Note: This review specifically covers the Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our single-player campaign review or our multiplayer review.
You ever wonder how we got here? Not in an existential, “where did we come from?” kind of way, but more specifically “how did a one-off, co-op survival mode in a video game that used to put quotes about the horrors of war on screen when you died turn into this?” 16 years on, it’s hard to reconcile what the original Nazi Zombies mode from 2008’s World at War used to be with the outrageous, Resident Evil 6-inspired campfest Zombies has become. I’m not saying any of this in a bad way, mind you; Black Ops 6’s take on the mode is thrilling and unique thanks to all new movement mechanics, good map design, some absolutely killer Easter Eggs, lots of truly absurd guns, and the glorious return of round-based gameplay. Zombies hasn’t been the thing it was in World at War for a while, and I still find myself wondering how we got here, but I’m definitely not complaining about the end result.
Let’s carve out the bloody guts of this thing, shall we? Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode features two all-new maps: Terminus, a prison complex-turned-bio-research-station, and Liberty Falls, a small town in West Virginia whose slice of quaint Americana is about to test itself against The Worst Day Ever (spoiler: it doesn’t seem to be going well for the Americana). The story itself is a direct sequel to the Zombies campaign in 2020’s Black Ops Cold War, and if you, like me, have largely forgotten what happened in the intervening four years, there doesn’t seem to be much attempt to catch you up. That means you’re going to hear a lot of proper-noun-filled dialogue that could be important or fun references, but instead had me going “I vaguely remember that person,” a little too often. That said, there are some neat story beats here that I unfortunately can’t talk about without spoilers, and you’ll get more out of each map if you pay attention to the subtle details.
I wish I could say the same for the mid-combat dialogue. Mostly, I wanted the voices in my ear (and the characters I was playing) to shut up. They have what I’m going to call The Modern Video Game Character Problem™, which is to say they all talk too much – especially since half the time they’re just broadcasting their thoughts out loud. I’m not saying each and every one of them is a deeply annoying, terminally unfunny, outrageously unlikeable person, but I’m not not saying that, either. Their mid-combat banter is like something compiled from a Schwarzenegger film penned by ChatGPT – I’m not expecting poetry here, but at least give me Gears of War-level banter, you know? I can only hear lines like the one where someone is complaining about how the zombies make them so mad they “boil their piss” or how we need a mop to clean up all the brains we’re splattering everywhere so many times before I want to turn my gun towards my allies instead. Some of it is admittedly funny — I like Grey’s one about how she wanted a protractor to calculate an impact angle — but mostly it’s just kinda there.
You know what’s pretty sick, though? The gameplay. The biggest change here is Omnimovement (Zombiemovement?), Black Ops 6’s complete overhaul of Call of Duty’s basic movement mechanics. You can sprint, slide, and dive in every direction, even chaining these moves together. You’ve also got a full 360 degrees of motion, which means you can do sick stuff like sprint backwards, pull off a retreating dive, mow down the zombies approaching you from every angle, and then get up and keep moving before they even get close. We haven’t seen zombie-killing moves like this since Resident Evil 6, minus a few suplexes here and there. (Dear Treyarch, please add suplexes. Love, Will.) Even if Treyarch misses what might be the easiest post-launch, patch-introduced layup with that, though, the point I’m making is that this feels good, and I like it. That said, I feel like Omnimovement is more of a cool addition rather than something you’ll use all of the time, especially as the zombies get more numerous in the later rounds.
My favorite thing about this year’s Zombies are the maps themselves. I prefer Liberty Falls over Terminus because I vibe with its more open areas and the unique travel options you have, like the extremely entertaining ziplines that let you zoom from roof to roof. I also enjoy its more traditional structure of “pay Essence to open doors and access new places” over Terminus’s “restore power to the generators and defend them from zombies so you can earn the ability to open doors” twist, but that’s not to say Terminus doesn’t do anything cool. At one point, you’ll have to use a little outboard-powered raft to venture to the smaller islands around the main area to do the next step in the map’s Easter Egg-fueled story mode. Even then, you’re not going to escape any zombies that were chasing you on the mainland. When my team and I landed on a beach, a horde of zombies popped out of the ground like a bunch of really angry, undead cabbages, but c’est la vie, right? C’est la undead? I don’t speak French.
What I do really like are the Easter Eggs unique to each map. Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode has you constantly moving, unlocking new areas, and trying to complete that map’s Main Quest during each round. That means a lot of running for your life and trying to earn enough Essence (which you get from offing zombies) to open the way to the next area, buy a new weapon, or upgrade a gun you like at a Pack-a-Punch Machine, which does exactly what it sounds like. Discovering the Easter Eggs is most of the fun. You’ve got your Main Quest ones, of course, like solving the math equations in Terminus’s science lab to build your Wonder Weapon (an incredibly powerful gun you’ll need to progress the Main Quest) or using that weapon to shoot some ceiling tentacles you’ve summoned to find the hard drive they’ve eaten. But the truly fun stuff are the optional Easter Eggs. Finding all the bowling shoes on Liberty Falls and going zombie bowling, for example, or shooting a hidden skull on top of the church to do your own cover of It’s Raining Men for extra resources. I don’t want to spoil all of these, but there are a lot of them, and they’re all fun, some in some pretty wild ways.
My only complaint is that, to do the fun stuff, you’ll essentially need a pre-built group. Every matchmade group I ran with either had no idea what they were doing or didn’t feel like talking, so our ability to make progress was limited. To complete the Main Quest on Black Ops 6’s Zombies, you’re going to either have a lot of patience and be willing to learn or know how to do it already. And I don’t just mean the Easter Eggs. You’ll need to know what perks, like increased speed and faster reload times or buffed health, to buy first from the soda machines (and where the machines are, so you can eventually grab them all), when to Pack-a-Punch your weapons with Essence and upgrade their rarity with Salvage, where to buy armor upgrades, what Easter Egg goodies to save for the late game, how to keep a single Zombie alive at the end of a round to progress the Main Quest more easily, and a whole lot more. There are a lot of mechanics in Black Ops 6, and you’ll need to know how to take advantage of… most of them.
The only one I found not getting a lot of spin in my runs were Gogglegums, single-use candies that return from Black Ops 3 and provide unique power-ups during matches. Essentially, you bring a customized pack into matches, and then spend Essence at Gobblegum machines to get them mid-match, though you can also earn them. It’s a cool idea, and there are some strong Gobblegums out there, like Perkaholic, which gives you every perk on the map, or Wonderbar, which will give you a guaranteed Wonder Weapon the next time you use a Mystery Box – but my team generally felt it was better to spend money on more expensive, guaranteed boons like a Pack-a-Punch upgrade than to gamble on the less expensive Gobblegums. We basically never used them. I don’t think they’re bad, per se, I just don’t think they’re necessary, either, given everything else you have access to and how tight Essence can sometimes be.
Don’t get me wrong: learning to make sense of all of this stuff is part of the fun. If you’ve played Zombies before, some of it will come naturally, but it does require a lot of coordination. And if don’t have that, well… based on some of the groups I got matched with, some folks just aren’t going to have much fun. Treyarch plans to provide an optional, more guided, story-focused version of the mode later on to preserve the sanctity of the Easter Egg hunt – that will disable Easter Eggs and Side Quests, but I kind of wish it was here now so I didn’t have to roll the matchmaking dice every time my friends were busy. At least any account progression you earn in Zombies carries over to the multiplayer if you wanna take a break, though. Get you some new guns before you go into matchmaking.
Oh, and if you want to do the Main Quest, you’d better be in it for the long haul. Completing a map can take a hours, even if you’re doing it right, and you can’t save your progress unless you’re playing solo – the first time I cleared Liberty Falls, for instance, it took our group about three hours; we were, admittedly, doing a lot of optional stuff, but that is still a long time. So, for the optimal experience, you’ll need a team, all available at the same time, a few spare hours, and for nothing to go wrong. Getting near the end of a map and dying is soul-crushing, not because you failed, but because of how long it can take to do it all again. One night, we got most of the way through a map, died, and then… tried again for about ten rounds before all of us realized we were exhausted and should probably just pick things back up tomorrow.
There are also some annoying bugs. Sometimes, I couldn’t interact with objects and my teammates would have to so we could progress, or trying to pick our Wonder Weapon would always drop the same, super-upgraded Pack-a-Punch gun instead of the cheap one we wanted to give up, or we’d have mid-match disconnects or stuttering. No big multiplayer game launches without similar problems, but they’re no fun either way. Once, we couldn’t even get out of a match properly. We didn’t lose progress, thankfully, but it was still obnoxious.
