‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6’ Campaign Review: All Thriller, No Filler

What a difference a year makes. The Modern Warfare 3 2023 campaign reboot was a cynical rush job, sacrificing the finale of an incredible story for inevitable Christmas cash. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has righted those wrongs, proving it’s worth waiting a few years for a great single-player experience.

It’s also more than that. Black Ops 6 might have some truly batty moments–plus the occasional misstep–but it’s the most satisfying CoD outing since the original Modern Warfare reboot, offering a long, strong storyline with real surprises, loads of variety, and plenty of unforgettable moments along the way.

Treyarch and Raven Software have once proved they’re a safe pair of hands for Call of Duty campaigns–even if they slightly stumble by jamming their most famous game mode into the mix.

Black Ops 6 currently demands 82.5GB on Xbox for the single-player mode. This was 79.5GB on release day, but as it’s Call of Duty, this lasted 24 hours–we can probably expect it to be 100GB by November. Thankfully, I only had to restart the Call of Duty hub four times during installation–going on old memories, I was expecting closer to seven.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign doesn’t get off to the best start–it kicks off with a cold mission select screen, rather than introducing you with a video. This menu also details rewards for doing certain things in each level before you begin, giving small spoilers. These are minor complaints, because you’re in for a rollercoaster ride once you get into the action.

You assume the role of silent, faceless protagonist and rogue CIA operative William “Case” Calderon, ten years after the events of the fun but forgettable Black Ops Cold War. After fast-forwarding through the fall of Berlin Wall and up to the outbreak of the Gulf War, Black Ops 6 places you in 1991, at the tail end of one of the most transformative decades in modern history.

You start in a tough situation: an interrogation room at the CIA headquarters, following the failed extraction of Iraqi Minister of Defense Saeed Alawi from the Iraq-Kuwait border. Things initially go to plan for Case, his comrade Troy Marshall, and their handler Jane Harrow–until Pantheon, a shadowy paramilitary force, turns things upside down. As you’re about to save Alawi, Russell Adler, who had been forced to go into hiding after getting framed, appears out of nowhere and kills Alawi then surrenders, quietly giving you the location of his hideout. You adopt it for an off-the-books investigation into Pantheon. So far, so Black Ops.

Looking and feeling great

From the start, there’s no doubt Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is a good-looking game. On Series X, it runs more or less effortlessly at 60fps, with no visible screen tearing. Lighting is immaculate, especially in character-led video sequences, though it judders when it lays on the narrator-led, headline-driven exposition mission intros.

Its art direction carries through the gorgeous architecture and designs of Black Ops Cold War: high color contrasts, stunning symmetrical sculptures, and atmospheric, metaphor-driven creations that trust your intelligence to understand deeper or hidden themes. As with previous CoD games, the disappearing HUD proves its biggest boon, allowing you to appreciate the game like a movie when it matters most.

As for the game’s handling, Black Ops 6 is exactly what you’d expect from a modern Call of Duty. It’s built with a modified version of the IW 9.0 engine used for MW2, MW3, and Warzone 2.0, which grants a couple of new benefits, notably omnidirectional movement, which lets you sprint, dive, and slide in all directions–though you don’t really use it in the campaign mode, nor does the game encourage or force you to.

There seems to be a handful of extra bells and whistles, especially in enemy movement and damage animations–deaths look more painful than ever, to the point they look occasionally look harrowing. Luckily, these moments are punctuated with comedy ragdolling, specifically from Blops 6’s hilariously overpowered shotguns, which routinely send enemies into nearby walls.

It wouldn’t be Call of Duty without the occasional glitch, but the campaign is mostly limited to visual quirks. On Xbox, graphics occasionally render slowly in transitions from set pieces to live action; while mercifully rare, enemies can glitch between spaces with super speed. My favorite issue by a mile was Electric Adler: after getting hit by a trap, he was covered in lightning bolts for the rest of the mission, frying and smoking for 15 minutes. I wouldn’t have him any other way.

The Rook is your castle

Black Ops 6 isn’t all murderous globetrotting. Adler’s hideout, the Rook, is a former Soviet installation inside a house in Bulgaria, and he transformed it into his base of operations. This inter-mission HQ comes with unlockable training, weapon, and gear stations where you can buy operator perks with money collected from your travels.

It also has its secrets–nice distractions for keen-eyed puzzle fans–and plenty of opportunities for story exposition by talking to your collection of unlikely allies. Still, it all comes back to the mission board. Ostensibly, there are nine missions on the board, but the game officially runs across 22; they’re generally segmented by location and usually split into two sections. These take you worldwide, though don’t expect to recognize any landmarks–it’s mainly spread between Iraq and Kuwait, the U.S., and the fictional Mediterranean destination of Avalon.

Across the 10 or 11 hours you’ll spend on the campaign–even if it feels much longer–Black Ops 6’s missions revisit all the hits, throwing plenty of different playing styles and ideas at you. Thankfully, there isn’t a MW3-style Open Combat Mission in sight, and you never feel bored. Bewildered, maybe–but not bored.

Mixing things up

You can expect all the things CoD campaign fans love: tactical FPS shooting; stealth missions with the option to go loud; open-map exploration sections; tactical air assaults that erase entire hillsides of sentient life; and, of course, the occasional, mission-ending moment of belief-suspending madness that leaves you with a stupid smile on your face. You even get a Call of Duty-fied Ocean’s Eleven experience thrown in for good measure.

Along the way, you pick locks, decode ciphers, sabotage fuel lines, tag enemies with a spy cam, tune radio frequencies, and more. None of these are frustrating, difficult, or dull; they just further the narrative and you feel like a secret agent, which is exactly what you want.

Then there’s the Equipment Wheel: a messily introduced tool that soon becomes your gateway to even more satisfying and hilarious combat, balancing offensive and defensive tools. The real highs include homing knives, complete with remote detonation and a slow-motion camera; adrenaline stims, which help you clear out entire rooms in bullet time; and RC car bombs, which aren’t new to the series, but never get old.

You have to mix things up, especially as you reach the game’s final third, as bullet-sponge enemies become more frequent. These bring special skills, like gas grenades or miniguns, and will take an entire LMG magazine to the face and live to tell the tale. They’re not exactly realistic, but neither is an exploding, heat-seeking dagger–and it’s still better than the spooky Jäger Mörders of Vanguard that did their best to ruin all forms of immersion and fun.

All the while, Black Ops 6’s story stays relatively linear and doesn’t go too far off-topic, or serve to confuse you with twist after twist. Well, that’s not strictly true. With its midway mission, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 loses its mind, creating arguably the most memorable level in the game–and maybe the most extraordinary of the CoD series so far–for better and worse.

The divergence of ‘Emergence’

At the campaign midpoint, ‘Emergence’ sees you visit a testing facility in Kentucky owned by Pantheon, locked down and abandoned after a biohazard leak. It’s a huge tone shift for the game, but light spoiler alert for what’s to follow–feel free to skip to the next heading.

You, as Case, join Troy to explore the facility with gas masks on. Within seconds of breaking in, you get separated–Case smashes his mask, breathes in the mysterious smoke, and things start to get freaky. From here, objectively speaking, ‘Emergence’ transforms into a well-executed horror mission that channels Control and Atomic Heart, but sticks out like a sore thumb both during and after you finish Black Ops 6.

Call of Duty has a penchant for reusing prime assets, and both Treyarch and Raven Software are best known for masterminding CoD Zombies. While it’s often good to make the most of what you’re best at, this drug-addled experience with the undead, boss battles, and more–but you can discover the best enemies in ‘Emergence’ for yourself–just doesn’t fit, even if it’s meant to explain Case’s back story and give vital exposition about the mysterious Cradle drug.

Most frustratingly, the fever dream ends when you’re pulled out of your stupor by your compadres, who then completely gloss over what happened to you–like it was all a fantasy or a repressed memory. Maybe they found you shooting at invisible enemies? They even have the nerve to express surprise that Cradle is a hallucinogen; afterward, the whole affair is never mentioned again.

Despite being Black Ops 6’s most thrilling mission, even if you might need to change your trousers while playing, ‘Emergence’ feels insincere. It’s not on par with MW3’s reuse of Warzone for OCMs, but it’s not far off–you just can’t shake the feeling that the priority wasn’t story exposition, but the desire to encourage people to play Black Ops Zombies.

A bombastic finale

Whichever way you feel about ‘Emergence’, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 has one of the best final levels of the franchise. Technically, it’s two missions together–the duality of ‘Separation Anxiety’ and ‘Checkmate’–but it plays on similar themes to ‘Emergence’ and to a much more spectacular and satisfying outcome.

It’s the gaming equivalent of The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, combining dual narratives that effortlessly switch between normality and disassociative madness, bringing the experience to a close. Dawn Olivieri’s performance as Jane Harrow should go down as one of the best in the series; her incredibly complex role stays believable and human in the face of what is probably the most bananas storyline in Call of Duty history, and Black Ops 6 wouldn’t be half the game it is without her.

Well worth your time

After such a soul-crushing MW3 campaign experience–which only feels even worse with age, and the only one I didn’t want to replay before the next one-player release–Black Ops 6 is a much-needed shot in the arm. There was a real concern that Call of Duty’s huge multiplayer popularity would now start to define the future of storytelling, but thankfully that’s not the case here–‘Emergence’ aside.

It’s just as well that Black Ops 6 actively keeps things open for a sequel–a potential finale. As Blops 6 played out in 1991, and given the urgency of the ongoing story, you could place safe wagers on sideways interpretations of other early 90s conflicts like Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia, and even the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis.

Still, while time is of the essence for the characters within the Black Ops story arc, it certainly shouldn’t be for campaign fans. The four-year wait between Black Ops Cold War and Black Ops 6 proved that good single-player experiences are worth waiting for. Obviously, it’d be great if it arrived before 2028, but please don’t rush it.