Call of Duty: Cold War: How Bad is It?

Call of Duty, being such a well-known franchise, has created many games that have been memorable in Countless gaming careers.  Some of these games being Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 1, Black Ops 2, Black Ops 3, and 2019’s Modern Warfare.  But with great success and the amount of time the Call of Duty franchise has been around, they were bound to have a few bad games.  Call of Duty’s most recent game, Cold War, may be the fulfillment of that prophecy, but how truly bad is it?

Cold War cover

Call of Duty: Cold War is the newest in the franchise that came out November 13, 2020.  The game has now been out for over 6 months and most CoD fanatics have been able to play it.  Eurogamer ranked Cold War 3/5, Metacritic a 76%, and PC Gamer 69%. 

First, Cold War has three parts to the game: Campaign, Zombies, and Multiplayer.  Personally, I did not mind the campaign. It was pretty solid; it had many plot twists and some cold puzzles to solve.  The campaign is not that long. But depending on your skill level the story may take around 7 or 8 hours.  Moeller senior Jaden Worst said, “The campaign was alright, I enjoyed my time playing it, but it was just like every other Call of Duty campaign.  The best part was that was that it was during Vietnam.”

Cold War zombies Gameplay

Zombies

Next is Zombies. I think the Zombies was very enjoyable, it had many aspects both new and old that made the game entertaining.  The first map that they dropped, Die Maschine, was a very well rounded Zombie’s map.  They had many training areas to horde up zombies and a good number of areas to camp to get to high rounds.  They also had a well-balanced wonder weapon that was not to overpowered.  Then there is the Easter-egg.  Personally, I thought that the easter-egg was a little easy to complete but it got harder to complete when entering the higher rounds.  Overall, the zombies have been a good refresh off of Black Ops 4, probably the most disliked Call of Duty zombies’ game, and has brought back the classic Black Ops zombies feel.

Multiplayer

Finally, there is the Multiplayer.  Overall, the gameplay is below average compared to previous Call of Duty’s.  the game feels less realistic, and the movement feels very slow, unless you turn the field of view up in settings.  There are many unbalanced guns, and they are constantly changing the meta for better or for worse. 

The first week of release the MP5 was overpowered, and they completely change the gun days later; then later the Mac-10 and the Aug constantly won every gunfight without any problem.The time to kill is awful with the headshot buff damage being too drastic compared to the body shots. Though it has been in the past few CoD’s, Cold War limits your chances to improve your skills by matching you with players either worse or the same skill as you.

Continuing on the multiplayer topic, the original 8 maps dropped at the release were pretty garbage.  When playing on the map Satellite I find myself raging over getting snipe off the spawn from across the map or being one bursted by an Aug or M16 long distances. On Cartel, finding myself dying from people hiding in the large bushes.  Compared to Modern Warfare’s launch with 19 maps, people got really sick of playing the same 8 maps over and over again.  And you cannot forget about the skilled based matchmaking. The issue with skilled based matchmaking is that high-level players being grouped with high-level players at all times making it almost impossible to just sit down and enjoy a game casually.

Cold War Gameplay

Also, what were they thinking when creating that really weird leveling up system?  Start off at level 1 going to level 55.  You decide if you want to prestige or not sending you back to level one.  After that you continue to level up to 1000, then get sent back to level 1 after the season ends.  Can’t we just get the classic Call of Duty leveling up system back? Though the new leveling up system does reflect how much you have been playing over a few months, personally I would rather have our overall level be reflected because I want something to grind for and to show my level off to other people.

In an interview with Moeller senior Nolan Moore, “Call of Duty: Cold War is very subpar.  The game mechanics are pretty rough, including the time to kill and the whole movement situation.  The graphics are actually good, but I find my first generation Xbox one constantly loosing frames trying to keep up.  Last lime a played was a month ago and I can’t see myself playing it anytime soon.”

Also keeping Warzone out of this since the entire battle royal game is on the Modern Warfare game and the only correlation that Warzone has in relationship to Cold War is they share weapons, though the guns have a different feel and different time to kill.

Overall Call of Duty: Cold War is an alright game.  I can log on a play a few games and enjoy myself for a little, but it is just not one of those CoD games that I can play for countless hours.  Coming off a game like Modern Warfare that is debatably more enjoyable it’s hard to see myself playing Cold War.