Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 review – annual military shooter fixture hasn’t felt this fresh in years

Whoever thought of constructing this game’s campaign around a safe house resembling a haunted mansion on an abandoned country estate deserves an immediate pay rise. After each foray into shoot-’em-up carnage, your team of militarised misfits is deposited back into this sprawling country pile, which for some reason is filled with intriguing mysteries and puzzles: what happens if you play the piano? Where does that passage lead? What is this, scrawled in invisible ink on the wall? It’s like Scooby-Doo crossed with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – a comparison I never imagined making about a Call of Duty game.

Lead developers Treyarch and Raven have had four years to work on this title and boy does it show. The multiplayer mode is both familiar and fresh thanks to its “omni-movement”, which lets you run and leap in every direction, radically altering the feel of movement and tipping the balance of lethal encounters in favour of people with spatial reasoning skills rather than lightning-fast trigger fingers. The small maps, taking in derelict radar stations, strip mall forecourts and penthouse apartments, have been intricately built to provide combinations of labyrinthine corridors, long sight-lines and sneaky cubby holes. The weapons, including 12 newcomers, are designed to exploit varying playstyles from quick-scope super snipers to Red Bull-guzzling SMG teens – and the gunsmith allows myriad ways to modify each one, with genuine tangible effects on your play.

For the single-player campaign, the scene is set in 1991, during the Gulf war, where a mysterious international terror agency named The Pantheon has got its hands on a deadly weapon of mass destruction – possibly with the help of corrupt CIA operatives. The only people who can stop the Pantheon are a selection of weaponised ne’er-do-wells including an ex-Force Recon hard nut, a troubled assassin and a very bouffant secret agent, the last of whom may well have had a sideline modelling 1980s hair products.

It’s kind of refreshing that Call of Duty, all too often a jingoistic standard-bearer for American exceptionalism, is now looking inward for its enemies. It’s also probably a good idea that the Iraq conflict is very much a backdrop (with Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton and George Bush all popping up in cameo roles) rather than a focus, given how complex that conflict was. There are however several controversial scenes, including the helicopter gunship slaughter of dozens of Iraqi soldiers, and the gratuitous interactive interrogation of a terrified prisoner, that are distressing in their lack of moral context or analysis.

Otherwise, how does it play? Well, Oscar Wilde famously said that “genius steals”, and he may as well have been a design consultant on this game. “Most Wanted” is effectively a Hitman mission set during a Democratic party fundraiser, where you’re given three different ways to blackmail a senator into giving you intel: mafia hitmen, a disgruntled wife or a mysterious note in his coat pocket. Hunting Season is Far Cry 2: an open-world quest set in a desert crammed with enemy bases to raid and secrets to discover. Under the Radar is Metal Gear Solid – a heady mix of stealth and social engineering that follows the assassin as she infiltrates a Pantheon base in Vorkuta (a small Russian town that previously featured in the original Black Ops campaign).

These are short, sharp genre exercises that each bring different flavours to the central gameplay conceit of killing as many soldiers as possible. But the real treat is Emergence, the narcotic-induced hallucination mission that every game in the Black Ops series must contain. It is a tense, engrossing and genuinely unsettling tribute to a certain Dr Who episode that will induce a fear of crash test mannequins in all who play it.

Finally, the Zombies mode has returned to its standard format, abandoning the unpopular open-world design introduced in Modern Warfare III. It’s a wave-based shootout, in which teams of co-op players try to survive against incoming zombie hordes using weapons and items discovered while exploring the tight, atmospheric locations. Once again, you’re holding out against swarming corpses, levelling up your guns at Pack-a-Punch machines, collecting special weapons and facing down boss monsters, while keeping your eyes peeled for fun easter eggs, such as a hidden bowling alley where you attempt to knock down as many lumbering brain-eaters as possible. It’s fraught and incredibly stressful, but with three friends it’s a real blast.

Black Ops 6 is the best title in the series for years. It’s still a maniacal first-person shootfest that many players will absolutely detest; no critics of games that glorify the military-industrial complex are going to be converted at this stage. The design team, though, knows its audience and serves them accordingly while doing just enough to move things forward and try some intriguing little segues. I would happily play a whole game in which I could customise the flamboyant safe house to make it more comfortable for my cute little family of spec-ops sociopaths; I would play a whole survival horror adventure set in the world that Emergence concocts. Nothing in this series has ever lingered with me as long as the nuclear bomb explosion in Call of Duty 4 – but these violent delights, I feel, have staying power.