Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Campaign (Xbox Series) Review

When the Call of Duty series transitioned into a yearly, multiplayer-centric franchise, it lost a lot of its luster for me. While I do play the occasional deathmatch round, I’m a campaign-first kinda guy and, as each campaign got shorter and shorter, so too did my attention span. All of which makes returning to Call of Duty for Black Ops 6 kind of a big thing for me. My interest was piqued when I heard Raven Software – or what’s left of them – were leading development of the campaign and, thankfully, they haven’t disappointed.

Now if you’ve played any of Ravens single-player focused FPS before, you know they have a certain design style to them and a focus on fun minute-to-minute gameplay rather than on-the-rails spectacle. Which is to say that they’re usually not graphical explosions of shock-and-awe and almost always start somewhat underwhelming. And then, as in Quake 4, Wolfenstein (2009), and Singularity they eventually become great to exceptional at a certain point. Black Ops 6 proves that Raven haven’t changed that much at all.

Black Ops 6 takes us back to the turbulent 1990’s, the Gulf War, and a new paramilitary threat known as The Pantheon. The game seeks to emulate international mystery and spy stories, ala The Jason Bourne movies. Our heroes are, as always, out in the cold with a target on their back after an extraction operation goes wrong. To clear their names and bring down The Pantheon, they go on the run, and plan ops in exotic locations to find out what The Pantheon’s big plans are. If you’ve watched any espionage movie in the last thirty years or so, you’ll know what to expect. There are twists and turns, betrayals and revenge, all thrown together with a smattering of that explosive Call of Duty seasoning.

The story may feel a little disjointed at times, with plot contrivances designed to throw you into exotic locations, such as a casino heist and the opening of Operation Desert Storm itself, which break up the gameplay flow and sometimes give you multiple ways to play. While I wasn’t entirely sold on the story nor found it novel, this backstabbing flow of betrayals and reveals helps to make Black Ops 6 the best Call of Duty campaign in years. To the developer’s credit, a safe house visit between missions ensures you can speak to your team of operators to flesh out their stories and personalities, so they don’t seem one-sided and one-note as most of Call of Duty‘s secondary cast.

Most Call of Duty campaigns have floundered in recent years, with a mere handful of hours to blow stuff up and shoot nameless cogs in an ageing, formulaic, and mummifying playstyle.

Black Ops 6 bucks that trend by giving you a meaty eight hour plus campaign. While most of it is still a shooty little beast, it mixes up its mechanics to make each level feel distinct and fresh. The awful Call of Duty staple of endless enemy spawns until you hit a trigger or checkpoint has also been paired back, with only or two sections using this mechanic while the rest of the game favours traditional enemy placement and limited numbers.

Outside of the original Call of Duty trilogy, whose World War II setting made sense for the endless number of warm bodies thrown at you, it’s a design aspect I’ve come to find a mix of annoying and predictable. If kill counts are what you’re after for stat purposes, you can gladly plop yourself down behind a barrel and camp until bored with that kind of trigger-based gameplay. I prefer set number of enemies and custom-tailored encounters myself, and Black Ops 6 mostly scratches that itch.

Black Ops 6 inherently tones back the usual bombast that the series is known for with it spy-thriller design. Make no mistake, there are still a few huge firefights scattered through the campaign and one particularly thrilling airport set sequence, but the developers have opted for a design that makes sense for covert ops structure. Of more importance is that stealth, which is a fully viable, if simplistic, playstyle. The bulk of the missions give you the option of going loud or silent, and it’s very satisfying dropping bodies without alerting anyone. Two of the game’s best missions drop you into open areas with multiple objectives to complete in anyway and any order you decide. Your choices may not affect the final outcome, but it’s nice to choose whether or not you want to fill an attack choppers engine with water versus planting a bomb on its underside.

In between missions, you return to a command centre, well safe house, to chat with the rest of your team and plan your missions. The house has its own set of secrets to unlock with some light puzzle solving, and it can be upgraded with cash collected in the field to add perks to your operators and weapons. Things like faster reloads or more ammo dropped in the field add a nice, albeit tiny skill tree to proceedings. All in all, between the missions that let you swap between characters for a fun casino heist, the usual explosive run and gun spectacle, and the quiet team moments, Black Ops 6 has more depth to it than any prior game in the long-running IP has had for a while.

Performance wise, the game ran perfectly on an Xbox Series X. No matter how many explosions were on screen or aircraft were falling out of the sky, the frame rate was rock solid. That may be down to the fact that this is the first Call of Duty I’ve seen in years that hasn’t attempted to push the visual boundaries as far as usual. It’s still a good-looking game, especially the character rendering and animation department, but it does feel as though stable performance on current-gen machines and acceptible last-gen perfomrance might have been the target.

With a legitimately fun, lengthy, and satisfying campaign, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has revitalised a series I had long since written off. If Activision and its various contributing developers continue to put more time and effort into their campaigns, I may just return for subsequent games. Black Ops 6 may not outshine the original Call of Duty trilogy or the phenomenal (original) Modern Warfare, but it’s still a helluva ride played solo and that makes it the best Call of Duty in years for me.