Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War arrived alongside the launch of the new console generation and took players into the 1980s, into a world of espionage operations and mistrust between superpowers. The campaign continues the line of the first Black Ops and, alongside the usual action set pieces, offers quiet missions, interrogations, and decisions that change the ending of the story. New was a customizable protagonist with several selectable abilities and several missions built around gathering evidence, where the player pieces clues together and decides how to proceed. The pace is brisk, the campaign can be finished over a few evenings, but it offers motivation to replay it for the alternate endings.

Multiplayer sticks to the proven formula of fast matches on compact maps, a loadout system, and killstreak rewards, joined by larger vehicle-based modes. Alongside it stands the cooperative Zombies mode, which in this installment opened its storyline to new players and offered clearer rules along with the option to bail out of a map at any time. On Xbox Series X|S a mode targeting 120 frames per second is available, which for a competitive shooter means noticeably more precise aiming, and SSD loading eliminated long waits between matches. The visuals lean on striking lighting and dense weapon sound design.

At the time the game was received mostly favorably, with the campaign earning praise for its narrative boldness and its willingness to experiment with form, while some players criticized the shorter length and balance changes to multiplayer after launch. The link to the free battle royale mode, into which weapons and progress carried over, confirmed at the time the direction the whole brand was heading. Today it stands as a solid entry among modern military shooters, its campaign among the more interesting in the series' recent history, even though the online portion has long since been replaced by newer installments. That is precisely why it's worth revisiting — mainly for the story and the cooperative zombie maps, which work independently of how many players are currently looking for a match.