It’s Been One Week, Since I got you… Black Ops 4 Review
Last Week, Activision dropped their annual edition of Call of Duty to the likes of $500 Million on launch. To me that is not surprising. The Beta was getting a lot of love from streamers and youtubers, blackout mode seemed to appeal to both the Fortnite BR fans, and the PUBG fans offering something that feels similar yet different from the two main Battle Royale games. I know I was intrigued after getting my hands on some Beta game play. And now, a week later, and 27 total hours of running and shooting, in both regular multiplayer and Blackout I can honestly say. This is a damn good game.
The Call of Duty Franchise has been going strong for 15 years. The only time they didn’t have back to back years with a title was 2004 the year in between Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2. Treyarch has been the developer of 6 of the Call of Duty titles including all four Black Ops titles, World at War, and Call of Duty 3. Most of the titles were well received by fans of the franchise and critics alike until Black Ops 3. Many felt the gameplay to be wonky, the multiplayer to be bland, and not up to the expected standards of a Treyarch game. Black Ops 4 (I will get into a personal grievance with the title later) took a calculated risk in not including a campaign and including a battle royale mode to go along with their usual . And, maybe it has paid off, sales are up from last years WWII (which wasn’t a horrible Call of Duty game until the inclusion of shields) and already seems to have secured dominance in the FPS genre once again with Battlefield V struggling in pre-orders.
As for this edition of Treyarch’s Black Ops Series; well it didn’t suck, in fact I would dare to say it is the best Call of Duty game in six years. For those of you counting that was the year Black Ops II came out. Boots on the ground, dedicated servers (thank god they moved away from Listening servers; except in countries away from Blizzard servers), gunplay is smooth, game play feels solid. I have enjoyed both Hardcore game modes, and Blackout and have enjoyed seeing the old maps mixed in with the new maps, along with seeing all the old maps included into Blackout mode. Definitely an improvement from WWII and Infinite Warfare (the last two titles), but not without it’s faults.
Firstly, the graphics haven’t changed much over the years, slight upgrades to the last engine used for Black Ops III. While not game breaking, it does seem a little lazy that it has a very similar graphic feel as CoDs dating back to Ghost. Secondly, now this has nothing to do with gameplay, but it has been something that has bothered me since the first day I saw the Logo for Black Ops 4. Maybe I am showing my nerdiness, maybe I am being too critical of a design choice. Black Ops 4 should be Black Ops IV, not this silly Black Ops IIII. Yes with the logo it looks cleaner having 4 lines instead of an almost twitch inducing asymmetrical IV, but the history nerd in me SCREAMS seeing improper use of Roman numerals. Much like the NFL’s decision to use 50 in place of calling it Super Bowl L even though the Roman numeral L showed up the following year for Super Bowl LI but I digress. Now to gameplay issues I have (as of patch 1.03 dropped on 19th of October 2018). I mostly play Hardcore when playing multiplayer, so this will cover issues i have seen in Hardcore mode only: There are times where visually it looks as if bullets are randomly coming from places they shouldn’t be, this may be a desync issue, or just a visual bug. The scorestreak Strike Team is WAY TOO overpowered. While in Hardcore it takes very minimal damage to kill a player, but the Strike Team NPCs health, damage, and damage resistance, is still the same as it is in core. This makes it extremely hard to counter this scorestreak when it is called in, and has been the only scorestreak that is this unbalanced. Lastly; it does sadden me there is no campaign. While I understand I was in the minority to have actually played through, at least once on normal difficulty, all the way through (minus WWII because, man could that story be any more blah, though I did get fairly far in the campaign before never returning), I do wish they would have had some semblance of continuing the black ops lore.
Overall, like I stated before, Call of Duty Black Ops 4 (yes I refuse to use 4 I’s) is a great rebound for the franchise, it is enjoyable and I suspect many hours spent by this guy right here running, gunning, and laughing my way to positive KDs and GLORY for the Kraken!
Until next time,
Love and Tentacles;
PieRatKing
No Comments