Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (BETA)

I’ve not bought a Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 2. Every time I see a new one I just think ‘I can just play MW2 again’. The multiplayer may be dead, but the campaign is still super fun and the Spec Ops mode is fantastic with a friend. I do keep trying them though, which is why I wanted to give Black Ops 6 a shot.

And sure enough it’s . . . more Call of Duty. The years go by and the names may change but Call of Duty stays the same. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Black Ops 6 is fast, frantic and utterly chaotic. The maps range from small to absolutely tiny. One map is essentially just a big open room. It’s not unusual to die almost immediately upon spawn because of how fast and easy it is for players to circle the map and come around behind you.

And you can do the same to them. So many times I’d see two or three enemies just spawn in before me and I’d mercilessly mow them down. But so what, right? It happens to them and it happens to you. Within seconds you’re back in the match and within seconds you’re dead again. Sometimes you’ll go on a streak, but it feels more like luck than skill or good judgement.

The maps are quite open, so you’re often going to get shot from about seventeen different directions at once. And because they’re all so small, there’s no real sense of order or flow to a map. No aggressive pushes forward or tactical retreats. No tactics at all, really. Everyone just runs around (or falls around in this case) shooting everything that moves and tossing grenades about like candy.

Why not toss them? Even if you can’t see the enemy the maps are so tiny that you’ll probably hit something. I killed dozens of enemy players with totally blind grenade tosses just out of pure luck. When the maps are this small, you can’t really miss.

It’s pure chaos. Is it fun? Sort of, I suppose. But I only played the Beta for about 5 hours before I gave up on it. Not because it was bad, as such. I guess I just didn’t find the matches particularly satisfying. Win or lose, none of it feels like it really matters. Everything happens so fast and feels so random that even if you play well you just don’t feel any sense of accomplishment.

You get your XP. You get your level up and unlocks. Everything is instantly forgotten and you move onto the next. It’s like the takeaway junk food of gaming. I’m actually surprised how well I did during a lot of my matches considering I’ve not played any competitive shooter, let alone a CoD game for years.

But like I said, I didn’t really feel like I’d done well because so many of my kills felt more like luck. A few times I got the ‘play of the match’ or whatever but like so many others I saw, it’s only because I was fortunate and killed three or four players looking the wrong way in a row. That’s not good play, it’s just a tiny map in which I got lucky with my spawn and they got unlucky with theirs.

I was also kind of confused by the player and weapon skins. I thought this game was set during the Gulf War? So why do I have what looks like a zombie in riot gear on my team? And why does that guy have a purple glowy gun? What the f**k is going on? I guess this is normal now? Is this CoD now? What happened to period appropriate weapons and team skins? I guess the weapons (skins aside) seem okay. But why did I just kill a bloody cyborg?

It feels like CoD has evolved into something far beyond what I recall. It’s now a service platform as much as it is a game. I found that out when I wanted to download the beta and discovered I first needed to download the Call of Duty platform application, through which I then had to set up an Activision Account, and then I had to pick the Black Ops 6 Beta from within that app, in order to launch the separate Black Ops 6 app and . . . f**king hell it never used to be this tedious.

I can’t say I didn’t have any fun with this beta, but CoD – the multiplayer at least – has clearly evolved into something I’m just not very engaged by. Win or lose. Kill or die. None of it feels like it matters. The new ‘omni-movement’ or whatever just results in everyone pointlessly throwing themselves to the ground every few seconds. That was fine with me – I just stayed on my feet and shot them. The kids really seem to love it though given what I heard through the open mics before I blanket muted everybody.