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Playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 over the last two weekends, I am reminded of Joan Cusack’s great line from Grosse Pointe Blank: on the subject of attending her ten-year high school reunion, she says, ‘It was just as if everybody had swelled.’ It hasn’t been 10 years for Treyarch, of course – the previous entry was released in 2015 – but it feels as if the Black Ops branch of the Call of Duty tree has become bloated and knotty.
It’s strange, given the game is stripped of a single-player campaign, that it feels this way – especially considering the lightsome speed at which Black Ops 4 rockets along. Movement has the surge a sledge: a caffeinated sprint speed, grapnel hooks that hump you across maps, and the power to slide along the floor like a knob of butter. Likewise, the globetrotting of its maps is brisk, thumbing a lift from coastal towns to alpine nuclear installations. The spring of Call of Duty has long been wound tight with wanderlust, its campaigns and multiplayer modes as much a replacement for your travel agent as a chance to perforate your fellow man. The maps in Black Ops 4 are the first warning sign.
The private beta features six maps: Frequency, Payload, Gridlock, Seaside, Contraband, and Hacienda. Payload and Frequency are, respectively, the arctic and tropical varietals of Bond villain lair; only, in their relentless adherence to the language of crates, pipes, silos, struts, and hangars, they blur into a dun industrial sludge. The last three seem hasty refutations of the first three. Contraband feels clumsy; its sucrose beachhead and outrageous cerulean water look like holiday photos that have been tampered with by Michael Bay. Similarly, the picturesque Seaside and Hacienda maps flout reality; their oversaturated Spanish villas, huddled on the hillsides, and flawless arrangement of cafés, fish delis, and vineyards are all more a VR postcard than a real place. I'd sooner holiday in Pripyat.
And what of the chance to riddle people with air holes? It seems as if Treyarch is catering for the gluttons, because characters in Black Ops 4 take an awful lot of bullets before they go down. The gunplay is as it has been, winnowed with the usual breeze and speed; only now, your opponents seem to swallow entire clips and walk on. This means punching through enemy numbers in Black Ops 4 feels like getting through a plate of suet – thus, controlling the pace of games as part of a squad in Domination or Team Deathmatch becomes like trying to digest the stodge.
This is exemplified best in the final map, the perfectly named Gridlock, which is symbolic of Black Ops 4 as a whole. It’s set in a futuristic Japanese metropolis, roads jammed with smashed cars – the remnants, the official description tells me, of a bank heist gone wrong. The bones of older Japanese architecture – papery buildings and red roofs – just upwards here and there amidst the concrete and smashed glass. Movement through the map is piped along lines like the flow of sewage, spewing out into clearings of shrapnel-death. It feels not unlike being excrement, flushed away.
Perhaps, rather fittingly, what we need is the centripetal force of a toilet flush: a whirling, constricting whoosh that binds players together, and sures up the lethargy of play. What Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 needs – and forgive me for citing the vogue of our times – is a battle royale mode. We need Blackout. The bloated game needs a girdle, something to tighten its squidgy overgrowths. In a confined space, the frequency of death ramps up; with each encounter forced as the map constricts, those bullets will get to work a lot quicker!
Besides, there’s something quintessentially old Call of Duty about this clutch of maps – something of belted pathways and cramped corridors that funnel each firefight with contrivance. One too many times I found myself whisked to the location of a skirmish, swiftly killed (granted, this is most definitely more a comment on my own skill), and spat out at the back of the queue with vomit on my shoes – ready for another whirl on the rollercoaster. The health mechanic, which is now a needle jab mapped to a button press, instills part of the rabid scramble for survival into Black Ops 4 already. Now, we need the maps and the mode to bring it all together. We need the open space and careful curation of Erangel, or Miramar.
We need the desperation, the mad dashes of depravity that battle royale brings to proceedings. Perhaps it's a sign of madness in me; recently, given the success of Fortnite and PUBG, it’s become news when studios don't have plans for battle royale in their games. It’s strange, and oddly fitting then, that Call of Duty, a series with the lion’s share of responsibility for getting us to where we are now with shooters, is in need of catching up.
