Earlier this week, I felt a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long while: I was looking forward to the release of a Call of Duty game. Black Ops 6, the latest installment in the long-running Call of Duty sub-series, has spent the last several months hyping up audiences about all of its changes and innovations, like its quickened pace and omnimovement. Meanwhile, the promotional tour has also been deliberately trying to harken back to some kind of golden age for the franchise, which seems as embattled as ever despite still regularly posting huge numbers and breaking records year after year. In recent weeks, players have been excited over the return of systems like prestige, which I didn’t even realize had been stripped from the games, but my personal favorite bit of messaging has been around Zombies, a fan-favorite cooperative mode that has become a staple of CoD since it was first introduced in 2008.
Over the years, Zombies has grown from a throwaway game mode tossed into 2008’s World at War at the last minute into a full-fledged prong of CoD. It has featured unique maps, weaponry, mechanics, characters, and stories! It’s home to the weirder side of the otherwise milquetoast, standard-bearing franchise, making it a beloved fixture of the series. As the games ramped up in scale, though, Zombies did too, and eventually the mode became unwieldy and unfamiliar even to people who’d played it for a long while, but especially to folks like me who looked to it as a casual kind of third space to just drop in and out of with friends.
Black Ops 6, however, has continuously made promises that its iteration of Zombies would be a kind of reset for the mode. It would be a return to the most basic formula for the experience: kill zombies, rack up points, buy and upgrade cool perks and weapons, rinse and repeat. The mode would return to round-based progression, the maps wouldn’t be these labyrinthine sprawls—at least at first—and the developers promised that it would even simplify the storytelling of Zombies, which now includes numerous different crews of survivors scattered across several storylines. Though I can’t speak to every one of those promises, I did manage to load up Zombies on Black Ops 6’s launch night and play with the very friends I last fought alongside years ago, and if I may say, I loved just about every bit of it.
The key to my positive experience is that, for the first time in a long time, this Call of Duty mode didn’t feel so burdened. Make no mistake, there’s tons to know going into it, like the fact that you can make custom loadouts to start with, pick out Gobblegum perks that you can earn mid-match, and so on. But that did little to get in the way of my dropping into Liberty Falls—one of Black Ops 6’s two Zombies maps at launch—with my friends, buying wall guns, and kiting swarms of zombies in circular routes before picking them off.
The lengthy game that I played gave me a chance to familiarize myself with both the map, a small Americana-style town, and the cadence of the rounds. Black Ops 6’s Zombies still features the occasional special round composed of a different enemy type—this time spiders, to the chagrin of arachnophobes the world over. A part of me really missed the Zombies announcer’s “Fetch me their souls!” from the good old days of hellhound rounds, but I can make peace with the fact that some things must change.
To that end, this new Zombies experience isn’t without some innovation. Armor plates are now in Zombies, carrying over from Warzone, Call of Duty’s battle royale title, and drop from enemies. Salvage does as well, and can be put to use at crafting tables around the map to make armor, equipment like grenades, or upgrades to your weapon’s rarity and base damage. There are pickups that allow you to even mutate into special zombie enemy types, and maps have their own wonder weapons, rather than a univeral pool. Points are no longer distributed by hit but by kill—a change I don’t love, especially as enemies become more spongey in later rounds and points risk becoming a scarcity—and there is no longer reinforcement of barriers and windows, which could stagger the release of enemies and stop rounds from devolving into open mayhem right away.
The biggest change, at least for me as someone who last played these games around Black Ops 3, was in the composition of the zombie ranks. New maps and iterations of Zombies have long featured some kind of central gimmick or even boss character, like George Romero in Call of the Dead, the prison warden in Mob of the Dead, and even Avogadro in Tranzit, but in Black Ops 6, waves of enemies look vastly different than I’m used to. There’s a mixture of armored and standard zombies, which will push players to higher-damage builds more quickly, but alongside spiders (which can also spawn from dying zombies), there are also mini-bosses that will periodically appear and then outright overwhelm you in the late-game rounds. Manglers are heavily armored brutes who fire homing concussive blasts, while these three-headed beasts called Abominations shoot electricity from any of their maws, and command the field the second they appear.
Many of these changes are welcome additions, and ones I reckon have been around for a while, but most importantly, none of it ever got in the way of the classic high of pursuing a lengthy run and shooting the shit with friends. There’s a lot of optional depth and profundity to Zombies in Black Ops 6, but it is, in its purest form, a blast, and that hasn’t felt true in a long while. I’m looking forward not only to sampling the other Zombies experience available in the base game—a much moodier map called Terminus—but to growing comfortable with old and new strategies alike and settling into familiar grooves. While I can’t speak for the whole package just yet, as far as Zombies goes, we are so back.
