The mode’s signature mystery box - which spits out random weapons - can give you weapons of any rarity, and it’s more likely to give you higher tiers later in the game. Each rarity upgrade does more damage and comes with a random selection of attachments. Weapons come in tiers of rarity from Common, to Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. Zombies now has a weapon rarity system that should look pretty familiar to anyone who’s played an MMO or RPG. For every new upgrade I bought, I could actively see myself lasting more and more rounds. Upgrading a perk like Juggernog can give you more health, while upgrading ammo mods - which give weapons elemental effects - can increase your damage or stun zombies when they get shot. When you’re actively upgrading, the rewards feel direct and important.

Rather than the microtransaction-fueled upgrades of Black Ops 4, Black Ops Cold War’s upgrades are earned by surviving waves. While previous maps made the zombies feel like an afterthought to the Easter eggs, one of my favorite parts of Die Maschine was just kiting hundreds of zombies around the map like the Pied Piper, but with a laser gun instead of a flute. The environment is split between an upper level, which is a snowy landscape complete with rocks and debris that make it perfect for dodging zombies, and a lower-level laboratory, full of tight hallways that are easy to get ambushed in.

More importantly, killing zombies in Die Maschine is a tremendous amount of fun. Everything I do in the map now feels like it’s in service of my survival. This makes the map feel more focused than Zombies maps of the recent past. This map, called Die Maschine, still has plenty of hidden secrets, but it leads players to things like the power switch, which you need to turn on to buy perks, and the Pack-a-Punch machine, using simple objective markers rather than keeping them hidden. The best example of this comes from Black Ops Cold War’s map, which takes the original Nazi research lab from the first World at War Zombie map and expands it into a modern, much larger, Zombies experience. It keeps most of the basic ideas that Treyarch has added to the mode over the last 12 years, but simplifies them down to their most fun elements. Course correctionīlack Ops Cold War doesn’t reinvent the Zombie-mode wheel.

I spent more time watching YouTube videos trying to figure out the maps than I did running around the game itself.īut in Black Ops Cold War, Treyarch has brought the focus all the way back to zombies and how you kill them. 2018’s Black Ops 4 was so complicated that the features distracted from the fun. But in the 12 years since it was first released, Treyarch has added way too much to the mode. The wave-based survival mode is equal parts silly, challenging, and endlessly repeatable. The secret heart of Treyarch’s Call of Duty games since 2008 has always been Zombies.

Black ops 1 zombies