![]() ![]() Those three flavors of mission serve up plenty of undead to kill, but they also grow stale very quickly. Alas, Vanguard has little imagination beyond bigger damage numbers sparking out of the heads of its undead.Īll of those upgrade stations demand currency you earn out in the killing fields, which means that Zombies follows a rigid formula: take one of the outlying portals to an instanced challenge – survive an onslaught, escort a floating skull, or power up obelisks – and then minmax your build back at basecamp. It’s rare to have one of those loot-based eureka! moments found in many other roguelikes when all the random upgrades meld together in a sublime miracle run, like catching lightning in a bottle. It's so much more fun than all of the expensive stuff available at your headquarters, but of course finding it is all up to the luck of the draw. Case in point: one power-up I found basically gives you the Golden Gun from GoldenEye – every zombie you tag, regardless of location, immediately keels over. Part of that is because they pale in comparison to the randomized bonuses you’ll find when you’re out and about on the maps. However, most of the Covenant boosts you can buy are pretty uninspiring, and I found myself thirsting for augmentations that provide a bit more color than just speeding up my animations. Read the full Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's Zombies Review It should get bigger and better as Treyarch adds new free maps and features, and if so this could become a great year for Call of Duty Zombies. Compared to Black Ops 4’s ambitious Zombies mode that launched with multiple episodes, this single map feels like a disappointment, and the lack of local split-screen co-op is a bummer as well. The iconic brand of frantic zombie killing and interdimensional intrigue is incredibly fun while you’re caught up in the moment, but it doesn’t build enough on what came before. What We Said About Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's Zombies ModeĬall of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s Zombies is as highly polished and tense as you’d expect from a mode that’s been around in some form or another for over a decade now. Booby-trapping a spawn point with a screen-filling explosive is just as satisfying as you'd think it'd be, and skulking away from certain death with an invisibility cloak saved my reputation in front of my teammates more than I'd care to admit. Those options merge nicely with Vanguard's four ultimate abilities – a devastating energy mine, an invisibility field, a party-wide damage buff, and a speed-dampening vortex – which fit into the usual DPS/Tank/Healer class balance setup, and add a few more thoughtful flourishes to the action. A lot of your time in Vanguard's Zombies will be spent between encounters, dawdling around a war-torn hub zone (a la Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine or Destiny’s The Traveller) where you can juice firearms, craft weaponry, and swap in powerful but generally uninteresting buffs called Covenants that might give you a kickback of health with every melee kill or revive allies faster, and so on. A Treyarch developer told me roguelites like Hades were influential during development, and that touchstone jumps out immediately. What’s new this year is an element of randomness on each run. I've always loved how Zombies lets Call of Duty stretch its legs into a brutal, Doom-y aesthetic, and Treyarch proudly heaps on the gore as waves of hungry enemies keep coming and you to survive as long as possible. You and three friends have been transported into a hellish, phantasmagoric alternative universe - red skies, cursed talismans, eldritch gods - about a million miles removed from the steely realism prioritized by the mainline Call of Duty games and Vanguard’s own campaign and multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, a stark lack of content upon release squanders that potential, instead making Vanguard’s Zombies mode come across as a total afterthought. And for anyone who spent their high school years boarding up windows when Zombies debuted in Treyarch’s 2008 Call of Duty: World of War, the developer’s latest interpretation had the potential to be both a homecoming and a living testament to how the mode has evolved since. ![]() With Vanguard returning to the gristly frontiers of World War II, we are culling the rotten corpses of the Third Reich on gothic European battlefields for the first time since 2017's Call of Duty: WW2. ![]() Call of Duty’s Zombies mode has circled around the axis again.
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