4/5 ★ – MichaelROLeary's review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

CAMPAIGN REVIEW (some narrative device and MacGuffin spoilers): Call of Duty tends to have solid campaigns which are Michael Bay-inspired explosion fests. The Black Ops entries tend to get a bit more psychological, but within a certain level of reality. Black Ops 6 goes heavily into that realm, bringing horror and surrealism to the table in what is the most creative Call of Duty campaign I've ever played. With these entries that are much more about the world of spies and the CIA, we do usually get a bit of reprogramming of minds as the typical linchpin but here they use the setting of unease and brings other modes, like Zombies, into the mainline campaign. Maybe not the full-on Zombies mode, but let me tell you, they basically have some Zombies in here. There is, of course, a lot of the standard fare here. Missions where you mow down a couple waves of enemies and then move onto the next area where you mow down a few more until you reach a climax moment in the level. But mixed into this are some decent stealth missions, the aforementioned cerebral missions, and a bit of open world stuff that is pretty whatever if I'm being honest. Let's start with the latter. At one point, you're driving around the desert in Iraq heading to different waypoints in order to blow them up, but the area is semi-littered with a side stuff that frankly doesn't really add anything other than making sure you have stuff to do while driving around. On top of that, the actual points of interests that are the main mission tasks end up starting with some sniping and ending with some close up normal CoD shooting. The world, the gameplay, the missions, none of it is all that interesting and it's a pretty low bar with this franchise. The general missions that play as the levels you expect from the series do just that, sometimes you're in a jungle, sometimes you're at a palace, sometimes you're at a casino. A few of these are broken up with a bit of decent stealth, and a later mission is almost more of an immersive sim, so there's plenty of variety while still fitting the mold. But now we come to the best part. There are levels where you control someone - not just your player character - under the effects of the game's MacGuffin, a bio weapon that essentially turns people into zombies. These levels go from spooky hallways, to shambling or running infected, to mannequins that move when you're not looking a la Doctor Who's Weeping Angels. This Call of Duty campaign straight up becomes a first-person horror game for a bit and it works wonders. Later, there's more of it that adds in a bit of the Arkham series' Scarecrow levels to the mix. It's stuff that maybe we've seen before, but it's so refreshing for a game in this series to feel new. To feel like it's trying something vastly different than what's come before. To the point that it's probably my favorite campaign in the whole franchise, and that mannequin level my new favorite level in the series.