Note: This review specifically covers the Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our campaign review or our multiplayer review.
Despite playing a new one every year, I never know what to make of modern Call of Duty – a first-person shooter so big, so successful that it is no longer a standalone game but a platform with file sizes so large it asks you to choose the other two things you’d like to have installed on your PC or console. This year’s PC release comes with a frustrating new anti-cheat that seemingly caused my CPU fan to choose death instead, so while I would normally base my playtime on that version, as God intended, I am initially slumming it on PlayStation 5 to bring you some early impressions of this year’s Zombies mode. I still have tons left to see as the community collectively hunts for Easter eggs and solves mysteries, but so far I’m interested in digging into what’s here, even if it may take a bit to get to the vital organs underneath these bones.
Zombies is my favorite part of Call of Duty, simultaneously the stupidest, silliest side thing the series has ever done and probably big enough to be a small video game in its own right. I remarked on a similar feeling in last year’s review, but remember when this was a serious game series about war, and you were storming the beaches of Normandy, machine gun fire spraying sand in your face? When you died, you used to get quotes about how terrible war was from men who had lived it. Now, I play roulette on a big mystery box covered with skulls for weapons, the best of which is a ray gun, so I can shoot zombies in the face while a disembodied voice who calls himself the Warden taunts me from afar; my character quips about how said voice reminds him of his high school gym teacher. Zombies has been doing this for a while now, but I still don’t know whether to laugh or weep.
There is allegedly a story here – Raul Menendez, who apparently has been alive and drinking beer on his porch for the last decade, is back and threatening to cause chaos the world over, there’s a shady security company somehow involved, and massive, violent zombie death, of course. All of it is very well-produced and so goofy that the only thing I could do was watch the introductory cutscene while emulating the face that I imagine a cow would make if you gave it cocaine, chuckle a little, and get on with it. I suppose I answered my own question there, huh?
This year’s Zombies is hard to get a handle on so far because so much of what Zombies does will come down to the community working out the new maps in the coming days and perhaps weeks. Right now, we’re all kind of bumbling about, figuring out what’s what, which is simultaneously fun and frustrating. Many of the pain points from last year remain early on – for instance, you can’t make your loadout until you hit level four, which means if Zombies is all you want to do (and for me, it is), you’re stuck with a pistol and whatever you can earn by buying stuff on the walls after you’ve dispatched enough undead. Remember when games just let you have fun from the outset instead of unlocking it?
Otherwise, the underpinnings of Zombies feel much the same. You’re on a map, you open up new doors and paths with currency you earn, and you’ve got Pack-a-Punch machines to upgrade your guns. There’s additional armor you can apply plastered to the walls, an Arsenal to really crank up specific aspects of your weapons, Gobblegums for a little flavor if your mouth is lonely and you want a mid-battle pick-me-up, and so on. And of course, while you’re managing all of this, the undead rise and hunger for flesh. Ghouls, man.
The gameplay here is similar to last year’s – I still love sliding at a group of zombies and firing off a shotgun until they’re just paste and all that. No, what’s new are the maps. I’ve played both maps in their round-based modes, Ashes of the Damned and Vandorn Farm (the latter seems to be a part of the former, but I haven’t reached it in the standard mode yet), and so far I prefer the farm. Ashes of the Damned seems to be home to what will be the more traditional “find the secrets to finish the map” fare, while Vandorn Farm is more of a “you’re locked in here with the undead, kid, so try not to die too much” deal.
Our run on the former ended when one of my teammates, who didn’t communicate with the rest of us, grabbed a truck and started driving it to the next objective… before he decided it might be more fun to smash into the zombies until it exploded. The rest of us spent most of the map either trying to catch up to the truck or waiting in vain to be revived after we all died. It went about as well as you’d think. I’m interested in seeing what Ashes of the Damned has to offer with a more talkative crew; right now, if you’d told me I’d hallucinated the whole thing, I’d believe you.
The farm is more old-school. Zombies hang from the rafters in the big barn, the smaller one houses the Mystery Box where each of my teammates made offerings in the fleeting hope of a Ray Gun, and there was a house with a skeleton family sitting at the dinner table and a roof in desperate need of, well, more roof. It was a much more interesting map than Ashes of the Damned, and I enjoyed navigating its twists and turns, learning where everything was, and spending the in-between time killing the misbegotten horrors that were formerly people.
The problem, once again, was that we couldn’t figure out what to do yet. There was some mysterious infection growing on one of the machines that seemed to power the farm, but after we destroyed it, our objective told us to wait for it to come back. So we did, killing zombies and upping the round count. The issue is the infection never did reappear. Normally, this is a good thing. The antibiotics worked and the patient is recovering well, thank you. In this case, it meant we got to round eight, nothing happened, the four of us spent several minutes looking for any zombies we somehow missed or a way to progress, and then all three of my teammates left the game after we couldn’t figure out what came next. Hard to blame them. The farm’s cool, but I’d prefer something with some warmer colors and fewer rotting corpses, you know?
Like I said, I’m never sure what to make of Call of Duty, and that extends to this year’s Zombies. It certainly plays well and you can see the absurd amount of money spent to develop it on-screen – but the ooey, gooey, juicy parts of the mode haven’t revealed themselves to me quite yet. As is usually the case, its success will largely depend on how the maps shake out. I’ll need a bonesaw and a ribspreader to get to the still-beating heart of this thing, but that’s fine. I can’t say I’m not interested in seeing what’s in there. I just hope I don’t get anything on me in the process.
