Today we are going to analyze Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War game. Imagine being very good at something. Not that you’re just good at it, mind you, I’m talking about being really remarkable. To dethrone kings and raise revolutions. To mark the way so that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, wants to be like you. Imagine being Call of Duty 10 years ago.
Ventilate at a stroke to a consecrated saga like Medal of Honor, get the rest of the FPS to look at you before even breathing, make even games previously focused on a campaign mode rethink the need to have a multiplayer mode. And now imagine being Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and saying that, despite all this, what you want is to be something else.
A different campaign, for better and for worse
Not an evolution and improvement of your classic formulas. Neither the usual more and better. No. Something completely different that leaves aside the popcorn, excessive and kaffir action that you do so well to focus on, I don’t know, the people who run on the walls, or the jetpacks, or how it happens in this new Black Ops Cold War : stealth, decision making, and even pencil and paper investigation.
Why? I dont know. Perhaps for a simple ” because I want to and because I can.” As in the crisis of the 40s that invites those who have never taken one to get on a motorcycle, with the danger that this entails.
Funny how, in that effort to stop and think about what makes you special and exploit it to the fullest, Modern Warfare 2019 has become what Black Ops once represented and, on the other hand, Black Ops – the saga of the irreverent and excess Within the Call of Duty family, it has become a kind of headless chicken that seeks to be what it is not with greater or lesser fortune. Not only because of this edition, but because of the recent string of unsuccessful revolutions that it carries behind its back.
And yet Black Ops Cold War gets away with it. He does his somersault limiting his Michael Bay spirit and falls more or less on his feet when trying, at times and with limited success, to be Dishonored, The Stanley Parable or LA Noire. A very risky stunt in which the sequences and the spirit that have brought the series to this point end up being a mere mirage of other games and installments of the franchise.
Ideas that can be liked or even dazzled, there is material and budget for it, but that always end up being little more than a mere reflection of the idea they are trying to emulate . Even in what makes it a Call of Duty there is the memory of another example with more weight and strength than shown here.
Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War: Half-baked ideas
To display various buttons. The first of them is its story, which, as in the case of Modern Warfare, updates the classic idea that we already saw in Black Ops as a restart. A web of spies and international entanglements, also of numbers and syringes, unable to hide a twist that ends up being seen from the league.
True to the idea of keeping the game alive for another year, even more so than what happened with Modern Warfare last year, the ending is most anticlimactic , looking more like the cliffhanger of a series that will continue next week. . A strange enough situation to go to make other decisions and see what the other endings offer, only to discover with surprise that the one I had experienced was actually ” the good one “.
With a strange structure that has you jumping from one mission to another as soon as you braking in front of a clue board, the game invites you to collect additional objectives that add more information about cases that should be deciphered before entering side missions . An invitation to replay the missions, or to do it more calmly, with the intention of emerging triumphant from those optional challenges .
The problem is, such challenges are overly simple in the first place and don’t even require you to comply with that so-called investigation. You can play them and complete them with the only fear that, once you reach the end, the line you will hear when someone stops to talk about it will be one or the other. No more.
In fact, there are only two levels , because the campaign is so short that there is no room for more. Of these, one is a brand new scenario, while the other is a recycled multiplayer map where you can run from here to there while dodging the bullets of posted enemies. Good idea, but weak execution.
Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War: When experiments go well, they go very well
It might seem that the problem is being excessively conservative in the face of these developments, but nothing could be further from the truth. I celebrate and embrace them, but I couldn’t help having the feeling of being before a hodgepodge of ideas with as good a background as little ambition.
It saves, by far, a formidable mission in which we are asked to infiltrate the KGB as if we were at a level of a classic Medal of Honor .
A job that we carry out from within and fulfilling different objectives while we choose different decisions – such as getting the papers that are asked of us or stealthily eliminating and hiding the bodies of those who are hindering us.
Tremendous on a narrative level, with a great stage design, and an example of how to maintain the tension and scale the ending with a climax that, yes, is already pure Call of Duty . Is this what the saga should be from here on? It seems perfect to me, but you must clarify your ideas and put efforts where you touch so that everything shines equally
And, above all, it’s time to find another way to recycle ideas -or avoid singing too much. We have already played the test city inside an immense building in this franchise, the lucid dreaming thing too and, if you’re going to make something explode and go over your head once again, the display of excesses and self-mockery on the Call of Duty WWII train already did infinitely better.
A multiplayer without much fanfare, but just as fun
Not happier but certainly more as multiplayer leaves me. Here they once again show off their passion for experiments with a somewhat twisted class creation instead of limiting themselves to the classic Pick-10 from the exalted Black Ops 2, all with the intention of making room for the already modified premium weapons that Incidentally, they strike me as a considerable balancing problem.
But to Caesar what is Caesar’s. The weapons feel really good and there are maps to frame for their fantastic design. On the side of glory, a warehouse with a disassembled plane in the center that perfectly combines the best of two worlds as disparate as Hijack and Terminal.
On the side of rejection, however, maps like Miami that we could play in the beta. A labyrinth of nooks and crannies that will delight campers and those who enjoyed the placement of buildings with no rhyme or reason in the Ghosts style, but far removed from the three-lane concept that players like me keep coming to Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War.
Good for democratizing the kill streaks , which now do not renew the counter after dying and will allow any player to drop even one UAV per game. It’s far from a game-breaking gift that detracts from great players.
It is still moderately difficult to access a helicopter, for example, so the only fear it presents is that it runs the risk of giving us skies constantly full of junk as it already happened in deliveries like Modern Warfare 3.
I have already made my position very clear regarding the modes with tanks, boats and large-scale jet skis more typical of a Battlefield than a Call of Duty. As in the case of the attempts to be something else in the campaign, here it does not come off particularly well either. The whole life, on the other hand, continues to work like a shot.
Great news for some very conservative zombies
We close with the last key section in any Black Ops worth its salt and, above all else, the one that has always been my favorite mode of this saga. Here, where Treyarch really breaks down and plays everything for everything with the craziest and most successful experiments of the entire franchise, this time they are limited to return to the origins with a map much more bland than usual.
To put ourselves in the situation, let us bear in mind that we come from the Titanic, from Alcatraz, from a huge city in which to move from here to there with a tram, and from a bus trip with stops in spooky locations. It is no small thing.
Here we have a field with a ruined building and a small underground bunker. And that’s it. At certain moments you change dimension, which means going through the same map but with more colors, but it is easy that in a couple of games you have already seen almost everything that the scenario can offer and, in fact, it is the zombies mode that It has taken less time to complete the entire saga. Just three hours after launch.
The idea of being able to create your own classes in zombie mode takes a bit of the fun out of the matter, but it is a welcome addition for those of us who tend to taint more than necessary, especially when it comes to facing larger than normal bugs and your companions. They seem more focused on running away from him than on helping to bring him down.
Inevitable to have a sense that the best is saved for later. That with that of now delivering maps and levels for free, for the zombies mode they plan a revulsive that can serve as a hook later. Hopefully so, because I don’t see myself for long exploring a map that I already know almost by heart.