Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Campaign Review

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 remains my favorite of developer Treyarch's contributions to the long-running and sometimes formulaic shooter franchise, because it's the one that takes the most wild swings. It mixes traditional Call of Duty linear levels with a top-down, real-time-strategy-like experience that lets you move troops around the battlefield and then zoom down like a gunslinging ghost to possess any one of them and do the fighting yourself. It also logs your choices, your successes, and your failures, and adjusts its convoluted branching narrative to account for them.

The spirit of Black Ops 2 is alive in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and not just because it actually serves as a semi-prequel-sequel to that 12-year-old game. Black Ops 6 infuses the standard Call of Duty formula with level designs and mission ideas that challenge the usual Call of Duty framework in much the same way. It's not as brazen as Black Ops 2 was--that game was admirable for going all-out, but not all of its ideas were home runs in execution--and there's no branching narrative or major departure from Call of Duty gameplay in Black Ops 6. Instead, Treyarch works in creative but familiar design additions that break up and expand on its campaign, making for an experience that maintains the franchise's cinematic, high-yield explosiveness, while also providing numerous opportunities to feel like a super spy and super soldier.

There's a lot of story going on in Black Ops 6, but as is usually the case in the franchise, it's at once both pretty simple and weirdly complex. The gist is that, as part of a covert mission during Operation: Desert Storm, your CIA operative player character--a silent protagonist named Case--and his teammates Marshall and Harrow run into Russell Adler from Black Ops: Cold War. From Adler, you learn about The Pantheon, a paramilitary organization full of American ex-soldiers and others, operating secretly inside the CIA but with their own evil agenda. The rest of the game is about teaming up with Marshall, Adler, and Black Ops mainstay Frank Woods, recruiting a couple spies, and trying to figure out who The Pantheon is and how to stop them. It's all standard fare for a game like this.