Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Multiplayer Review

Note: This review specifically covers the multiplayer of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our single-player campaign review and our Zombies mode review in progress.

Alright boys and girls, the word of the day is Omnimovement. That’s where you take a Max Payne-esque leap in any direction, guns blazing, only to land on the ground in the most dramatic way possible to minimize getting shot and maximize your aim after exposing yourself, and it’s a game-changer in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s multiplayer mode. Sure, we can nitpick all day at minor things other games do better, but in the face of such fun, fast, and smooth online competition, those seem insignificant. Black Ops 6 is certainly no reinvention and arguably plays it a bit too safe, but its fundamentals – moving and shooting – are at such a high level as to elevate the experience well above that of years past. I spent a couple of hundred hours grinding through the perfectly fine but not at all remarkable Modern Warfare 3, but after a few days in Black Ops 6, I can't even imagine going back.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen moves like this in Call of Duty, but it’s the first time the developers have embraced the technique the community invented and used to call Dolphin Diving, and they built on it with dramatic flair. I still find it a little cumbersome to execute properly with my mouse and keyboard control scheme, but I'm happy to say after my nearly 20 hours grinding out matches, I've already gotten much better at bursting into a room with a gun-blazing sideways leap.

Where I think Omnimovement works the absolute best, though, is when you’re moving backwards. When you dive back and hit the ground, you have the same overall target footprint as you would in the prone position, but now you have 360 degrees of aim freedom and you can both get up and move around while on the ground much more easily. When I pull any of these moves off I also congratulate myself for giving everybody else a good show, because it looks really cool from an observer's perspective.

Crucially, though, omnimovement isn’t omnipowerful. Those online acrobatics may make for some sick clipouts, but I’m finding it pretty easy and extremely satisfying to take people out when they get overconfident and execute a flying sideways John Woo leap directly into my gunsights. In fact, if you're playing against me I encourage you to Omnimove as much as possible.

On my end of things, I find it a little harder to aim true with an Omnimove than I do with just a simple slide or traditional dolphin dive and so I end up using those tried-and-true methods much more often. Part of that is undoubtedly muscle-memory, but for the most part I find Omnimovement to be a ridiculously cool way to get around that doesn't necessarily help me competitively except in very specific situations. It’s another tool in the toolbox, but not the end-all-be-all.

Maps, Modes, and Gunplay

Call of Duty lives or dies by its gunplay, and Black Ops 6 is absolutely fantastic in that regard. I've been grinding the XM4 since launch, one of the first weapons available to you when you boot it up for the first time. It feels phenomenal to use, and since I've been using it for at least 80% of my matches, I have it customized to a level that has me afraid to try out any of the other assault rifles. I mean, I'm obviously going to, I gotta get those skins, but with the Gunfighter Wildcard, I now have a total of eight attachments on my XM4 and it's an absolute beast. I do think the Gunfighter wildcard is a little too generous, but on the other hand, bow to my OP XM4. There's almost no situation in which it doesn't just dominate: I'm able to easily take out snipers in larger maps like Protocol while also having no problem at medium range for maps like Subsonic.

Sniper rifles are, as always, cumbersome to use but absolutely lethal in the hands of a skilled player. I am not that player, but there really is something to be said for racking up those satisfying head shots. I'm also a fan of the SMGs, although I've only just started on those. I've definitely noticed how many times in any match on any map I've fallen to an SMG, though. They almost seem a little too powerful at medium-range.

I'm not really too keen on the Marksman rifles this year, but I'm sure that will change as I open up more attachments. I've always loved a good Marksman rifle, especially the KAR98K from previous Call of Duty games. It's the lethality of a sniper rifle with the handling of an assault rifle. I've never really liked shotguns or LMGs, but in modes like Gunfight where I don't have a choice, I'm totally fine with them. Just not a gun category I'm really interested in other than fulfilling higher-level skin unlock requirements.

I also like how the perks work this year. If you equip three from the same category, you're given a special fourth perk. My favorite is rocking a full Recon build, because it briefly exposes enemy positions when you spawn, giving you an edge on the smaller and even medium sized maps.

Maps like Rewind and SCUD, which I thought were just okay during the beta, are now among my favorites thanks to how well you can move and shoot your way through them. Rewind has a perfect mix of long corridors and close-quarter interiors, and SCUD has some of the best sniper lanes in the current crop of launch maps.

It feels like the maps were designed around different load-outs, with larger ones like the aforementioned SCUD and the island-based Protocol having excellent sniping spots while also working well with medium and even short-range guns. You have your long, open lanes with plenty of windows and balconies to perch your glinting sniper scope, but there are also tunnels, building interiors, and obstructions that invite you to play with other guns. It's great because you don't end up with teams made up primarily of snipers plunking one another from across the maps. Smaller maps, like Payback, lend themselves extremely well to the medium and short-range weapons and Payback in particular is absolute chaotic fun for objective-based modes like Headquarters and Control. The cramped quarters, ample angles, and multiple levels with such a small footprint means tons of chaos and carnage all happening quickly, as you're constantly running into enemy players at every turn.

Subsonic, a small-ish map set in a stealth aircraft hangar, has one of my favorite features in any of the maps: a hangar bay door that opens and closes during the course of the match. This one little idea completely changes up how you have to approach the onslaught in objective-based modes throughout the match, and I love that it forces you to switch up your strategy on the fly. You really have to use both tactical and strategic-based thinking and it's awesome.

I'm actually at a loss to name my least-favorite map, because there isn't a single one out of the 16 total that are here I don't enjoy loading into. Red Card, a large map outside a soccer stadium, is maybe the only one I have a bone to pick with, but that's entirely because you can't actually run out onto the pitch and shoot each other. That just seems like a missed opportunity. But otherwise it has a lot of variety, making it a great map for almost any type of loadout.

I’m a little bummed out that the modes present are really nothing new. It makes me realize that the last really cool new multiplayer mode in a Call of Duty was Champion Hill in Vanguard back in 2021, and weirdly that hasn't been seen or iterated on since. I would have loved to see something novel and new to discover, but Treyarch plays it safe with a standard set of modes like Team Deathmatch, Control, and Kill Confirmed.

The newest idea is Kill Order, a spin on VIP modes where one member of each team is designated as a High Value Target. It's pretty fun when you play with friends, but otherwise everyone just runs off and acts like it's Team Deathmatch, completely ignoring the objective to protect the HVT. That’s not to say I don’t like it, because there’s a reason this style of mode has stuck around so long, but the minor tweaks like giving the HVT more armor and a very Warzone-like chance to revive if they’re killed don’t do enough to set it apart.

My go-to mode to play with a friend is Gunfight, a 2v2 mode on extremely tiny maps. It’s a pretty simple fight to the death where everyone has the same loadout that changes between each round, so you never really know what to expect. It's also a great mode to jump into when you only have a small window of time to play, because the matches are really fast and over quickly. By and large, though, my friends and I stick with regular modes when playing together, and I switch to hardcore Team Deathmatch and hardcore Free-for-All when I'm playing solo.

For the most part, Treyarch stuck to its promise to revamp the user interface in Call of Duty, and while I do think it's a big improvement in areas like gunsmithing and picking which of the base game modes you want to play, it still has weird issues that caused me some frustration. The greatly improved interface of Black Ops 6 really falters when it comes to finding Hardcore games to join, though. You need to open up the mode filter menu, and then select Hardcore from there, and then filter your modes. On top of that, BLOPS 6 seems to forget I want to play Hardcore and switches me back to the regular mode – something I usually only notice when I start a match and it suddenly takes more than one bullet to down a foe, usually resulting in a kill for my opponent.

My only major complaint about Black Ops 6 is that it has resurrected weird bugs and glitches that MW3 seemed to have completely squashed. At one point I started up a match and got the XP screen telling me I'd earned negative 170,080 experience points and was now at level 1, which felt pretty harsh. That, thankfully, didn't stick, but sometimes my friends still see that level 1 indicator over my head. I've also had more than one occasion where a match would end and I'd be thrown back to the launch screen for a moment, only to drop back into the lobby but without my teammates. And there was a weird bug where it showed me '&&,' C# for a logical 'AND' operator, instead of their level. So far none of these bugs have affected my gameplay or progression, and even that awkward level 1 reset disappeared once I restarted the game (which I did immediately). However, these small bugs are happening noticeably more often than I’m accustomed to.

The Weapons Grind

One of the main reasons I play Call of Duty multiplayer so much each year is to unlock weapon skins. The non-corporeal reward of a shiny gun always spurs some sort of primitive pleasure system inside my brain into action, and I do whatever is necessary to unlock the shiniest. That can be a slog that makes me curse that part of my brain, but this year things are a little different in a way that makes me happy to indulge that compulsive behavior.

For example, they keep it simple this year, at least at first. For the XM4, get 10 headshots to unlock the first skin, then 20 to unlock the second, and so on up to 100. It’s only once you’ve done all those that you get to the more elaborate, "Kill 10 enemies with your gun shortly after sprinting" type challenges that reward you with Specialized level skins. And you know what? I'm into it. It makes the common skins feel more common and the Specialized and Mastery level skins feel more, well, specialized and masterful. Am I looking forward to having my K/D plunge because I'm chasing the weapon skin dragon instead of taking whatever kills I can get? Not really, but I much prefer having those super cool skins require a little extra work.

In addition to the weapon skins, the usual unlocks are here: new weapon parts and slots that open up as you level each weapon, different reticles for your sights, scorestreaks, wildcards and, of course, new operators and their associated skins.

Of the scorestreaks, one of my favorites is the new Archangel missile launcher that gives you a remote-controlled missile you operate from a first-person view. It's like the cruise missile from Call of Duties past, but with a ground launch and much more control. If you like, you can just circle around the map for a surprising amount of time, searching for that perfect kill. It's really fun and really effective.

The Watchdog Helo is another powerful scorestreak that operates similarly to helicopters from previous Call of Duty games, but this time it marks enemy positions on the map even if it can’t take them out with its minigun. At launch, it was a little too powerful and a little too hard to shoot down, but Treyarch has already balanced it out and now I feel like it's right on the money. It doles out serious damage, but if you're on the receiving end you can shoot it down without it feeling like a flying bullet sponge.

That said, I'm actually pretty disappointed in the number and variety of operators and operator skins so far. I know Black Ops 6 just came out, and Activision is really good at selling cosmetic upgrades over the course of a year, but one of the best parts of MW3 multiplayer was the sheer variety and absurdity of the skins. No matter how many times I dropped into a match with someone with a Snoop Dogg skin, I still got a huge kick out of hearing "I got your six, homie," in Snoop's actual voice.

None of those operator skins carry over into BLOPS 6 multiplayer, and the current crop plays it pretty safe with characters from the BLOPS 6 campaign, and the more ridiculous skins like Brutus and Klaus only being available if you purchased the Vault Edition. I already miss looking around at my team and seeing Nikki Minaj, Cheech Marin, an orangutan, Michael Meyers, and Violator from Spawn ready for action. Please bring us the ridiculousness, Treyarch and Raven. I'm a simple man; That's all I ask.