Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 review

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 review

The best Call of Duty in decades?

Black Ops 6 has rekindled my love of the series. I love what Treyarch has created here, one of the most fun video games I’ve played in a long, long time. It has taken over my life in ways that games rarely do.

The entire package is hefty, to say the least. The campaign is there, and so is the regular multiplayer and the Zombies modes. But magically enough, with Warzone the team has decided to cycle in all of the newest movement aspects of Black Ops 6, starting with that new season, so that even players who haven’t been able to buy the new game yet get to experience what it has to offer.

And it offers a lot.

Treyarch has gone back to a lot of the basics of what made CoD fun, pulling out a lot of the convoluted stuff that turned people away and simplifying it. Headshots for more camos? Yes, please. Leveling up our guns? Sure! Better balanced perks? YUP! And all of our progress with our leveled up weapons carries over throughout the modes, so that no matter what kind of CoD player we are we’re getting to keep our personalization to keep the experience consistent.

The big addition to the gameplay is the omni-directional slide and jump. Essentially, any direction that we’re facing we can make our character slide. We can sprint backwards while facing forwards, and then can jump back or slide back or just slide in any direction. It feels like there are so many ways to move now, and it’s so fast and feels so good. And people are just going crazy with it. I love seeing players do the craziest, stupidest stuff in a match because they’re experimenting with the new movement options. It’s really fresh and unique.

I was a big Call of Duty player when I was younger, and had been deep into FPS and shooters like Halo, but those eventually fell off and I gravitates more towards indies and RPGs. I’m the JRPG guy. But playing this, it all just started coming back to me. Those play sessions and the love of this genre.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a winner. It’s the return to what I loved best about the series, with the addition of features that add new ways to experiment and create some spectacular moments.

This review is based on a PlayStation 5 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on the October 29, 2024 episode of The SideQuest. Images and video courtesy the publisher.