Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Beta Thoughts

By Sam Coles:

When Call of Duty Black Ops 4 was announced back in May I was rather disappointed, this was because Treyarch decided to not to include a story mode in this year’s game which they are known for producing well written campaigns. This year’s Call of Duty will be a multiplayer experience only, which is fine as long as it can stand on its own legs and compete with other games within the genre. Activision was kind enough to grant me access to the private beta on PS4, I got to play around with a few modes, specialists and select weapons. Just as a disclaimer, this game is not finished yet so certain features, modes and weapons are subject to change so keep that in mind.

I got access to several game modes such as Domination, Hardpoint, Chaos Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy and a new mode called Heist. Most of the modes are staples of Call of Duty and have been in the series for the last 10 years, Heist is the mode which is interesting as it is not a new idea because if you have played Counter Strike you have played this mode. How it works is that you start off with a small amount of money with nothing more than a pistol, you gain more money by killing other players or reviving and helping team mates. What you have to do is steal cash to take back to your base, which is similar to the blood money mode from Battlefield Hardline expect you have one life. It’s an interesting addition but it’s not new as I have had the same experience from Counter Strike and Battlefield Hardline.

Specialists make a return from Black Ops 3, all the familiar characters are back although you can no longer run on walls or jump seven feet in the air as advanced movement has been scrapped.  They all have their uses and I what I do like is that their special abilities are not all offensive tactics, they have support roles such as healing team mates, granting extra protection via body armour and setting up barbwire barriers to slow down and kill enemies. It really encourages team work instead of the old ways of Call of Duty where players run like chickens with their heads cut off, plus you can no longer have players pick the same specialist as this creates tactical variation on a team.

Gameplay has been changed up and some of it good and some of it questionable, for starters you no longer have regenerating health as you have to heal yourself with a  syringe. I do like this as it adds an extra layer of depth and tension to firefights because you and your opponent are on equal ground in terms of vulnerability; you have to make decisions of when you are going to heal. You now start off with 150 hit points and this fine, but the problem is that the time to kill which is how long it takes to kill an opponent is too high, I found myself in situations where it took more than half a magazine to kill another player.

Other issues I had with this game was and bear in mind that this game is not finished, the framerate is all over the place, it targets 60 frames per second but it struggles when things get busy with explosions and gunfire and it gets rather jittery.  Visually at the moment the game seems to look worse than Black Ops 3, which I may remind you came out in 2015 and was also shoehorned onto the Xbox 360 and PS3, character models like rather low in quality hopefully it can be fixed.

The main menu and user interface is also rather cluttered, now this may seem to be rather nit-picky, but when your main menu is a chore to navigate then there is something fundamentally wrong. I found during gameplay that there is too much on screen, with icons and status of your character etc. cluttering the screen where it almost distracted me from engagements.

One last gripe I had is that the spawning system is botched as I found myself spawning next to enemy players during matches as well, as enemy players spawning behind me. This lead to me dying in a continuous loop, where wanted to repurpose my controller as a boomerang.

Overall I’m left feeling confused, Call of Duty Black Ops 4 in its current state is trying to be Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege and Counter Strike it is trying to be everything but a Call of Duty game. Now I’m all for change and innovation but this is a mess, it currently does not have a focus as it seems to be taking what is currently popular. I remember a time from 2007-2012 Call of Duty were setting the trends not following them, what is here is interesting but it lacks the soul of a Call of Duty game. Let’s hope all the issues that I have are fixed by time the game releases on the 12^th of October on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.