Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Review

Cutting the campaign was the loudest decision this series ever made, and the honest verdict is that what replaced it is good. Blackout is a battle royale assembled from remixed locations across every previous Black Ops game, and it plays far better than it had any right to, because the underlying gunplay was always the best in its genre and the map is a greatest-hits tour. Multiplayer slowed down deliberately: manual healing on a cooldown, no automatic regeneration, specialists with defined roles, and a time to kill that rewards holding an angle.

Zombies shipped with three full maps including a Roman colosseum, which is more content than the mode usually gets at launch. What is entirely absent is any story at all, and the Specialist tutorial fragments are not a substitute, which is why the story grade here is what it is. It also arrived as the series leaned hard into paid cosmetics and a pass economy that got worse over its life. As a multiplayer package it is one of the strongest. As a complete game it is deliberately incomplete.