Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Review

Black Ops 4 brings Call of Duty into the Battle Royale genre with a bang, but the lack of a single-player campaign and a few other niggles keep it short from greatness.

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Multiplayer:

When you have a game which is entirely online, then the server infrastructure had better be damned good. Unfortunately, I found several aspects where the game was significantly less smooth than I would like. You need to be online to even start the game – so if your internet goes down you can’t even look at a menu or play the tutorial levels, nor even the single-player zombie modes. That’s annoying. I also found that matchmaking seemed slower than previous Call of Duty iterations, and the game also hard crashed on me a couple of times, something I can’t remember ever happening in the series.

Having said that, bar two isolated incidents of lag for the merest second or two, performance is still excellent in-game, even if it perhaps doesn’t always meet the high standards of previous games.

Presentation:

If you have an Xbox One X, then you’re in for a treat, with a 4K presentation at 60fps and HDR enabled to boot. There are times where you can still see that Activision continue to just iterate on the same old (now well over a decade) engine, but in motion the game still looks impressive. Characters and animations are no longer best-in-class but still more than hold their own. However, the crowning achievement has to be the Blackout map. By all accounts, it’s not as large as the biggest PUBG maps, but the comparison in terms of quality is night-and-day. Even the Sanhok map in PUBG on Xbox struggles to get to 30fps @4K, and has massively reduced texture quality in comparison, and significantly less foliage and advanced lighting effects. Treyarch have done really outstanding work here.

Multiplayer also comes with more voice-work than ever before, whist the rest of the audio experience is just as good as ever. Very few games come close to Call of Duty’s explosions and gun effects, and this year the addition of Atmos makes for a remarkable upgrade in quality if your surround system will support it.

 

Conclusion:

This year Call of Duty comes at you with more multiplayer, but a lot of your money is clearly going into the Zombies mode, which has always been my least favourite way to play these games. However, Blackout is my new favourite way to play Battle Royale games, and is strong technically and visually compared to the competition. It also manages to maintain that Call of Duty feel, too. With no single-player content, some dull maps, and a number of technical issues that are still persisting a couple of weeks after launch, there are clear areas for improvement. However, for the casual player, the simple fact that you get more online content for your money will be a trade-off worth making, even if personally I’d have liked to see what Treyarch could have delivered in terms of a narrative. In brief, Blackout is excellent, Zombies has made some changes and has much more content but is still a marmite experience, and standard multiplayer hasn’t made enough changes and struggles with some dull maps, whilst still remaining decent. It may sound entitled, but more standard multiplayer maps and just a slightly enhanced single-player element would have made for a better balanced game. As it stands, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 is a solid entry in the Call of Duty universe, without blowing me away.

Good

  • Mode Blackout
  • Graphics

Bad

  • A few crashes and bugs
  • Zombies as marmite as ever
8.4

Great

Story - 7
Graphics - 9
Sound - 9.5
Gameplay - 9
Multiplayer - 8
Value - 8
Editor - Reviewer GamerKnights

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