Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Call of Duty: Black Ops III from 2015 took the series to the year 2065, where the player, as a soldier equipped with advanced cybernetic implants, fights amid a new cold war between superpowers competing for technological and military supremacy. For the first time in the series, the campaign is designed for cooperative play with up to four players and offers a partially nonlinear mission structure, as well as a hidden alternate mode, Nightmares, which turns the entire story into a horror zombie experience after completing the campaign. The game was developed by Treyarch and, besides the story, includes an extensive multiplayer with a movement system based on wall-running and double jumps, nine unique Specialists with their own abilities, and the popular Zombies mode with the map Shadows of Evil.

On PlayStation 4, the game launched on November 6, 2015, alongside the PC and Xbox One versions, and contains the complete content – the full campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies, including all Specialists and the Nightmares mode. It's technically the smoothest of the console versions of the time alongside Xbox One, running at a stable resolution and frame rate matching PlayStation 4's capabilities and using the console's full power without the limitations later faced by the older-generation console version.

Importantly, Black Ops III also launched the same day in a stripped-down version for PlayStation 3, but that one was developed by a different studio and didn't include the campaign – making it a fundamentally different product from the full-fledged PS4 release. The PS4 version, by contrast, offers content completely identical to the PC edition, including all story missions and bonus content available from day one.

Black Ops III also offered a detailed character and camouflage editor for the Zombies mode, as well as an extensive system of unlockable weapon attachments shared across the campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies. The PlayStation 4 version supported this complete progression system unchanged from Xbox One and PC, including all nine playable Specialists and their unique abilities available from day one of release.

Why play it: For fans of Zombies and loadout experimentation, the PS4 version offers the complete progression system and all nine Specialists with no restrictions compared to other platforms.