The best part of any Call of Duty game’s Zombies mode is how it facilitates panic. The longer you play the round-based horde mode, in which the undead stream toward you from all directions, the tougher it becomes, and before long, you’re sprinting around the map, trying desperately to stay alive as crowds of corpses shamble after you. Your only chance is to stop and fire away to thin out the approaching wave of undeath, hoping you don’t run into any huge mutated monstrosity while your back is turned. Black Ops 6 is great at these moments.
Zombies in Black Ops 6 is a return to the best-known and best-enjoyed form of the four-player cooperative mode, which developer Treyarch originated back in Call of Duty: World at War and has been iterating on ever since. Gone is the approach from last year’s Modern Warfare 3, a messy take that bolted Zombies mechanics onto elements of CoD’s battle royale game, Warzone. What Black Ops 6 offers feels like classic Zombies but enhanced, with a bunch of small elements old and new added together to build out the experience in fun, engaging, and challenging ways.
The most notable change, and the one that works best with Zombies, is Omni-movement, Black Ops 6’s adjustment to how you get around in the game. Omni-movement lets you move at the same speed in any direction, including sprinting, diving, and sliding, so you’re able to change direction on a dime without losing momentum. It’s a great addition to Zombies, where you will inevitably find yourself kiting a horde around the map as you fight to stay alive, only to suddenly realize that the path you’re backpedaling down isn’t as clear as you thought.
Omni-movement really shines as the panic of these moments mounts and you’re able to deftly change direction to slip around enemies to make good your momentary escape from certain death. The system adds an extra dynamism to Zombies because you’re agile, especially compared to the undead, providing what feels like a lot of options to just run for it, where you can throw yourself over a rail or down a flight of stairs, firing as you go.
That said, the mode is still as tough as ever, offering plenty of challenges to match the fact that being a little quicker on your feet might help you stay alive a little longer. New enemies, such as the spider-like Vermin, which can pop out of regular zombies as you gun them down and even transform into flying Parasites, change up the composition of the undead hordes, and you’ll face special monsters like Manglers and Abominations pretty regularly, too.
Gallery
Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode launched with two maps, and each has a different feel from the other. Liberty Falls is a small American town that’s largely laid out on the side of a hill, forcing you to work your way up and down it a lot of the time and featuring a mess of pathways through buildings that can turn into bottlenecks if you’re not careful, as well as ziplines at the top that can carry you quickly to rooftops. Terminus, on the other hand, is an island prison that hides a secret laboratory beneath it and tends to be more sprawling, giving you opportunities to drag zombies around in big circles. It’s flanked by smaller islands you can reach by boat and includes a bunch of subterranean tunnels, making it feel like both a large open space and a winding maze as you explore it.
The focus on these maps is twofold: Stay alive as long as possible, and scour the maps for intricate Easter eggs and narrative quests to complete. The approach on both is a little different–Liberty Falls starts mostly in the traditional way, with players unlocking doors to open up the map. On Terminus, each section of the map has its own dedicated generator, which you need to turn on and defend from zombies to power up the facility and things like Perk Cola machines located in each section. But the gist is the same here as in the past, with lots of secrets and story to uncover in both maps as you spend the Essence you earn from killing zombies to purchase weapons and upgrades.
In addition to Omni-movement, Black Ops 6’s take on Zombies works in a variety of systems both old and new that expand on your options in combat and how you approach the mode generally. There’s collecting Salvage from enemies to craft gear, “wall buy” stations where you can purchase specific weapons and armor upgrades, and all the returning mechanics ranging from Perk Colas to Pack-a-Punch machines, including a new punch-focused one called Melee Macchiato.
Returning from Black Ops 3 are GobbleGums, gumballs you can grab periodically that give you short-lived upgrades and which are distributed from a “pack” of possibilities you set ahead of time. Gobblegums do things like teleport you randomly around the map or create specific drops such as Max Ammo or Insta-Kill, but what’s nice is you can pick them up when they appear and stockpile them to use when you choose. So in addition to the elements of Zombies like Bonus Points and Nuke pickups that drop randomly, and Perks you can buy to upgrade your character, you also have deployable, short-lived buffs that can give you a significant edge at the right time.
Gallery
Although Zombies still has you starting with a pistol and finding most of your gear throughout a run, Black Ops 6 adds the ability to set loadouts ahead of time, which let you customize some of the things you might eventually find or buy as you play. Your starting loadout also includes a Field Upgrade, a sort of “ultimate” ability that charges over time, like a Dark Ether beam that can burn through tons of zombies in a straight line, or an exploding Energy Mine that zaps lots of enemies in a specific area. Your loadout can include a dedicated melee weapon, and you can tune guns with attachments so that when you find or buy them during a Zombies run, they come out exactly the way you like them, instead of with random components.
Finally among the customization options, there’s the Augment system, which lets you equip a few specific upgrades that adjust how certain elements of Zombies work. Everything from perks to ammo types to Field Upgrades can be customized this way; you might equip an augment to the Juggernog perk that causes you to deal bonus damage when your health is low, or one that splits your Energy Mine ability into three mines instead of one.
Augments have to be “researched” before you can use them, which is Zombies’ major progression path–you can only research augments for one element of the game at a time, which pushes you to make specific choices about what’s most important to you. You unlock three “major” and three “minor” augments for each element and can equip one of each for a given item, which works out to a lot of options to tweak and customize your upgrades and power-ups toward a specific playstyle or preference. The research system is slow-going because you can only work on one augment path at a time, but cross-progression at least means that whether you’re playing Zombies, Black Ops 6’s campaign, or multiplayer, you’re still earning experience for augment research.
With loadouts, augments, and Gobblegums, plus all the usual elements at play in Zombies, you wind up with a lot of stuff to think about, plan for, and customize within the mode, and that tends to deepen the experience significantly. There’s just a lot you can mess around with or adjust to change how Zombies plays, providing lots of reasons to keep diving into and trying to survive the two maps–and that’s before you even start worrying about the Easter eggs and story elements that tie them all together.
Where Zombies struggles with all these new ideas, however, is in making them approachable to new or lapsed players. The Zombies mode has always catered to a hardcore group of dedicated fans, and has long been so convoluted and unclear that more casual players might bounce off. All those different systems and new additions can add to the confusion in a mode that already very much expects you to know how it works or spend a lot of time figuring it out. For example, I already knew about the augment system from previewing Black Ops 6 Zombies ahead of its release but didn’t realize how the system worked in practice at launch, or that I wasn’t earning any research credit until I actually went into its dedicated menu and assigned a research task. It’s not that any one element of Zombies is particularly hard to grasp, but there are a lot of layers of systems and menus and elements to understand and keep in mind, increasing the density of an already-dense mode.
Treyarch announced that it’s going to release a “guided” version of Zombies sometime after Black Ops 6’s launch, and as a more casual Zombies player, that’s an element I’m really looking forward to seeing. Uncovering the hidden aspects of Terminus and Liberty Falls in Black Ops 6 is, as usual, very involved, and even more difficult when you’re messing around on the maps with friends who aren’t especially hardcore about Zombies. Bringing in new players is something that Zombies struggles to do, and the guided mode should help deal with that issue. As it stands now, it’s great that Zombies in Black Ops 6 makes the simple act of fighting and staying alive as deep and engaging as it is. But it still requires a lot of dedication to understanding its intricacies and nuances, especially if you only pop into Zombies now and then–after all, it’s been four years since Black Ops Cold War.
Still, the return to round-based, Easter egg-hunting form for Treyarch’s Zombies is, overall, very strong, specifically because it returns to a version of the mode and a lot of systems that are proven to work well together. It’s more of a recombination and refinement of the mode than an especially innovative one, but here, that works very well, allowing Treyarch to push the envelope in the design of its maps and the way its systems work together rather than trying to force Zombies into a mold that doesn’t fit it.
Elements ranging from augments to Omni-movement to Gobblegums make it engaging and satisfying to fight through the hordes, even if you never go much deeper than trying to kill as many zombies as possible and then pull off a daring helicopter exfiltration. Though Zombies remains a little dense, especially for those less familiar with the mode, Treyarch’s adjustments add a lot to enjoy about it, and do a great job of creating those breathless, panicky moments of fighting off the clawing undead that define the mode at its best.