After the success of games like PUBG and Fortnite in 2017, Call of Duty wants to have a piece of the battle royale pie. With Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s Blackout, Treyarch hasn’t just copied a formula to make some extra money, they’ve made a mode that is purely Black Ops and it’s spectacular.
By combining the tactical nature of something like PUBG with the more fast and loose mindset of Fortnite while simultaneously putting their own spin on things, Treyarch has molded something very special. Blackout is 88 players (or 100 in Quads) who drop out of a chopper on to an island with towns made up of both new locations and classic Black Ops maps. Everyone scavenges for gear and fights to the death until there is only one person or team left standing.
Blackout is a love letter to the Black Ops herritage, plain and simple. Many have dismissed the mode because battle royale is popular and they just think Treyarch and Activision want to cash in on this trend but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Blackout radiates passion from the team with iconic characters like Sgt. Woods and Reznov being playable, recognizable locations from the series’ past, and beloved Black Ops-exclusive equipment repurposed for the mode like the RC-XD.
As you load into a lobby, the load screen flashes red numbers at you similar to the ones seen in the first Black Ops game, when you jump on to the map, you’re hit with familiar locations like Nuketown, Array, Firing Range, and more, there are zombies that surround you on key points of the map, and the list goes on.
This could’ve been something quick and rushed together but there every detail is painstakingly catered to, down to even the must obscure Black Ops references like a memorial to Tanbor Fudgely (if you know, you know).
That’s all well and good, you can have a lot of passion but a bad game so is the game mode actually good? Yes, god yes.
The responsive gunplay of Call of Duty makes for fluid engagements with higher stakes, to quote Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War: “No resurrections this time.” I didn’t think gameplay that has been made for rapid close-quarters combat would work very well in a massive slow-paced map but I was so wrong. The combat is a refined version of the classic Call of Duty gunplay to ensure combat isn’t too snappy but isn’t too long, creating the perfect amount of tension when a firefight ensues.
There’s still room for improvement when it comes to things like balance and bugs, however. Armor is a bit too powerful, you can fire a rocket launcher at someone at point blank range with level three armor and it’ll bounce right off of them like a pebble. It’s something that’ll be tweaked as time goes on but it’ll be bound to cause frustration with early adopters of which there are many.
Some bugs also include not being able to spawn in Blackout and being forced into spectator right away, not having kills tracked in the post-game screen, and emotes not working at all during gameplay. These are issues that will inevitably be ironed out in due time but ones still worth noting.
One of my complaints during the beta was that was an overabundance of weapons to be found at the start of the match. While there are still plenty, it feels like they’ve dialed the spawns back a bit. It used to be possible to just get gunned out of the sky as you were landing from your initial drop because anyone who touched down before you could find a gun as easily as the soil beneath their feet.
While I have yet to get a win in the mode, it’s incredibly addicting and rewarding simply because of the stories that come from it. One of my personal favorite moments to happen so far is when I was flying a chopper towards the construction site toward the end of the game.
My eyes locked down on a small helipad on the roof of the half-made multi-level building, seeing no one in sight after a quick circle around the building, I made my descent. BANG, BANG BANG! Dozens of bullets rattled my chopper which quickly began to smoke and then catch fire, a group of soldiers had begun spraying me with lead on the roof.
I panicked and pulled up on the chopper and knew that regardless, I was dead, so I better make the most of it. I slammed forward on the sticks and propelled the copter towards the three men who scattered. I persisted towards one and pushed him off the roof to his death, I spiraled over to another who kept firing at me and hit him with the back of my tail rotor. I’m not sure if the blade sliced him up or if the mere impact killed him but regardless, he was down for the count.
The third and final man kept shooting at me and I bailed out as I was low enough to the ground to survive a fall. The bird fell off the roof and hit the ground with a fiery inferno, this last man reloaded his gun as I gained my footing on the building. I pulled a grappling hook out of my backpack and flew towards him like Superman, he began shooting again as I whizzed past his bullets. I went right over his head and landed behind him, giving me a split second to put a shotgun shell square in the back of his shaved head.
It was an incredible moment that was cut short by some bastard with a sniper but I was still fresh off the adrenaline high that it didn’t matter. These are the kinds of war stories unique to Blackout, nothing like that is remotely possible in Fortnite or PUBG. Treyarch has masterfully claimed their stake in the battle royale genre and I can’t wait to see how they continue to expand on it throughout the next 12 months.
Next page: Zombies and The Verdict
