Call of Duty Black Ops 6 campaign review – nonsensical, but surprisingly intimate psyop thriller is a blast
If you want to sum up Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s campaign in a single moment – and really all of Call of Duty in a way; this is quintessential CoD – then look no further than Ground Control, a mission roughly three-quarters of the way through the story.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign reviewDeveloper: Treyarch, Raven SoftwarePublisher: ActivisionPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Game Pass)
Here, you’re assaulting an airport in the middle of a Gulf War ‘hot zone’, as Iraqi soldiers loyal to Saddam Hussein fend off an assault from the US at the same time as a mysterious, highly militarised organisation known as the Pantheon protects a valuable human target inside. It’s a sprawling, multi-stage mission, as many of Black Ops 6’s are, eventually leading to one truly spectacular moment that encapsulates it all.
After fighting into, through, and out the other side of the airport and then along the aisles of an aeroplane, it’s revealed that your target is actually elsewhere. And so, the spectacle: you and your pals burst out of the aeroplane exit onto the tarmac, launching out onto a battlefield in the midst of an intricately choreographed scene: explosions detonate, tanks roll by, soldiers yell, fire, are shot down or blown up and through the air all in a second. You charge forth into the chaos, shooting at everyone and everything, surging on to commandeer some armour of your own and, onwards.
It’s utterly spectacular, right up there with any of the most memorable action set-pieces in CoD history. It’s also completely ridiculous, almost by definition, and both narratively and contextually it does remarkably well to cover the full gamut of CoD-isms. Searching for a mysterious Russian bad guy whose intentions we don’t fully understand? Check. An uncomfortable, poorly-timed, and mostly unnecessary choice of real-world set dressing for the conflict? Check. A scene where you do a bit of war crimes on foreign soil but someone sort of comments on it so you don’t feel too bad? Check – hattrick!
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 | ‘The Truth Lies’ | Live Action Reveal Trailer Watch on YouTube
That last bit’s worth digging into. There are minor plot spoilers here, so beware (it’s nothing major – there are a good few twists in this story and I’m not revealing any of those at all here). In brief: you catch your man and, amidst the wreckage of an exploded passenger plane, hold him up against a flaming, still-whirring engine propeller and – now with a choice of dialogue options! – start battering the truth out of him. Russel Adler, the Robert Redford-meets-dark-side-Kurt Russel star of previous Black Ops storylines, is here with you, and in all his typical moral ambiguity tells you you’re free to “dispose” of your guy upon finishing your interrogation. But no! There’s an American here! And he’s not having any of that. “You’ve got your ways and I’ve got mine, he’s in my custody now,” returning cameo Lawrence Sims declares, having foreshadowed his upstanding morality with a warning to behave at the beginning of the mission.
