Call of Duty; Black Ops IIII

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has a meticulous multiplayer with eight modes and 14 maps, a brand new battle royale mode called Blackout with the largest map the series has ever seen and the most developed co-op with zombies so far.

But something is missin. The game has not got a soul.

Do you know that warm feeling of excitement and controlled impatience when you first run a game you've been waiting for the first time so you do not want to skip anything? Every fraction of this process of the first game launch is studied and absorbed in the guts.

Even the introductory animations of Nvidia, Dolby Digital and similar technologies used in games today are not overwhelmed because it's all part of that initial euphoria. You want to completely submerge in the atmosphere, to leave the theme that the game represents. The introductory animation that sets this subject then welcomes you and the effect is complete - you look at it without flashing, and the main menu when it is finally discovered is like someone opened the door and let you in. You do not even want to click on the New Game because you are afraid that you will miss something by thinking that the dedicated and discerning developers have certainly hidden some detail in the main menu.

You may experience this when you first launch Red Dead Redemption 2 these days, but not Black Ops 4. The new Call of Duty has just one big-screen menu that goes straight to the thing - which of these three options do you want to play?


Black Ops 4 has all that one new title in 2018 should have to justify its price. It's fun, full of content and technically works virtually without mistakes. He quickly hit millions of people with his royale mode recipe as well as classic multiplayer and co-op zombies so we can say that Activision was obviously right when he thought it was more worthwhile to remove singleplayer and divert resources to more content-intensive multiplayer.

But I tell you - the game does not have the soul.

Whether you like some of the previous Call of Duty extensions or not, you can not deny that the rules of your fantasy universe and the themes that are inspired by design and story are clearly set out by singleplayers. Whether you played singleplayer in the game or not, the very fact that it was present in the game affected both the design of multiplayer and then your experience of the same, or the feeling of the place and time when you are participating in those MP battles.

In Black Ops 4 you will have no idea who are the two warring parties in multiplayer, why they fight, what year and why the rifles look the way they look. Because there is no story. The little hint lies, of course, in the title of the game, Black Ops 4, so it is a sequel to the Black Ops series that previously had its singleplayer stories and a theme that the new sequel now only leaps lightly.
Truths for the will, as an attempt to approach the subject and those who did not play Black Ops before, have created a Specialist HQ mode, where you can get acquainted with 10 major characters (read: specialists) and their background stories and battle skills, but if you succeed make you look at those fallen, second-rate cutscene everybody's honor.


But how much is that lack of soul really important? Well, if we honestly - and not really. Instead of the soul, the game has a ton of content that can take you up to hundreds of hours. Only Blackout mode as the most prominent and most certainly the most important part of the package is so fun and refined that it can offer you 100 hours of fun, probably a lot more if you just get infected. And it could - very easy.

BLACKOUT

Blackout is a classic battle royale, something like a famous PUBG,but more faster than PUBG. And to those who accelerate you so you do not even think about it. Right Call of Duty maneuvers get out of the helicopter at the start of the match, using the wingsuit and the parachute quickly touch the ground and then find the first weapon even faster. You will soon die if you do not find at least level 1 armor, and even faster if you do not know how to act as the greatest masters in the game.

It's a real thing to watch a good player while eliminating, sprinting and skipping the fences on the massive Blackout map. Everything acts as a connected, fine-controlled combo-movement that never ends. In the case of the best players, that series of fine moves often ends with expert referral of the bullet in the opponent's head, after which the dance on the map continues.

All this really helps and helps you stay longer, but a great emphasis is placed on the armor. Without him you can still suddenly kill a life with a sniper from just two good shootings.

Blackout, in addition to anticipated weapons such as assault rifles, short guns, pistols, shotguns and snipers, offers a whole host of other weapons and gadgets to spice up every match. On the Blackout map you will find a series of short-term buffoes that will increase the speed of movement or show where the loot is located. Or a remote control car with which you can explore the situation in a home without risking your own head. Jump to the bar and maybe find a rocket launcher, visit the cemetery and maybe run into a dumb potent laser gun that keeps zombies ..

Call of Duty is known for fast dying, or short-term TTK, which is not in line with the values of battle royale games in which you have only one life. That is why Black Ops 4 increased the basic health of the player at 150 HP. This at the start increases the chances that you will stay alive at 1 to 1 meeting in the middle of the Blackout map, and this is in fact the fact that various health packs are always close to you, as well as being used very quickly. You can heal even while sprinting to cover - the game has no brakes.


Blackout has only one map and is not huge, but it can be said that it is the best designed map in the battle royale genre so far. It would be strange that it is not so when we consider how much the game costs, how much money is behind the production of the whole thing, as well as the fact that the map has been tested by good multiplayer battlefields from the Call of Duty series. All of these individual CoD maps are not just meaninglessly embedded in a larger map. Forests, paths, deserts and massive grassy areas as well as completely new villages and areas like cemeteries connect these well-known maps and completely new ideas into a perfectly meaningful whole.

However, I would not be bothered to offer another Blackout map immediately, and I do not think it's much to be expected with regard to the price of the game and the lack of singleplayer. The current map in Blackout is great, but not really huge when compared to others in the genre. And because of the rapid movement of the fact that we have land, sea and air vehicles available soon it seems to be smaller than it is. Although it's always great maps, in every battle royale game you will get the feeling that you know every corner of the map after enough matches. In Blackout, that feeling appears earlier than usual.

The design of Blackout also influenced the classic multiplayer somewhat. Because of Blackout, HP has been lifted and a system of manual regeneration of health has been inserted, and this is now transferred to a classic MP. The feeling of playing the classic CoD multiplayer with this is a bit different - you have to remember to squeeze the healing key after each surviving encounter, you do not have to squat behind the covert and wait for the energy to return.

Specialists

You should also remember to use the specialties of your specialist because each one comes with your own skills that emphasize the team play in the context of the match. One specialist can fire an arrow revealing the location of the enemy, the other one can go to the higher levels of the map, and the third one will kill three people if they are placed in front of his (good, special) revolver. A well-rounded team of specialists who communicates with the team about the availability of their utima skills can easily get a match with the help of all of this.

This might remind you of the hero shooter as Overwatch, but it really has nothing to do with it. This is still Call of Duty and so is playing. In Black Ops 4 each specialist has his own class, he selects the weapon with which the specialist will go out on the field, and these specialty options are not so important to make a huge difference in the match. There are, part of the game and you have to master them for success, but what you have to master primarily is movement and shooting from classic weapons, just like in any CoD game so far. Multiplayer matches at the start of the game are well-known in spite of the specialists and other changes. Fans will appreciate what the game is still consistent with their own series, but others could say that it is not overly innovative.


Multiplayer

The fact is that a total of eight different multiplayer modes give ample variety to this multiplayer experience, but only two are brand new. Control is not that special - it is your job to take or defend certain points as a team, but the tact of tactics in that known format is the fact that there is a limited number of possible respawns. A welcome addition to MP mode, but I say - nothing too creative.

Heist is far more interesting - it will remind you of games like Counter-Strike and Payday with a dozen economics between each round. In Heist you steal money and carry it to a certain point, and you earn earned gaming for better weapons, armor, and add-ons between rounds. There is no Create a Class system here, but you have to buy everything you have earned in each previous round, similar to CS. There is no respawn, but instead of immediately dying when an opponent drops your health to zero, you'll go to your knees and hope that your colleagues will revive you before your opponent completely removes them from the rounds. For a long time in CoD there has not appeared a fashion that calls so much for tactics and it is the biggest plus of this part of the game.


Zombies

The third part of the game is of course zombies. This cooperative mode has been part of the Call of Duty game for a long time, and until now it was just a cache for a small team of zombie mazes with a separate story, Black Ops 4 got it close to the level of a separate game. Instead of one, the Black Ops 4 launches up to three big maps in the beginning, through which you step through the team and kill more serious opponents with amazing creatures of zombie obstacles, buying weapons, and revealing secrets. It's fun and interesting, and it looks good.
On one map you are in a gladiator arena at the time of old Rome, another zombie is hunting for the Titanic in the huge iceberg and the third will remind you of Black Ops 2 because it is a kind of transformation of known Mob of the Dead maps with some extensions. Each map tells its story and contains characters with the tasks that should be completed, but it's not an adequate substitute for the real singleplayer because all those zombie stories live in their own small universe.

Zombies are scary as always, but not just because of the good design and atmosphere on each map, but the fact that they can quickly throw you on your knees if you're not careful. And when I say zombies, I mean the giant armed starry soldiers and the huge red-eye tigers. There are such. I do not particularly like them.

I'm not sure maybe it's up to me, but I think this is the most difficult Zombie mode in Call of Duty so far. Begin on the Beginner setting because Normal is already quite brutal - it's no wonder that after the first few waves you fall to your knees and you're inviting your help colleagues. But the good thing is that the experience is completely customizable, through a simple editor you can set yourself and your friends a separate match where zombies have less, you have more health, and in your hands you have a better weapon right now than usual.



Conclusion

As in Zombies mode, you have three maps that will not be liked by everyone, so Black Ops 4 as a whole offers three very different multiplayer experiences that will not all be equally experienced. But of course you can not buy only Blackout or just zombies - Black Ops 4 is a package of content and as such is sold, you liked it or not.

You are a big fan of royale fan and you want to try this from CoD? There are good chances that you will enjoy Blackout - it's one of the best royale combat modes you can ever play today. But the fact that you have a ticket for that battle royale on one map had to pay 60 euros would be a pity.

Maybe you just packed that pain to try MPs and zombies when you bought it all over, maybe suddenly you find a party you did not even look for. It's possible - maybe you're just such a mix of all these experiences and looking for one package. All this is a well-made multiplayer experience. But now that there is no singleplayer that connects everything in a single story with a story and theme, Black Ops 4 works less closely, as something that could be thrown out as three separate games. In other words, Black Ops 4 has no soul to lubricate all that it offers, but it also reminds us that games today need not have the soul to be fun and successful.