Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Review: A stunning return to form

Black Ops takes us back to the '90s with action-packed multiplayer and a stealthy spy thriller campaign.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is a stellar return to form for the series. It shows why the rotating formula has kept it atop sales charts with each annual instalment after a consecutive dose of Modern Warfare 2 + 3, which fell flat with an expansion masquerading as a full price release last year. Black Ops 6 is the course correction we were looking for.

There’s been a trend of excellent reboots in the CoD universe followed by tired sequels. CoD WW2 and CoD Modern Warfare returned to the franchise’s key roots in 2017 and 2019 respectively to critical acclaim, but didn’t get there again with direct sequels. Black Ops, while not dormant for as long, had its turn for a renewed direction with Black Ops Cold War in 2020, and delivered one of the series’ best campaigns.

History would suggest that Black Ops 6, the first since Microsoft acquired the franchise and launched it day one on Game Pass, would be hard-pressed to follow that success. But I’m delighted to find it’s bucked the trend and gone one better, at least on the campaign front.

Black Ops 6 campaign review: a spectacular spy thriller

Black Ops 6 follows Black Ops Cold War as a more intimate, individualistic, slower paced campaign. It still presents some challenging shootouts against rooms swarming with bad guys – and even jokes at times rhetorically asking if they brought enough goons – but you’re infiltrating behind-the-scenes more often than commanding the frontline.

Like its predecessor, Black Ops 6‘s campaign was led by Raven Software and is more of an espionage thriller than military action saga. It opens early-on with the mandatory helicopter crash, but this time you’re the one shooting it down, which in many ways serves as reintroduction to the Black Ops tone – this isn’t Modern Warfare. Actually, it’s not modern at all.

Following the Cold War, Black Ops 6 opens in 1991 with a broken, but not beaten, Frank Woods anchoring the narrative. It juxtaposes threats of deadly bioweapons, against former heroes still functioning as relics from the Cold War, as Woods’ crew of operatives use all their wit to fight a dangerous new faction known as the Pantheon.

It follows the blueprint of Black Ops Cold War, with encouragement to play as a stealthy spy, but this time offers more flexibility to deliver an all-time great Call of Duty story – even if it does steadily grow more outlandish towards the finish line.

Most of the campaign is very well paced, and includes a nice mix of varied stealth and action with plenty of flexibility. This ranges from blending in undetected, to remaining covert as you get into position, to having a genuine choice to keep the silencer on or go weapons hot. The more murderous missions often encourage stealth to start before shooting your way out, but guns blazing from the outset or sneaking past a room full of goons are nearly always options.

There’s also a great selection of missions that give you the right amount of choice in how to complete an objective. It’s enough to channel Bond or Bourne, but not too much as to divert off course from the tight CoD narrative structure.

An early mission has you blend in at a function for US presidential hopeful Bill Clinton. You need to fabricate a retinal scan of a scandalous senator in attendance – the pinnacle of ‘90s spy thriller technology – to gain access to a secure area. There are several ways to approach this, all laid out for you, with the affable agent playbook to charm information from his disgruntled wife perched at the bar. Although, we don’t quite go full 007 – she’s all business.

There isn’t a gun in sight for most of the mission. But this is Call of Duty, after all, and the alarm is eventually triggered to ensure a climatic firefight on the way out. I wouldn’t want it every year, but this slower mix of story, stealth and action is my preferred way to play a CoD campaign now. These stealth focused stories are also well intersected by more traditional military moments in the Middle East against the backdrop of the Gulf War, providing a nice balance in gameplay.

Between missions, there’s ample downtime to get to know the other operatives in the renovator’s delight HQ manor. With intel collectibles long gone, missions are littered with cash that can be spent adding new functions to the base and unlocking abilities – it’s basically the customisation of multiplayer weaved into campaign.

This break between missions is reminiscent of ’90s and early-2000s spy films, and while the limited dialogue trees don’t impact the story, they do support world-building. For those who like to poke around, there are also former KGB artifacts to uncover throughout the manor to make it worthwhile exploring.

Weapons feel fantastic in campaign, with satisfying headshots and a tough-but-fair challenge on veteran difficulty. Following the trend of flexibility, gadgets can be interchanged on the fly, so you’re not stuck with the remote bomb RC car for an entire mission – which reminds us we’re in the ‘90s by sending your current-gen 4K display to a VHS-esque remote feed.

The carefully crafted structure of missions also requires you to cycle through different weapons. Often after the silenced handgun has served its purposed, you’re picking up discarded weapons and depleting their ammo. It’s a natural way to force variety, and may even convince some players to change up their multiplayer loadouts more often.

Black Ops 6 multiplayer review: Omnimoving in the right direction

I love the Modern Warfare series, but two games in a row had me suffering from a serious MW hangover. It became bloated and overdone. I’m ready for change, and Black Ops 6 has delivered with a faster, snappier and all-round very Treyarch multiplayer offering. From the outset, Black Ops 6 is much cleaner (more on the CoD Hub in a moment). It’s easier to get into a game and see what matters.

Playing across both PS5 and Xbox Series X with a 120Hz display, Black Ops 6 is a buttery smooth multiplayer experience. It’s tight and heavily contested, taking learnings from arena shooters, favouring relatively close quarters combat across smaller maps. For anyone else platform hoping – perhaps more prevalent now CoD is on Game Pass – progress syncs to your Activision account and carries across platforms, not just console families.

Movement feels amazing, thanks to the new Omnimove system, which adds plenty of flair and has you flying around the map. Not quite as literally as the era of CoD that was obsessed with verticality and double jumping, but it’s not too far off. For the constant sprinters (one of us!), you’ll settle into a groove and enjoy the feeling of speed, without requiring much else. The sliders and divers, meanwhile, will spend most of their time horizontal at extreme pace.

I’d expect some balancing tweaks over the next few weeks. The Omnimove system clearly overpowers some techniques – I’m looking at you, shotgun-sliders and Max Payne sideways-divers – but overall, it’s a great experience at launch.

Most of the maps are serviceable and suit this tight and satisfying combat loop. At such a frantic pace, you’re rarely out of the action. The smaller maps funnel players together, but have enough obstacles and corners to keep things interesting, while ensuring most areas are accessible from enough angles to crack down on campers – that’s not how this CoD is meant to be played.

The weaker maps are the bigger ones, which waste space. The kill-to-death time is still short, but they just aren’t as engaging with too many dead zones and are the likely contenders to be skipped as time goes on. As a collection, it’s an atlas of maps that are decent and fit for purpose, but aren’t overly memorable. None leap out as instant classics we’ll be seeing again, but nor do any have me racing to vote against them, at least not yet.

Like the campaign, the gunplay in multiplayer is smooth and satisfying. It’s much lighter and less weighty than the Modern Warfare duo. That’s exactly what we’d expect from a faster combat loop, and it’s a big part of why I’m really digging my return to Black Ops; it’s quick and fun, even if we’ve lost some of the realism in weaponry and individual variation between how guns feel.

Multiplayer is quick and snappy, and with the right temperament, you’ll be picking off headshots in no time. It’s also not all about speed, with players rewarded for taking the right moments to slow down. CoD has had automatic peeking around corners for a while, but it’s normally been a little clunky. This is the first time I’ve naturally incorporated it into my strategy without thinking about it.

There’s no big 64-player mode like Ground War this year, reflecting changing player tastes and the (hopefully temporary) fall of Battlefield, as much as the narrowed focus of Black Ops. It wouldn’t suit what Black Ops 6 does best, and I appreciate the focus on smaller quicker battles, which seem to be more popular than slow sprawling battlefields at the moment.

Kill Order is the newcomer and while I like it, I’m not sure it has legs in the CoD community. It’s effectively Team Deathmatch with the addition of one active HVT (high valued target) per team. Everyone gets their turn to play that role, with both your team’s and the opposition’s always marked on-screen.

Killing the HVT earns additional score, while the HVT has extra health and can be revived by teammates – so they tend to rack up regular kills to keep the scoreboard ticking. It’s a nice way to introduce an objective element for those TDM’ers who really only want to shoot people, but I’m not seeing a great deal in the way of teams protecting their HVT or coordinating to eliminate the enemy’s. There are plenty of opportunities for last minute victories though, with a late HVT kill or loss making a big difference.

Many moons ago, pre-pandemic, I was a regular among a contingent of Aussies who flew to the US to intently play the upcoming Call of Duty with a bunch of other journos and developers in a controlled environment. We’d often play that year’s new mode intently and really enjoy it in that controlled setting with all players in the same room. But then the game would launch, and in the real world, Call of Duty players do their own thing. These types of modes become niche, and I suspect once the dust settles, Kill Order will fall into that camp.

The likes of Domination, Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint and Headquarters always rise to the top as the objective based modes, as players can contribute to team success without being a team player. Black Ops 6 really commits to these more-than-murdering modes, with Treyarch’s preference for scores over kills. Scoreboard-watchers will see their objective scores, but not straight kills and deaths in these modes. It’s always great to see support for those passionate about playing the objective first and foremost.

Call of Duty launcher on consoles is still rubbish

One of the biggest disappointments this year has nothing to do with Black Ops 6 – it’s how we’re forced to access it. For the third year running, Activision has stuck with the terrible Call of Duty HQ launcher, which doesn’t make any sense for the user experience on consoles.

While Black Ops 6 wipes part of the slate clean and is much easier to navigate than Modern Warfare 3 became, I suspect that’s only a matter of time as the seasons roll-on. It’s still a ridiculously bloated app. Playing on Xbox, my console took the initiative to download Black Ops 6, which is a meagre 95GB or so. But with previous content still installed, it was pushing 350GB in total – about the usable storage space of a Series S. That can be managed fairly easily for more tech savvy players, but I suspect the endless list of 10MB add-ons will confuse plenty of casual fans.

Achievements are a nightmare, as the BO6 list is at the bottom. If you’re playing through the Call of Duty launcher for the first time on Xbox, perhaps with Game Pass, you’ll be clogged up by 2000GS for games you don’t even have, but Xbox assumes you do, as this is technically DLC for it. Over on PS5, the lists are separated by game, so it’s much easier to see what you’re aiming for in Black Ops 6. But it’s still an add-on, which means no Platinum trophy, which is extremely disappointing.

To cap it all off, the content left uninstalled still clutters up the CoD launcher, even without wasting SSD space. In the short term, most players who just bought Black Ops 6 will only be playing Black Ops 6, but they still need to force their way through multi-CoD menus to get there.

Activision – this is a horrible user experience, and once I put it down for a few weeks, it deters me from playing CoD. You’re charging us for full separate games, so release them as full separate games. Please.

Black Ops 6 verdict (TL;DR)

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is a spectacular return to form, after Modern Warfare 3 fumbled blurring the line between expansion and sequel. We were ready for something different, and that’s exactly what it has delivered with speedy and satisfying multiplayer and a highly engaging and well-paced espionage thriller campaign that’s one of the best in the Call of Duty series. With excellent gunplay across all modes and an addictive combat loop, Black Ops 6 is the best Call of Duty game so far this console generation.

8.5

GREAT

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 was reviewed on Xbox Series X and PS5 using Xbox Game Pass and a promotional code provided by the publisher, respectively. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.