3.5/5 ★ – Nestunt's review of Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII.

If there is one mark in 2018’s gaming that I should write on this page is the name Fortnite. In 2017, the gaming world was surprised by an indie early-access phenomenon called PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS. I did not play it then, but I respected the design behind the Battle Royale formula. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one, because Epic Games, the licenser of the engine in which PUBG was developed, blatantly applied that same formula to one of their in-house projects Fortnite: Save the World, a survival game with, now, a younger brother called Fortnite Battle Royale. You probably noticed that, in 2018, Fortnite was way more in the zeitgeist than PUBG. What makes Fortnite appealing to so many people are precisely the reasons why I never touched it. Still, I respect the battle royale concept a lot from a design point of view. So, when, predictably, another big AAA studio decided to apply that same formula to one of their games, I peeped to see if I was finally going to experience a subgenre I admired from the outside. Great, Call of Duty is doing battle royale. Even if I don’t like it, the package also comes with the traditional multiplayer I played years ago. (That was my rationale). I didn’t even care for the lack of a singleplayer campaign. I used to buy CoD for two propositions, and I was doing the same here. When the day arrived, like muscle memory, I went to the options menu to increase “stick sensitivity” to 8, and noticed that there was some kind of Tutorial. Cool, I haven’t played this series in years, it will be good for the rust. Oh, this is where the “singleplayer in development hell” went to. Nothing major, but there are some high-budget cutscenes contextualizing each one of the Specialists you are able to choose in traditional multiplayer. And, more importantly, you also get training on their different abilities and the best situations to use them on. Really neat. Multiplayer-only games should have a mode like this one, where we go through what the developers had in mind for that roster spot. And it worked. After concluding the tutorials for all the Specialists, I decided to try traditional multiplayer before battle royale, and despite this new tactical layer of abilities, alongside the fact that I hadn’t played a CoD game since 2011, still, I never felt that the better twitchiness of habitués was preventing me from having a good time. All because the developers gave me a place and time to understand the utility and ramifications of all the tools at my disposal in multiplayer. But the biggest argument I have backing Blacks Ops in my Top 4 is this: I still haven’t played battle royale. The traditional multiplayer is so good that it quenched my curiosity for BR. I stopped playing CoD when Activision, in trying to prevent franchise fatigue due to unnecessary annual releases, started forcing changes to the experience that never looked earned but more slapsticked. And, more worrisome, seemed to forget what CoD was good at: fast reflexes, but grounded. Ironically, Black Ops 4 has the best multiplayer since Modern Warfare 2 (2009), not because it is a “back to the formula”, but because it takes that formula forward with thoughtful takes on mechanics and systems from games like Rainbow Six Siege and Overwatch. The reach of CoD has expanded. It has become more tactical due to the “Operators with different abilities in tight corridors” and more accessible/fun at the same time due to game modes and maps designed to serve different types of players, who will choose different specialists with different abilities to contribute to a match.