Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War beta impressions

Another year, another call of duty. I don’t even have to preface this preview with any words on what this game is because lets be honest, you already know. The newest iteration in Activision’s behemoth Call Of Duty franchise sees us in the midst of the Cold War, a war mostly known for it’s sneaky, undercover spy tactics. However, if you’re expecting this game to reflect that narrative then you’re out of luck. This is a Call of Duty game, through and through. Unlike the Cold War. This game has a lot of guns, a lot of explosives, and a boatload of shooting. And I can say from the Beta, It’s pretty fun.

Gameplay

Gameplay-wise, if you’ve spent some time with any of the Call Of Duty games, you’ll feel right at home here. The gunplay, like in most Call Of Duty games, feels really good. The moment to moment gameplay is packed with intense, visceral gunfights where players battle it out to scrape their way out of interactions, the winner being the better shooter. Well, this is how it should be. Though the guns all feel amazing to shoot in this game I can’t say this is a game where skill is necessarily important as I’ve had many occasions where I’ve lost fights that I should have one or even myself, won fights I know I didn’t deserve to win. The spawns here are like a lot of previous COD games, meaning they’re absolutely atrocious. I’ve had moments where I spawned a couple of steps away from an enemy, giving me an insane advantage in the fight. You would think this would be because of smalls maps but the maps in this game feel big, well big for Call of duty standards. The Maps are all spacious enough, yet Problems like this still occurred, Given that this is a beta though I’m hoping they fix the spawns in the main release.

Speaking of maps, I was somewhat disappointed with the map choice here. There isn’t that much new with these maps, bar one standout map, Cartel. The majority of them are your basic 3 lane call of duty maps and though they aren’t bad, It would have been nice to see some more bold choices in the map design. Aesthetically the maps are all fine too, with a few like Cartel adding some nice little touches like the tall grass, which looks nice and is functional too. Giving players an added layer of cover when traversing the map.

Like I mentioned before, the major problem with the maps is they are all fairly large. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game had more players but for the small 6v6 battles, this leaves the maps feeling empty, void of anyone to kill. There have been many times I have found myself running around the map looking for an enemy for several seconds. This is a negative in my eyes as it really takes away from what is fun about the gameplay, the gunfights. You spend so much time away from gunfights and this can be frustrating, especially if in the end you get killed by an enemy spawning behind you.

Best bits

One of my favourite things that I found in the beta was the sound system. The audio in this game is amazing and each gun sounds different, making switching guns a completely different experience. The blaring sounds of bullets and grenades were explosive and I was completely immersed. However, the main reason why I love the sound so much in this game is the footsteps. The footsteps in this game feel heavy. Each step really sounds like a bulky soldier lugging around a small arsenal in their back pocket and this works really well in the gameplay. If you pay attention you can very clearly estimate where an enemy is based on their footsteps however they can also do the same.

This makes the game much more immersive but also more difficult as it’s not uncommon for enemies to now prefire corners based on your footsteps. This makes the game feel a bit more tactical like games like Rainbow Six Siege, however, there are a few elements that they previously borrowed from Siege that I wish made a reappearance here. Most notably the lean function. The previous game saw the addition of a lean function and I thought this made gameplay more interesting as you now had to be careful with corners because someone could be leaning over them. However, this time round that feature has been taken out and we are back to the basic Movement system COD has had for a while.

It should be said that though I do love the sound system in the game I did encounter some issues with it. specifically in the map Moscow. There are a few areas where the audio became somewhat choppy and I lost the ability to accurately locate people through sound as their footsteps were all over the place. I’m sure this is something they’ll fix in the launch version.

Possible improvements?

One difference that many will notice pretty quickly is how long the time to kill is in this game. The time to kill feels substantially longer here however I don’t necessarily see this as a negative and, to be honest, I prefer it. The longer time to kill gives players a better chance at defending themselves in gunfights and this proves especially useful in moments where you are getting shot at from behind because you now have time to turn around and fire back, potentially saving your life. Though I like this change and think it improves the gameplay I can see how some may prefer the fast time to kill from the previous games so be warned if you prefer games where whoever shot first is the winner then this may not be for you.

Another thing that takes a while is the grenades. And when I say a while I mean they take an insane amount of time. Throwing a grenade is a whole ordeal in this game, leaving you open to enemy fire for a substantial amount of time. This has led to many stupid deaths for me and from looking around, many others feel the same. However, like most of the problems with this game, this is something I think Treyarch can change very easily so I hope this won’t be a problem in the full release.

Another quick issue is whilst trying to get into games, Me and my group of friends did encounter some connectivity issues, mainly with joining each other’s parties. And during games, I have encountered massive lag spikes, with other players teleporting around making them near impossible to hit. These moments are few and far between but hopefully, the servers are improved on release.

Overall

Bar a few quite minor issues I think Call Of Duty Cold War is shaping up to be a very fun addition to the franchise, not adding much but rather stripping the game back in certain elements and making the game more similar to the COD I and many other people grew up playing. I mostly welcome this with open arms, though I do think some of these regressions are at the game’s detriment. Regardless this is a really fun game so far and I can’t wait to see how it turns out on release.

Call of Duty: Cold War will be out on November 13th on Xbox one, PS4, PC and next gen consoles Xbox Series X/S and PS5.