There’s an argument to be made that speed is what makes Call of Duty multiplayer feel so good. As a franchise, the CoD games are great about getting you into the action as quickly as possible. When you shoot opponents, they tend to go down fast; when you die, you can be back in the fight in about a second. With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Treyarch leans into the speed of the franchise in just about every respect, starting with some meaningful adjustments to movement systems and ending with map designs that make sure you’re never far from your next hail of bullets. Most of the time, those fast and intense battles are a lot of fun–but the design changes also result in Black Ops 6 feeling limited in the kinds of fights you’re likely to face.
The major adjustment Black Ops 6 brings to the series is the Omni-movement system, and at least in terms of how the game feels to play, it’s an excellent one. Omni-movement does away with the pesky natural limitations of a pair of human legs. You can run, sprint, slide, and dive in any direction, regardless of where you’re facing or where your momentum would take you. It’s kind of akin to the freedom a tank turret has from the vehicle beneath it, able to turn in any direction to address threats, but much faster and much cooler.
Omni-movement creates a really high degree of fluidity. The ability to move at full speed in any direction at any time makes it easy to quickly navigate maps and turn to address threats. The game never holds you back when it comes to movement, and paired with how fast you might gun down an enemy if you react quickly enough, or the speed with which they can shut you down, Omni-movement is an excellent improvement to your overall reactivity. This is a game that’s about twitch reactions and sharp aim, and Omni-movement amplifies that twitchiness by giving you more freedom of motion in all cases.
It’s the sliding and the diving that’s the most fun, though. Sliding and diving in whatever direction you want not only creates incredibly cinematic moments where you completely surprise someone as you whip around a corner or belly flop over a railing, it also gives you the opportunity to lie on the ground and target threats on any side of you in a way that was just never possible before. And to Black Ops 6’s credit, while the moves are cool whether you’re using them or they’re used against you, they don’t tend to make you invincible or even particularly hard to kill. Creative movement is just another tool in your kit, and you’re as vulnerable as you’ve always been–you are not, in fact, Max Payne, so dive carelessly through a doorway and you’ll still probably be dead before you hit the ground. Omni-movement is an extremely video-gamey addition to a first-person shooter, but it’s undeniable that it fits perfectly with the nature of Call of Duty gameplay, and feels just as good.
There’s a drawback to Omni-movement, though, and it’s that it can make Black Ops 6 an even more flop-heavy hop-fest than Call of Duty already was. There are times when you’ll be in a match full of players moving at ridiculous speeds, flying through windows and around corners to blast you with shotguns–and if you’re like me, you might be wishing for the Call of Duty days of yore when working together and utilizing strategy and tactics at least felt like it could be as important to a multiplayer fight as being the person with the most reliable hand for headshots and the twitchiest trigger finger.
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Black Ops 6 also tends to facilitate a lot of these close-range, fast-paced encounters with its map design. Maps are split into two categories: 12 regular maps that range more in size, and which pop up in your Quickplay and Hardcore game modes, and four smaller Strike maps, for chaotic 6-on-6 Face Off matches, or 2-on-2 modes like Gun Game. Even among the 12 maps that come up in most game modes, none is especially large, so you’re never far from an opponent. They also tend to be quickly and easily traversed, so you can sprint around for a flanking position or make your way to back up teammates in a firefight very quickly. Each one offers a mix of interior and exterior locations and a fair amount of verticality, and they’re all imaginative and distinct from one another, whether you’re working through an abandoned factory or slipping in and out of hangars housing stealth bombers.
The map designs make Black Ops 6’s locales dynamic to fight in, with a ton of variety in the ways that players will meet and how you’ll need to address a space in order to take down an opponent. Spaces tend to never be completely open or completely flat; there are always bits of rubble or piles of cargo that let you gain a height advantage or break up lines of sight, and that makes for a lot of strategically interesting battles. It’s somewhat rare that you can find a decent-enough sight line to set up with a long-range weapon like a sniper rifle–instead, maps tend to send you snaking through rusting train cars, like in Derelict, or in and out of strip mall buildings as in Rewind.
This means that as you enter any space, you really need to think about where opponents are going to be and how they’ll be moving through that area as well as how you do. There’s rarely much in the way of symmetry or simple shapes; there’s always a lot of cover as well as a lot of flanking angles, and so you wind up with tons of different ways to approach any given firefight. All that makes Black Ops 6’s maps fun and interesting, with a wealth of options, rather than a few dedicated lanes or central spots where all the fighting happens.
If there’s an issue with how maps are designed in Black Ops 6, though, it’s that they often feel too cramped. It’s not new that Call of Duty maps offer tons of pathways through any given area, such that you always have to expect someone to cruise up beside you and light you up while you’re aiming down sights to protect a strategic position or put ammo down a hallway. But especially with players incentivized to run full-bore around the map at all times, Black Ops 6’s multiplayer can sometimes feel like you’ve got nowhere to go.
This is also an issue with respawns; the tight confines mean that in some maps, you’ll drop back into the fight almost right where you left it. I’ve had several firefights where I’ve defeated an opponent and had that same person respawn in more or less the same place I killed them, looking right at me, causing me to lose a surprise rematch while I’m trying to get another magazine into my gun. Other times, I’ve been the one to respawn right back in the same place, where the three or four opposing players who overwhelmed me the first time were more than happy to drop me again.
The tight confines can also limit the choices of guns that make sense to use on them more often than not. It’s fine to have small maps as a variety of offerings in a multiplayer game, where close-range guns make more sense–but especially with all the extra diving and sliding Omni-movement makes possible and all the angles of approach you have to worry about as you move around, more often than not, close-range fighting becomes the default. Long-range weapons like marksman or sniper rifles generally feel kind of useless on most Black Ops 6 maps; there aren’t that many long sightlines most of the time, and you’re probably going to get shot from the side before you can set up to use one anyway.
Still, everything is so fast in Black Ops 6, from encounters to movement to respawns, and it all works so quickly and so well that it’s hard to be annoyed. Alongside Omni-movement making getting around feel great, Black Ops 6’s gunplay stands up with the franchise’s excellent standard. Every gun is solid and lethal, and easy to be proficient with while also requiring the player to account for nuanced changes to firing rates and recoil intensity. This is the element Call of Duty has been getting right the longest, and Black Ops 6 doesn’t disappoint with any of its weapons.
Like with movement, Black Ops 6 makes a couple meaningful tweaks to loadouts and progression that add to the overall feeling of playstyle customization in multiplayer. The big focus on cross-progression between all modes means that you’re always unlocking something no matter where you play in Black Ops 6, making it easy to quickly build up a base of custom options for different gameplay approaches in multiplayer. The game adds a few new Scorestreaks that offer fun options for your rewards, like the guided Archangel missile you can fire and then control to pilot straight into enemies, and the Watchdog helicopter that marks enemies as well as shoots at them, making it kind of like a deadly UAV. The Wildcard system from other Black Ops games also returns, allowing you to choose to add a particular gameplay tweak to your loadout–extra tactical gear like flashbangs, for example, or the ability to equip two primary weapons at the same time.
Perks are divided into three categories–Enforcer, Strategist, and Recon–and if you equip three from the same group, you’re awarded an extra perk that fits in the style of the others. With Enforcer, kills get you faster health regeneration and movement speed for a short time; Strategists get a bonus toward their Scorestreaks if they destroy enemy equipment or complete objectives, and can see enemy deployables through walls; and Recon nets you the ability to briefly see enemies through walls when you spawn and removes the death skulls from players you kill from the minimap. All of them encourage different thinking about the perks you bring into matches and give you a means of specializing your approach to gameplay. Particularly when going out with some pals, the specialization provides the sense that you’re fulfilling a role on a team, while maximizing your specific approach to gameplay.
Between Omni-movement, map design, and new options for loadouts, Black Ops 6 is full of relatively small adjustments that fit well with the underlying Call of Duty formula, without drastically changing it. Those adjustments often do tend to favor one kind of play over others–the bunny hopping, dolphin diving, in-your-face aggressive approach–but that’s not necessarily always a bad thing, and playing with Black Ops 6’s new movement system makes for some phenomenal action moments and great-feeling gunfights. The effects of Omni-movement and smaller battlefields have a tendency to have a limiting effect on what works in Black Ops 6 multiplayer at times, but with well-built maps, quick traversal, intense weapons, and interesting loadout options and rewards, the things the game does well are still a whole lot of fun.