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Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Review – Multiplayer Like Nothing Seen Before

call of duty black ops 4 review

Another year, another Cod. This time the parade being conducted by Treyarch, creators of the Black Ops series, World At War and Modern Warfare (with the exception of Modern Warfare 2). This is our Call of Duty Black Ops 4 review.

Has it become all about the money?

See every year the Call Of Duty games become progressively more half-assed and micro-transaction infested. DLC’s like Map Packs are inevitably going to have you opening your wallet, typing in your security number and entering your home address within the first couple months of release. As if paying £50 for the game isn’t gonna suffice for a copy and pasted reskin of the previous dozen Call Of Duty games. It’s kinda like selling a little girl a Barbie doll with no arms and legs, then charging £15 per limb. Then a fiver for a lucky spin with the barbie supply drop, where she can earn a desert camouflage thong or a sparkly new pair of socks to flaunt to her friends, who too have spent a ridiculous amount of money to make their barbies look like clowns. The same logic applies to the this title, Call of Duty Black Ops 4.

Although… Black Ops 4 doesn’t seem to have any trace of supply drops. Instead a progressive, tier like system called contraband, similar to that of the Fortnite/PUBG battle passes. Here you can earn cosmetic items, weapon skins calling cards and terribly amusing emotes… and I mean ‘terribly’ in a negative sense. Like a “Wow it’s quite amusing that my hours of gameplay are being rewarded with such sh*te” kind of sense. It’s not a rare strategy to keep players returning to the game nowadays. They get all excited about getting their new tier 91 face paint, brainwashed I believe is the term. It’s only a matter of time before they realise how disheartening it is that after 200 hours of gameplay they’ve earned nothing but useless tat that does absolutely ‘nada’ besides making your player look slightly more grey and dull than every other item of clothing that too is grey and dull.

This is an improvement, sure… but the rewards aren’t the most appetising to me. I don’t see myself playing hours on end only to be rewarded with a brand new blouse, which will only be soaked in blood in the next five minutes when I find my KD dropping below 1.0 due to poor matchmaking, in which I always seem to find myself in matches full of what feels like Pro tournament players. Tier 5 I get a poorly animated, slightly laggy gesture, in which Most People Will Have. It’s like everybody in the world owning the same pair of underpants then saying “Look at my new pants” and expecting a genuinely enthusiastic reply. No-one will pay any notice to the new helmet you spent 10 hours climbing up the contraband ladder to, because everyone else has done the same.

Bringing back what we know best…

The majority of Call Of Duty’s have been what’s known as ‘Boots On The Ground’. Where you tend to walk places rather than jet boosting around like Buzz Lightyear on crack. And it just so happens that this Call Of Duty is going back to its roots. You can’t fly around the map like a lunatic but you can sprint like Usain Bolt and crouch slide around like you’re on an ice rink. I must say that becomes rather annoying. An enemy sliding at 50 Mph around a corner hip firing every last bullet in their magazine straight into my freshly face painted, tier 15 face.

So that all being said, despite the lack of jet packs and stupid yet fun wall running, Black Ops 4 is an incredibly fast past game. You’re able to sprint into the action in a matter of seconds and find enemies not too far from spawn. Although this fast paced action becomes slightly awkward when the health is almost doubled in comparison to other Cod games. You find yourself pacing around the map faster than light, only to find yourself stopping for quite a considerable amount of time to slowly hack away at your opponent’s health. This extra health also becomes a problem when you encounter more than one person. It simply isn’t possible to win a 1 vs 2. You focus fire on one person — who takes several seconds to kill — whilst the nearby, second opponent has all the time in the world to slowly fill your body with bullets. It’s a major flaw which forces you to either travel in groups or constantly be peaking with cover.

What’s new?

One feature I wanted to include in my Black Ops 4 review is this new healing thing too. Where after every gunfight, when your health is low, you have to keep injecting yourself like a manic junkie in order to gain your health back. The catch however is that it to take a few seconds to recharge, not enough to give you health injection withdrawals but just enough to stop you spamming it like a long term health regen addict. Because of the recharge time, you find yourself pretty vulnerable after a firefight, running around with minimal health, praying that you don’t get picked off by a stray bullet whilst you desperately clamber away from the action, spamming crouch slide through the middle of the map. Usually the poor balancing is in your favour though. Like when you’re preparing for a tense 1 on 1 showdown but instead your opponent is a mere nose flick away from death.

These gunfights are never smooth as they should be. Framerate drops and stutters occur more often in Bo4 than they should. You’d think a company of this size, with billions of dollars and 20 years of experience in making games, should be able to effectively optimise a Call Of Duty game for a console at least.

Black Ops 4 multiplayer in a nutshell

The graphics are pretty standard too for a Call Of Duty game. The same old grey pallet as usual, with the exception of some maps like the map ‘Contraband’, a beach type map, grey but featuring the occasional green and blue… Yep, that’s right, don’t spit out your tea in shock, a call of duty map that’s green. All joking aside, it’s not that bad, Cod maps over the years have progressively lightened up their themes, and to be honest I think contraband is a quite pretty.

To round of our call of duty black ops 4 review; don’t think Black Ops 4 is a bad game… I’ve only touched on the multiplayer aspect. Zombies and Blackout are entirely different ball games, And I wish I could have written about the campaign mode, but unfortunately that isn’t a thing… because well, Treyarch know a battle royale mode will appeal more to the masses than a story mode. True but saddening.

As I said, Call of Duty Black Ops 4 isn’t a bad game… It’s just another Call Of Duty game. I only really covered the new aspects, simply because there is really no point describing Call Of Duty every single year a new one is released. It’s just same old, same old, like the 15th re-skin in the series. And honestly it’s getting boring now, there’s always hype around a new Cod but it always dies rather quickly. You’re allowed to like the game. Just I ask that you consider what you’re spending your money on. Is it really worth it? And will you really enjoy and get the most out of this game for the 15th year going?

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