Summer is in the rear view, which means it's once again Call of Duty beta time. This year Treyarch is in the driver's seat with a follow-up to Black Ops Cold War set in the early 1990s – and friends, I am all-in on the setting. After spending the weekend grinding multiplayer matches to hit the beta’s level cap, I'm cautiously optimistic that this year's entry could recapture everything I loved about 2020's Cold War.
First off, some context: I have about 200 hours of multiplayer time in last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and found myself enjoying it quite a bit more than our reviewer (which is fine, reviews are opinions, and opinions differ). However, a lot of that has to do with the social aspect of it. I have a core group of friends, the Beeflords, with whom I've been playing every Call of Duty multiplayer annually since Black Ops IIII. Having a dedicated squad makes playing multiplayer way more fun, and with regular content additions and balancing updates, I feel like MW3 is now in a much more solid spot.
Despite my fondness for both MW3 and Cold War, I tried to dive into Black Ops 6 with an open mind, and I'm glad to say I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. As far as a beta goes, this is one of the better ones I can remember. For example, back when I did my first impressions of the Modern Warfare 2 beta, I was actually pretty concerned by what I saw, but almost all of the rough edges had been sanded off by release. With the Black Ops 6 beta, I actually find myself with very few concerns already. After 12+ hours of shooting, diving, sliding, and shooting again, I'm left really excited for the full game, because it feels pretty damn good right now.
Probably the biggest change from the old formula is the "Omnimove" system. It seems like Treyarch looked at all the dolphin diving in Call of Duty and said "let's just lean into that." You can now sprint, slide, and dive in all directions, including backwards. Diving backwards puts you in a supine position, where you're laying on your back, with 360-degrees of movement. This is a feature I never knew I wanted. Diving prone in previous Call of Duty games restricts your aiming and movement pretty severely, but the supine position gives you a new tactical strategy to employ. In fact, if you lay prone and move backwards, you'll switch to the supine position, so you don't even really need to do the dramatic sprint-to-backwards-dive motion.
Which, if you're on PC, is probably a good thing. As cool as the Omnimove system is, it definitely feels like it's designed with a controller in mind. I don't play Call of Duty with a controller because I am a man of taste and intellect, but I'm also old and my brain isn't very elastic. Learning the key combinations in the training missions was a bit like learning to rub my head and pat my belly at the same time. To dive into the supine position, the key combination is S to move backwards plus the Shift key to sprint and then the Ctrl key to dive. It's the same for any of the sprint-to-dive commands, with their respective keys replaced for S. It took me a few runs through training before I could master it, but the effect is quite awesome. Sliding and diving in every direction is fun, and it makes for an even more fluid and exciting time in multiplayer matches.
From an outside observer's perspective, it's pretty dramatic to see someone diving sideways, guns blazing as they dispatch an enemy. It's awesome, actually, and getting the movement down, especially the slides, feels amazing once you get the hang of it. Again, it does feel specifically designed for use with controllers, but regardless how you play, sliding around and shooting in all directions is just good old fashioned fun.
One thing I do really hope they improve before the final release is the gunsmithing interface, because I don't like it at all as it stands. Gunsmithing and chasing down weapon skins has always been one of the hooks that keeps me playing Call of Duty, but in the beta it's kind of a pain (and since it's a beta, there are no skin challenges to unlock). It resembles the interface when you edit your loadouts in a match in previous games, so you don't get to see which attachments are still locked until you open up the category in the interface. There's no "lock" icon on the option to show you the entire category is still unavailable, only locks on the icons for the attachments IN those categories.
I found that pretty frustrating when I was leveling up my weapons. It means I'd have to open up the gunsmithing interface and then open up every attachment category, occasionally having to scroll down the options, to find out "oh, I haven't unlocked the option to swap out my grip yet." I ended up backing out of lobbies several times rather than making quick adjustments between matches, because I wasted a lot of that precious time manually checking what categories were open.
As far as the gunplay, well… it's Call of Duty, so it feels really good – though I don't want to say "great" quite yet, because the guns don't feel as weighty as in MW3 either. My general feel for almost all the guns is they take one or two shots too many to finish off an opponent. The notable exceptions to this are the two sniper rifles, which feel way overpowered as a result. Credit where credit is due, sniper rifles feel perfectly balanced in MW3, probably more so than in any other CoD I can remember. But in Black Ops 6 they currently feel too easy to use. The normal trade-off is still there, in that they're slow to aim down sights with, but just aiming in the general vicinity of an opponent, particularly with the LR 7.62, often results in a one-shot kill. Of course, sniper rifles in multiplayer are baby guns for babies, except when I'm using them, in which case they're good, actually. On a medium-sized map like Babylon, the SVD sniper rifle is one of the best choices if you want to rack up kills, and both it and the aforementioned LR 7.62 also make great choices for SCUD, the biggest map in the beta.
I also had a lot of fun with the Jackal PWD submachine gun, which is tied with the XMG light machine gun for my favorite option in the beta. I actually don't have any real complaints with any of the guns, although as I mentioned before, there is a bit of weight missing from them compared with what I've grown accustomed to with MW3. The only two categories I didn't really like too much were the marksman rifles and the shotguns, as I didn't find a good map where either one of those choices felt appropriate. The marksman rifles didn't suit me well for the medium and large maps, and the shotgun didn't feel like a great choice in the small maps, either, so I rarely used them.
The Black Ops 6 beta has six maps split across two different play modes: Core Moshpit and Faceoff. Core has four larger maps with different game modes, while Faceoff takes those same modes and squishes them down into smaller maps. I didn't love any of the maps, to be honest, especially the smaller ones. My favorites are probably SCUD, a sprawling former SCUD missile site set in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Rewind, another larger map set in a suburban strip mall complete with video rental store.
I didn't like either of the small maps available in the Faceoff modes. Gala, which is set in what appears to be a Washington D.C. ballroom, is just a little too big for a "small" map, and its multi-level layout makes it feel both crowded and yet somehow still not quite small enough. Modern Warfare 3's Stash House and Meat, along with the classic Shipment, are good examples of tight layouts that are among my favorites of all time when it comes to Call of Duty’s small map matches. They encourage strategic movement and require you to keep your head on a swivel, whereas Pit in particular has a central hub connecting with tunnels that just doesn't feel as fluid or fun to move around in. Meanwhile, Gala's relatively wide-open spaces meant running up the middle to claim an objective in Hardpoint was a death sentence, and a few well-placed snipers on each end of the map dictate the tempo of the entire match.
I would rather have maps with lots of corners to peek around than ones with lots of obstacles to hide behind, which is how the beta maps feel for the most part. SCUD might be one of my favorite maps, but even that has several camping spots for snipers to hole up in and there's no clear path to flank them without a little bit of luck or a well-placed spawn. However, SCUD otherwise does have a great overall layout that invites the use of pretty much any class of gun. There are tight interiors for shotguns and SMGs, medium-length corridors for LMGs and assault rifles, and of course the map-spanning hidey-holes for snipers to infuriate you with their repeated headshots.
Rewind similarly enjoys a layout well-suited to a variety of weapon types, and if you're good with any single class of weapon you'll find your rhythm. One of the new Field Upgrades I absolutely love using is Sleeper Agent, which makes you "switch" teams for its duration. To the enemy, you look like one of their own, and you extend the length of this charade every time you get a kill. During a match on Rewind, I activated this upgrade and repeatedly caught my opponents completely unaware, letting them run past before quickly turning on them with an easy shot to the back. I got a triple kill using Sleeper Agent in the beta, all while cackling maniacally. You still show up on the radar as an enemy, but in the heat of the moment, no one notices and it's a lot of fun to use.
Oh, and the tactical nuke is back. In the entire time I've been playing CoD I only met the conditions to trigger it during a multiplayer match once. That was way back in Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox 360, and it required 25 unanswered kills. Black Ops 6 asks for a whopping 30 unanswered kills and, needless to say, I have not triggered it (yet). But the good news is no one else did either! So that's nice.
As far as scorestreaks go, there's nothing here that is functionally different from what we've seen before. There's a UAV, a counter-UAV, an RC car with explosives strapped to it – it's all very familiar. The watchdog helo, which you can call in when your score hits 1,100 points, feels a little too accessible, as almost every match I played on an outdoor map had multiple helo calls. On the flipside, though, if you have an LMG with a big enough magazine, you can shoot them down without needing to reload.
I don't know if they pulled down some of the Black Ops 6 multiplayer modes before I got to them, but in my time grinding to the level 30 beta cap, I played Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, Faceoff Kill Order, and Kill Order. There are supposedly two other modes available, Faceoff Kill Confirmed and Gunfight, but I never saw a single match of them, which is fine since neither is new. In fact, of all the available modes, the only one not in last year's Call of Duty is Kill Order, which is basically team deathmatch with a High Value Target (HVT). The HVT for both teams appears on the map and radar and is randomly assigned to members of the team after the current HVT is downed. When you're the HVT, you are completely unable to hide, but you do have three armor plates a la Warzone, as well as the ability to be revived by your teammates when downed, so long as they get to you in time.
When I'm playing online without my group, I generally stick to Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, usually in hardcore mode. When my friends log on, we open the pool up to any game mode. That’s mostly because objective-based modes are most fun when everyone is, you know, actually trying to complete the objective. The entire weekend, in every Kill Order match I played, I was never once revived or even protected as the HVT. That sucks, but it’s also just the nature of the beast when you play with random people. Unfortunately none of my friends and I were able to link up our schedules to play together during the beta weekend, but I'm really looking forward to trying Kill Order with a full team. Even one extra person at your side when you're the HVT would be hugely helpful, because otherwise people treat it (and pretty much all the objective-based modes) as team deathmatch.
I still have a lot more to play once Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 comes out next month, but as far as betas go, it already seems to be in a great place. A few adjustments to weapon balance, some more UI tweaks, and the larger selection of maps at launch would fix most of the complaints I have with it right now. The gunplay is, as always, rock-solid, I never ran into a single bug, and graphically it's really sharp. I'm feeling really good about this year's installment… I just hope my operator skins from MW3 transfer over. That llama suit wasn't free, you know.
