This article contains spoilers for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the best COD campaign I’ve played in a long time (maybe ever?) and there are several reasons why it stands above the rest. It has very few of the traditional missions we expect from a Call of Duty; I can count on one hand — one three-fingered Yoda hand, at that — the number of levels that have you doing a meaningful amount of corridor shooting.
In most cases, you’re able to approach your mission from a variety of angles, with freedom to go stealthy or loud, and tackle objectives in whatever order you want. There’s a full-on open-world level, with tons of optional objectives to seek out. Each level feels like a little laboratory where Treyarch and Raven’s best scientists were cooking ’til they cracked the test tubes.
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Emergence Combines Control’s Government Secrets With Doom’s Martian Demons
Of those levels, the most intriguing is called ‘Emergence.’ In it, Case infiltrates a secret lab in Kentucky where Pantheon was working on a chemical weapon called Cradle. He gets separated from the rest of the crew early on, and is exposed to the toxin in the process. The rest of the mission is a lengthy hallucination, and the developers take this as an opportunity to pack in all the unrealistic stuff they never get to do in a traditional COD campaign. Essentially, ‘Emergence’ feels like Control meets Doom.
The Control aspect is clear from the start, and is mostly present in the aesthetics. The biolab combines gleaming retrofuturism with dated kitsch. Orange or pea soup carpets cover the floors, and you can practically feel the texture by looking at them. Those coexist with the kind of soaring arches you would see in Syd Mead’s concept art. The facility housed horrendous government experimentation — experimentation that Case, we discover, was a subject for — and though COD’s take is more grounded, it feels like this lab could exist alongside the Oldest House.
Call Of Duty Takes A Trip Into Psychological Horror
The Doom comparisons emerge through the gameplay, and ‘Emergence’ feels like a purposeful homage to id’s iconic shooter series. Case needs to open an important door and, to do so, must track down four keycards. Those keycards are all brightly colored, and that detail alone immediately took me back to hunting demons on Mars.
Combat leans into Doom here, too. This chapter trades out the stop-and-pop gameplay Call of Duty is known for in favor of boss battles in which you take on one, big (hallucinated) monster as hordes of mindless enemies swarm you. The fleshy designs of some of these boss monsters would be right at home in Doom Eternal, too. It isn’t as deep as the recent Doom games — the basic enemies can all be taken out with a simple bullet to the head — but the rhythm feels unlike anything I’ve seen in a Call of Duty. It’s more like the arena battles that make up the bulk of Doom Eternal. In the first boss battle, you even get a grapple gun that can shoot across the arenas and pull enemies to you.
Eventually, you make your way out, find the rest of your squad, and everything goes back to normal. I spent a few hours on a Saturday night playing through this in an empty house, and it felt like a full-on diversion out of Black Ops 6 and into psychological horror. Looking back, I see the campaign as being made of two parts; not two equal halves, more like the yolk and the white of an egg or the little black dot of yin in the yang. Most of Black Ops 6 is a pretty great shooter that handles story beats with the typical matter-of-factness you expect from COD. But, in ‘Emergence’, it gets weirder and darker, and that island of strange colors everything else around it.
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