Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War – Alpha Impressions

This past weekend, PS4 owners were able to get their hands on the multiplayer Alpha for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. As someone that’s looking forward to the game, I jumped in and played as much as I could in order to get a feel for the game and report my thoughts on it. So what do I think? I’m honestly a bit mixed on it.

Let me first make it clear that this was an Alpha build of the final game. I knew this going in, so I figured there would be bugs and glitches and didn’t expect everything to be perfect. Textures would take some time to load in after starting a match; my team was able to roam the map before the countdown finished; the ground disappeared once (though I could still walk on it). These are issues that I wouldn’t be surprised to see fixed once the Beta starts in a few weeks, and I definitely expect them to be ironed out by the full release in November. With all that being said, I’ll start with what I felt was good about Black Ops Cold War.

The Create-a-Class system isn’t Treyarch’s classic Pick 10 system. Instead, the Gunsmith from last year’s Modern Warfare has been carried over to the new game and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. While I’ve always liked the Pick 10 system, the Gunsmith offers far more customization with your classes, so it’s great to see it return. As for the weapons as a whole, Black Ops Cold War has a pretty well balanced arsenal at the moment… with one exception. The AK-74u SMG was by far the best weapon to use in the Alpha. It had great damage, range, recoil, and ADS speed, meaning that you would be doing yourself a disservice if you weren’t using that weapon. This is something that I’m sure will be taken care of by the full release, but it was the odd one out in regards to weapon balance.

The overall time-to-kill in the game is also what you would expect from Treyarch games, which I’m happy with. It’s slower than in Modern Warfare, so there aren’t any insta-deaths and you actually have a chance to fight back against someone when you see them.

Field upgrades have also been brought over from Modern Warfare and function just as they do in that game. C4 returns as well, but it’s balanced much better than in Modern Warfare. On top of being weaker, it doesn’t detonate immediately when you press the button. It instead beeps very quickly before exploding. As someone who’s played a lot of Modern Warfare, I’m more than happy with this change since C4 in that game is incredibly annoying.

Black Ops Cold War also introduces a new multiplayer mode called Combined Arms. It’s essentially a slightly larger scale version of Domination, with bigger maps, more flags, 24 players, and vehicles. This mode was fun to play, as it ups the ante of normal Domination without devolving into the pure chaos of Ground War from Modern Warfare. I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed this mode and anticipate myself spending a lot of time in it when the full game is released.

Now when it comes to the maps, they return to the classic three-lane style that Treyarch likes to design their maps with, although they didn’t all appear to be three very strict lanes. There were three 6v6 maps and two Combined Arms maps to play on, and I liked them all for the most part. The 6v6 map Satellite is one of the standouts visually, although it suffers from half of the map being a sniper’s paradise. My favorite map in the Alpha was Armada from Combined Arms. This map takes place in the ocean across a couple different military ships. There are zip-lines that allow you to easily get from ship to ship, in addition to boats you can use to drive around. It’s a very fun map to play on that works for all play styles, and it has one of the most unique designs I’ve ever seen in a Call of Duty game.

Unfortunately, this is where all the good ends. One area where Black Ops Cold War disappointed was in the graphics and audio department. I played on PS4 Pro and the game is visually a step down from Modern Warfare with characters and weapons lacking the level of detail that they had in last year’s game. In addition, the guns just do not sound anywhere near as good as the ones in Modern Warfare. They lack the power and oomph of the weapons from last year’s game, causing them to sound and feel far weaker and lackluster. This could be a result of the Alpha being an old build, so things could be better in the final release, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Another thing that I’m not happy with is the fact that quick scoping is back to how it was in the old Modern Warfare 2 days. Snipers can quickly aim down their sights and take you out, even if you started shooting them first. Quickscopers were prevalent all throughout the Alpha, no matter what mode or map I was playing on. If you’re a quickscoper then this is sure to be good news for you! But if you’re like me and can’t stand people who play like that, then you’re going to be in for a bad time.

Then there’s the Scorestreak system. Treyarch has brought it back for Black Ops Cold War, but made a fundamental change to them. Any score you’ve built up now does not reset upon death. It persists throughout the match, meaning that as long as you are playing the game, you can get each one of your streaks before the match is over. Treyarch has balanced this out by putting the streaks on cooldown timers, with the more powerful ones taking longer before you can get them again.

I understand that they want players of all skill levels to be able to get their streaks and feel powerful, but this new system doesn’t reward you for playing well or playing the objective (the original intent behind Scorestreaks). It instead rewards you for simply playing the game, which in turn, robs you of feeling a real sense of reward or satisfaction when you call in a Chopper Gunner and lay waste to the enemy team. It also doesn’t help that most of the streaks in the game aren’t all that exciting to use. I doubt the Scorestreak system will be adjusted by the time the game releases so we’ll just have to live with this new system, but I’m not that big a fan of it at all right now.

All in all, I’m walking away from the Alpha optimistically cautious. I enjoyed the time I spent with Black Ops Cold War, but some of the issues I had with the game bring down the experience. There’s some good stuff here, but I wonder just how much it’ll matter if the sniping remains as ridiculous as it is here and if the Scorestreaks end up causing the game to feel boring. We’ll see if anything’s changed when the Beta releases, and how the final product turns out when Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War releases on November 13th.