Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Overall, despite some performance issues, I rather enjoyed the mercenaries, spies and private eyes campaign that is Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. I’d like to see the development team get a chance to really flesh out a longer campaign in this style, but you know…the call of duty.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War combines a bombastic campaign that desperately attempts to shoehorn as much classic CoD action as it can into its rather short running time, with a solid multiplayer suite that feels a little light on exciting new modes and content at launch. However, what's here is still undeniably fun, the campaign introduces a few neat ideas along the way and multiplayer has got its classic modes, the safety net of Warzone and returning Zombies chaos to fall back on, resulting in a Call of Duty offering that may not throw up any big surprises but manages to scrape a pass regardless.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is a decent entry in the series, but it feels like it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. The campaign is full of underused ideas, while the multiplayer misses some of the magical charm of Modern Warfare, opting for faster paced aggressive battles which just don’t feel as satisfying. While still enjoyable, Black Ops Cold War fails to recapture the magic of Black Ops 1 and 2.

While its campaign is very fun and features great gameplay ideas wrapped in 1980s action movie codes, its multiplayer is disappointing. The weapons lack punch, the cards are few and unequal, the new modes are anecdotal, the whole is unbalanced.

With an entertaining campaign, great online opportunities and panic-stricken zombie slaughter, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is an impressive package. Still, we can not help but feel disappointed. The best parts of the campaign could have been developed much more and the online modes feel well stripped down. Cold War still impresses, but with more development time, it could have been so much more than "this year's Call of Duty game".

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does everything it needs to with polish and zeal, and those who plan to spend the next year levelling up through its multiplayer ranks won’t be disappointed if they get this for Christmas (although they might have liked a few more maps than the currently available eight). But given how disruptive March’s battle-royale Call of Duty game Warzone has been, both as a competitor to Fortnite and Apex Legends and as a new meeting place for CoD fans, Cold War could definitely have used some more innovation. The campaign hints at it, and the 1981 setting offered so much promise, but, sadly, this is not the subversive goth-punk krautrock shooter I was waiting for.