Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Zombies review underway

Note: This review specifically covers Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. For our thoughts on other patterns, see our Activity review or our Multiplayer Game Reviews.

Despite playing new games every year, I never quite knew what to make of the modern Call of Duty, a first-person shooter so big and so successful that it's no longer a standalone game but a platform with such a large file size that it requires you to choose two other things you want to install on your computer or console. This year's PC version comes with Frustrating new anti-cheat This seems to have led to my CPU fandom choosing death, so while I would normally base my gaming time on that version as God intended, I initially tested it on the PlayStation 5 to give you some first impressions of this year's Zombies mode. There's still a lot to see as the community collectively hunts for Easter eggs and solves mysteries, but so far I'm interested in digging out what's here, even if it may take some time to get to the vital organs beneath those bones.

Zombies are my favorite part of Call of Duty and also the silliest, silliest part the series has ever seen, and is probably big enough to be a small video game. I talked about a similar feeling in last year's review, but remember when this was a serious game series about war and you were storming the beaches of Normandy with machine gun fire spraying sand in your face? When you die, you often hear comments about how terrible war is from people who have lived through it. Now, I'm playing roulette on a giant mystery box filled with weaponized skulls, the best of which is a ray gun, so I can shoot zombies in the face while a disembodied voice calling itself the Warden taunts me from a distance; my character quips that the voice reminds him of his high school gym teacher. Zombies have been doing this for a while and I still don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Supposedly there's a story here – Raul Menendez, who has apparently been alive for the past decade, drinking beer on his porch, is back and threatening to cause chaos around the world, with a shady security company somehow involved and, of course, massive violent zombie death. It's all so well made and so silly that the only thing I could do was watch the introductory cutscene while imitating the expression I imagined a cow would make if I gave it cocaine, chuckle a little, and get on with it. I think I answered my own question there, huh?

This year's Zombies has been difficult to master so far, as much of what's been done with Zombies will depend on the community crafting new maps in the coming days and weeks. Right now, we're all kind of fumbling around and figuring out what's what, which is both fun and frustrating. Many of the pain points from last year are still present early on – for example, you have to be level four before you can equip, which means if zombies are all you want to do (which, for me, it is), then after you've killed enough of the undead, you're stuck with a pistol and whatever you can earn by buying stuff on the walls. Remember when games from the start were just about letting you have fun instead of unlocking it?

Other than that, the basics of Zombies feel very similar. You're on a map, use the currency you earn to open new doors and roads, and you can use Pack-a-Punch machines to upgrade your guns. You can affix extra armor to walls, an arsenal that can really improve the specific properties of your weapons, Gobblegums to add a little flavor if your mouth is lonely and you want a pick-me-up in battle, and more. Of course, while you manage it all, the undead will rise and thirst for flesh. Ghouls, man.

The gameplay here is similar to last year's – I still enjoyed slithering up to a group of zombies and shooting them until they turned to mush and so on. No, what's new is the map. I've played both maps, Cursed Ashes and Vandorn Farm, in turn-based mode (the latter seems to be part of the former, but I haven't gotten to it in standard mode yet), and so far I prefer Farm. Cursed Ashes seems to be the home of the more traditional “find the secret to complete the map” whereas Van Dorn Farm is more “you're locked in here with the undead, kid, so try not to die too much”.

Our run on the former ended when one of my teammates who wasn't communicating with the rest of us grabbed a truck and started driving it to the next objective… and then decided it might be more fun to ram zombies until they explode. The rest of us spent most of the map either trying to catch up to the truck or waiting in vain for resurrection after we all died. Things went just as you thought. I'd be interested to see what the more talkative staff at Ashes of the Damned has to offer; now, if you told me I was hallucinating the whole thing, I'd believe you.

The farm is relatively old-fashioned. Zombies hung from the rafters of the large barn, the smaller barn contained mystery boxes where each of my teammates made sacrifices in hopes of getting a ray gun, and there was a house with a skeleton family sitting around a dining room table and a roof that desperately needed, well, more roof. It's a much more interesting map than Ashes of the Damned, and I enjoyed navigating its twists and turns, learning where everything was, and spending the time in between killing the evil-doing terrorists who were formerly human beings.

The problem again is that we don't know how to do it yet. It appears that some mysterious infection is growing on one of the machines powering the farm, but after we destroy it, our target tells us to wait for it to come back. So that's what we did, kill zombies and increase the number of turns. The problem was that the infection never reappeared. Generally speaking, this is a good thing. The antibiotics worked and the patient recovered well, thank you. In this case, that meant we made it to round eight, nothing happened, the four of us spent a few minutes looking for zombies or ways to progress that we somehow missed, and then three of my teammates left the game after we couldn't figure out what was going to happen next. It's hard to blame them. Farms are cool, but I'd prefer some warmer colors and less rotting corpses, you know?

Like I said, I never know what to think of Call of Duty, and the same goes for this year's Zombies. It does play well, and you can see on the screen the ridiculous amount of money spent developing it – but the nasty, slimy, juicy parts of the mode haven't been revealed to me just yet. As is often the case, its success depends heavily on map changes. I needed a bone saw and a boning machine to get to the still-beating core of this thing, but that's okay. I can't say I'm not interested in seeing what's inside. I just hope I don't suffer any repercussions in the process.