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When Treyarch promised Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 would herald the return of round-based zombies, my heart skipped a beat. It's been years since I've clicked with Call of Duty's zombies – fittingly, the last entry I adored was the original Black Ops. Since then, the once arcade-y game mode has grown beyond its means, with optional Easter eggs warping into full-blown objectives that overshadow Zombies' once-simple premise: survive for as long as you can. Claustrophobic maps slipped to the wayside in favor of larger open areas, a design approach that culminated in Modern Warfare 3's disappointing Warzone-esque take on the undead shooter.
But after jumping into Black Ops 6's Zombies mode before so much as looking at its multiplayer or campaign, my love for this crawler-squashing series has been revitalized. It feels like I've stepped into one of Der Riese's teleporters and emerged in 2010, when all I could think about was my next round in Kino der Toten and the reveal of a little-known game called Skyrim – and reader, I am loving it.
Double points
In short: we are so, so back. Black Ops 6 launches with two maps – the once-idyllic small town of Liberty Falls and gloomy overrun prison Terminus – and in the time I've spent bouncing between both like an excited hellhound, I've found plenty to love in both.
Initially, I was on the fence. There are a few things that show we'll never fully get back the scrappy, retrospectively lo-fi game mode we once knew. Some of this is relatively small and now the norm, like being able to see zombies' health bars, or guns having signposted rarity levels. Others are bigger – namely being able to fiddle with your loadout, or extracting from a match rather than dying in it. But this is the first time since their introduction that I've felt these changes aren't necessarily bad, because they're complemented by so much Black Ops 6 does right. Zombies feel more textured than they have in a long time: emptying a Pack-a-Punched C9 submachine gun's clip into an alley-full of the undead in Liberty Falls is sublime, whilst feeling your starting pistol become less and less effective across each round is as sweetly nostalgic as it is stressful.
Largely though, Black Ops 6's maps are to thank for its success. Liberty Falls feels like a bridge between the original maps of World at War and Black Ops, and the larger settings used from Black Ops 2 onward. A small autumnal town built on a hill, you begin on a lower road and spend your points to work further and further uphill, which peaks with a deliciously spooky old church. Most of its streets are just wide enough to keep some breathing room between yourself and the undead hordes, but a number of smaller areas – like a narrow back-alley, or fenced graveyard – make it very easy to be cornered and killed if you're not paying attention. But given the amount of spawning points and zombies that flood in during later rounds, remaining in Liberty Falls' more open streets is impossible, and by round 10 onward, you'll be hard-pressed to keep any semblance of order to your route. Yet even under duress, the map flows wonderfully: you can often make an easy getaway when running downhill, as there are rooftops and ziplines to scramble across, but going back the other way is much stickier without the aerial advantage.
Terminus, on the other hand, makes Liberty Falls look infinitely vast. This overrun prison is old-school in layout, beginning in a single hall before branching out in a web of small, oppressive hallways and rooms. Some areas require you to defend a charging power cell before the next zone will unlock, which is a fiendish trick from Treyarch as you're effectively locked into corners that are easily overrun by even early-rounds' weaker undead. If you're playing with pals, keeping these power cells chugging requires coordination. If zombies break them you'll not only have your progress reset, but you'll need to pay points to get it running once more, making it all-too easy for the zombies to outscale your starting weapons if you can't move through the map effectively enough.
If it sounds like I'm losing my mind over this, it's because I am. After last year's Modern Warfare 3, I'd resigned myself to accepting that Zombies had become a runaway train I didn't care to chase, too hopelessly big to recapture the simplicity that made it so popular in the first place. Playing Black Ops 6 suggests I may have written this hellhound out of the race too soon. Its choked map design and relatively straightforward undead (OK, one of them has a cannon) are a step toward the mode's simpler roots, and I'm itching to see how this evolves through future updates. For now, though, I'll be spending the weekend glutting myself on zed-popping – and if you'll excuse me, I think I can hear a Mystery Box calling my name.
If you're already jumping into multiplayer, make sure to check out the best Black Ops 6 loadouts you should be using
