Call Of Duty Black Ops 6 campaign review: it’s worth answering again

“You’re the last global gunslingers of a bygone era,” you’re told during Black Ops 6’s intro sequence by CIA deputy director Livingstone, one of many cast members who’d look equally at home in a clandestine military briefing room or a wrestling pay-per-view.

It’s a good line, and one that neatly sums up single-player COD’s dilemma in the modern age. There used to be throngs of shooters like it, but in 2024 it’s the last man standing. The only triple-A left that’s still delivering this old-school thrill ride of set-pieces, shooting galleries and twist-laden espionage narrative. Developer Treyarch obviously noticed this and, in an inspired move to ensure COD’s continued big dumb fun, it’s made some inspired tweaks to the old formula.

And that’s how you come to find yourself sneaking – genuinely sneaking – through chic European restaurants, throwing knives at guards for silent takedowns, hiding bodies and holding conversations with NPCs in a COD game.

Choosing your approach to tackling a mission objective. Listening in on people for information. Paying attention to your surroundings and playing slowly. In the hands of an immersive sim series like Dishonored, these elements would be business as usual, and you’d back the final product to be finely crafted.

But this is Call Of Duty, the series that – and not a lifetime ago, either – once asked you to ‘press X to pay respects’ during a funeral cutscene, and changed its Twitter account to resemble a global news outlet while it live-tweeted a fake terrorist attack in Singapore to promote Black Ops 3. Subtlety has not previously been this franchise’s preserve.

It’s a big deal, then, that Black Ops 6 manages to blend elements of stealth, immersive sim and RPG into a solo shooter campaign while keeping its iron sights trained on its enduring identity as a vehicle for absurd military bombast.

Here’s the setup: it’s 1991. We’re mid-Gulf War 1, and your group of CIA operatives have just been suspended for being too maverick and disobeying orders in the field while encountering a mysterious private military force known as Pantheon. With little to do besides update your LinkedIn, you join your fellow operators in an investigation into Pantheon, during which you discover a superweapon known as ‘the cradle’ and are double-crossed more frequently than a Traitors contestant.

Between us, the narrative itself isn’t going to be troubling the Booker Prize panel. It’s enjoyable, schlocky and occasionally tone-deaf, like COD has been since time immemorial. What matters is how well Treyarch brandishes it to get you from A to B, and build compelling missions out of it.

Early highlights include sneaking around in the cloakrooms at a charity ball for the young governor Bill Clinton, who even appears onstage at one point but sadly refrains from launching into a saxophone solo, tagging enemies using a spy camera and choosing your approach towards getting your target alone and vulnerable. It’s not quite Hitman: World of Assassination, but certainly reminiscent of it.

There’s plenty of shooting, of course. It’s a wise design call never to punish you for being caught during stealthy sequences, instead simply letting you revert to type and open fire on the newly alerted guards without any sense of having messed up.

And it’s here where Treyarch’s decades-long expertise in making a gun feel good really makes itself known. Nowhere else do firearms snap and pop with just the right amount of immediacy and recoil as in COD. It’s a perfect alchemy of sound design, animation and physical feedback. Even the way the crosshair animates somehow sells the potency of your weapon.

As you delve deeper into your chase to uncover Pantheon and settle a score with its (shock!) double-crossing leader, the cadence of those all-out gunfights picks up, and you start to feel numb to the constant explosions and helicopters falling out of the sky and high-tech weaponry providing fireworks displays in every direction. Some of the original Modern Warfare intensity creeps back into this Black Ops, and that’s absolutely fine.

Because by then you’ve already had the chance to upgrade your base of operations, furnishing it like the Home Alone house with weapons benches and training rooms. You’ve had the chance to get to know your fellow operatives, listened to their backstories, understood their motivations.

Ultimately that makes for a well-paced campaign with surprising agility, as Black Ops 6 hops between genres like an enthusiastic crush handing you an eclectic mixtape of all the music it’s into at the moment. It’s hard not to share in that enthusiasm, even in the game’s crasser moments that over-indulge in real-world conflict parallels.

It’s always required you to turn your brain off to some extent in order to fully enjoy it, and that’s no less true in Black Ops 6 than any other COD campaign. But the synapses still left firing are treated to an uncommon feast of good ideas, delivered with that Hollywood blockbuster production sheen that only this series can consistently muster. Now shred this document before it self-destructs and get it installed.