Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Review

Cold War's campaign is better than its reputation and its packaging. The Perseus hunt gives Treyarch license for actual spycraft, an evidence board in the safehouse, a Lubyanka infiltration with multiple disguise routes, and side missions solved by decrypting collected intel rather than shooting it, and the Bell twist, letting the player-character's programmable identity power the finale, is the cleverest thing the sub-series has done since the numbers.

Dialogue choices and two endings sweeten it. The rest of the package shows its compressed, handed-off development. Multiplayer launched with a thin map pool and scorestreak tuning that rewarded chaos over objectives, gunplay lacked the weight of the previous year's reboot, and the engine, older than the one the franchise had just showcased, looked flatter in direct comparison, hence visuals at C. Zombies' Die Maschine was a bright spot with its streamlined onboarding. A good six-hour thriller inside a service that needed another year, and graded as the whole.