Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 review-in-progress – Blackout, multiplayer and more

As we only received a review code for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 the day before release, we’ll be doing an initial first impression here before providing a finished final verdict at the end of the week, right here on TechRadar.

Call of Duty has been around for a long time. A good 15 years, in fact, and it’s gone from WW2-set Medal of Honor rival to the very blueprint of what it means to be ‘triple-A’ in modern gaming. For 13 of those years, the series has released a new entry on an annual basis, but since 2016’s Infinite Warfare, the cracks have really started to show.

Sales have slowly declined, and what was once the most exciting FPS experience on the market has become over fatigued by its own over-saturation. Traditional asymmetrical shooters are no longer the kill of the hill. Now hero shooters such as Overwatch and Battle Royale titles such as Fortnite wear that crown.

Last year’s Call of Duty WW2 was a fun return to the series’ roots, but in order to change CoD needs to look forward rather than back. So what has long-time developer Treyarch done to solve this problem? Copied those hero shooters and Battle Royale titles, of course.

The result is Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. A game that quite shamelessly cherry-picks the most in-vogue mechanics and features, and combines them with that instantly familiar FPS template. It’s certainly far from a original plan, but for all its mimicry, Black Ops 4 manages to give itself the shot of adrenaline its lacked since 2015’s Black Ops 3.

Back to black

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

The traditional single-player campaign is the first casualty, dropped in favor of some brief ‘stories’ that introduce the game’s eight Specialists and their respective backstory. Considering these solo modes used to be the big selling point of CoD’s of old - think the heyday of Modern Warfare - you’d think its omission would be a bad thing, but Treyarch has proved time and again that deft storytelling is not its forte, so the absence of a campaign isn’t the grand loss it first appears to be.

Black Ops 4’s new three pillars are the long-running veterans Multiplayer and Zombies and newcomer Blackout, marking the series’ first entry to embrace online play across all modes. Multiplayer has received some of the biggest changes this year, weaving the familiar bombastic gunplay and some new features that aim to elicit a more tactical approach.

Health is no longer regenerative, so taking refuge behind cover and waiting for your lifeblood to return won’t do you any good here. You now have a StimPack mapped to ‘L1’/’LB’ that refills your health bar, Far Cry-style. If you’re a long-time CoD devotee, this one mechanic alone takes a while to feel natural, but its inclusion only serves to add to the flow of play rather than hindering it. Now you have to manage your health, your gear and your ammunition, forcing you to play smarter when you need to choose between healing and reloading.

Those aforementioned Specialists - first introduced in Black Ops 3 as an attempt to give traditional classes a little more personality - have been rejigged to create a symbiosis between their key traits and abilities. While you can still just jump in and play as whichever character you like (running, gunning and camping ad infinitum), there’s a pleasing synergy to using each operator as part of a wider team effort.

Crash can throw an Assault Pack to refill his team’s ammo supply or use a special ability to heal everyone on the team in seconds. Prophet has a Stun Drone that will automatically incapacitate enemy players, while Recon can use a carefully placed Sensor Dart can reveal enemy positions in real-time. There’s still the likes of Ruin and Battery, who are just there to cause mayhem, but the fact there’s a renewed focus on cooperation is a change Black Ops 4 benefits from tenfold. Every bullet, reload and mantle feels like the CoD you know, but it’s just different enough to shake up the minutia of play.

Dead to rights

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

Zombies returns with its biggest launch day haul of content yet. As much fun as its tongue-in-cheek horror action has been over the last decade or more, it’s also started to feel a little fatigued overall. This year’s entry adds in another instalment in the long-running Aether storyline, but it’s in the new Chaos storyline that things really get mixed up for the better.

The two launch stories - set aboard the Titanic and a trap-filled Roman arena - are some of the craziest yet, with everything from exploding tigers to axe-flinging gladiators to battle. The addition of customizable classes and a rejig of how long it takes to revive teammates coalesce to make one of the most enjoyable iterations on the mode yet. Much like Multiplayer, it’s no grand reimaging, but a handful of adjustments in many of the right places.

Royale with cheese

Finally, there’s Blackout - the new Battle Royale mode that’s hoping to give the likes of Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds a run for their money. It certainly doesn’t try to hide its blatant mimicry of those elements that have made this genre so intrinsically in vogue over the last couple of years - skydiving into a giant sandbox, looting for weapons, and fighting down to the last man or woman as the map shrinks around you - but it works because it’s using the slick production values of CoD and integrates all the familiar ingredients you’ve come to expect from it.

The gunplay is spot on, with the random placement of weapons forcing you to adapt your play not just to the situation you’re in, but the gun in your hands. Just found a sniper rifle but realized you’re an awful shot? Few things are going to teach you to learn to no-scope like a champ than a team of remaining survivors bearing down on your position. The map itself is incredible in scope, around twice the size of Fortnite’s iconic locale. Littered with areas that call back to classic Black Ops levels - such as NukeTown 2025 - it’s effectively a playable CoD monument.

However, the size does mean that buildings are spaced out quite far apart in some sections of the map, so it can take a while to find a weapon if you’re trying to avoid other players touching down in the same area. This means there’s a far steeper learning curve for players less experienced with BR games, but all manner of CoD elements sprinkled in for extra flavour - such as randomly placed zombies and collectable perks - there’s plenty to keep you on your toes once you learn the ropes.

Look out for our full and final verdict on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 right here on TechRadar at the end of the week.