be coming back.
Surprisingly, I’m going back to zombies. I’ve never liked how complicated this mod has become over the years, so I’m glad Cold War is back to basics. The clutter of power-ups has been condensed into a few Perk machines scattered across the map and ultimate abilities that can be permanently upgraded outside the game. Less time saving perks, which freed me up to waste points on mystery boxes trying to get ray guns.
There was only one map at launch, but there seemed to be a lot of challenges and Easter eggs to solve. Unlike earlier zombie maps that confine players to claustrophobic murder houses, Cold War’s map has plenty of open space to fly kites around zombie swarms and pick them up at leisure. There’s more Left 4 Dead than ever, which is always a good sign.
(Image credit: Activision)
left handed
The granularity of the Cold War setup cannot be overemphasized. Everything under the sun has graphics options – the first ray traced game I’ve seen, with separate values for ray traced sun shadows, partial shadows, and ambient occlusion. I also used Nvidia’s low-latency reflex mode (unenhanced) and didn’t notice any noticeable difference when flicking the head.
There’s also a ridiculously specific “Monitor Distance Factor” slider that normalizes mouse sensitivity for each zoom level. I’ve never considered my monitor’s factor, but I’ll never make that mistake again! For a rare controller player on PC, there’s a mile-long list of sliders to fine-tune stick acceleration and aim assist.
A semi-obscured missing piece is remappable controller configuration, an essential accessibility feature in 2020. Unfortunately, Cold War sticks to the age-old tradition of preset controller mappings with silly names like “Charlie” and “Single Pistol Man” instead of fully remappable buttons. When it comes to accessibility, Cold War can do better. We’ve written about its well-designed colorblind mode before, but other increasingly common features, like text-to-speech, haven’t panned out. If Rainbow Six Siege can revamp its dusty bones with proper accessibility five years from now, a shiny new CoD should at least match it.
all the president’s men
Performance
At the start of the Cold War, Beenox’s PC port was already more stable than 2019’s Modern Warfare. On a mid-range PC (RTX 2060, Ryzen 5 2600 3.4GHz) running at 1080p, I can maintain a solid 80-90 fps high with no issues. Turning on ray tracing dropped to an unsteady 60 fps, so I’d happily turn it off. One highlight is DLSS, which I kept in quality mode but still improved my average performance. Unfortunately, these nice shadows come at the cost of a shader installation, which took me almost 20 minutes on the first boot. If Modern Warfare is any indication, a similar install is required after every major patch, even after changing the GPU.
It’s almost impressive that the Call of Duty campaign is close to the original without actually changing it. When it was first announced, I hoped that Cold War (the first campaign led by Raven Software) could be an opportunity to get us out of helicopter crashes, turret sequences, and slow-motion door-breaks that could fill Call of Duty bingo Card. The Cold War still does all that, but it’s not entirely free of espionage.
An early mission, Wall Bricks, was almost entirely sneaking through the streets of East Berlin in search of the story’s villain, a clueless Soviet operative codenamed Perseus. In this mission, Cold War flirts with a bunch of non-Call of Duty stuff, like enemy markers, stealth knockdowns, and even a Fallout-style lockpicking minigame. So cool! But it was over in minutes, just in time for a vigorous firefight. Moscow’s late game levels followed a similar arc. What started as a neat killer infiltration of KGB headquarters eventually morphed into another mandatory wave-based shootout.
Many of the campaign’s best qualities are underexplored or fleeting. Between missions, you can have optional dialogue with allies who have branching dialogue trees. They’re a fun way to learn more about characters, but they’re too short. The same goes for the story’s two inconsequential side quests, one of which repurposes the multiplayer map. These are especially annoying because the way you unlock them is pretty cool. Technically, both missions can be played early in the story, but…
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