‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’ PS4 Alpha Impressions: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

I spent a good portion of my day yesterday playing Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s open alpha on PS4, though I switched to Modern Warfare and Warzone in between sessions to compare the two back-to-back.

I’ll say this: Cold War is going to be a divisive, contentious entry in the Call Of Duty franchise, and I suspect the dividing line will be drawn most starkly between those who prefer Modern Warfare and those who prefer Cold War.

Full disclosure of my personal bias before we get started: I vastly prefer Modern Warfare in almost every way, though there are a few exceptions to that. It should also be noted that this is merely my impressions of the game after playing it for a few hours during an alpha. I haven’t played the campaign or the majority of the maps and I’m not playing on a finished build, though any playable build two months out from release is going to be pretty close to the final thing.

Indeed, I find myself so much in the Modern Warfare camp that a rather large part of me wishes Activision would have delayed Black Ops Cold War for another year and focused on actually treating Modern Warfare like the games-as-service title it truly is. It deserves another year of seasons and Battle Passes and new maps, perhaps even more than that.

MORE FROM FORBES‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’ Alpha Start Time, New Maps And Modes – And How To PlayBy Erik Kain

And I’m not at all sure how Cold War is supposed to be integrated into Warzone when the two games have such entirely different systems (I’ll expand on that point in a separate post).

In any case, my personal preferences laid bare, let’s continue with the good, the bad and the ugly of Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War open alpha on PS4.

The Good

Right off the bat, one thing I enjoy a great deal about Cold War so far is the map variety. Not only are maps more varied in terms of location than Modern Warfare, they’re also more saturated with a wider color pallette.

You have Satellite, a desert map set around the crash site of a fallen satellite. On one side, sweeping dunes create long sight lines (though the dunes themselves provide a good cover option). The majority of the map is desert canyons and ridges with a smattering of rock archways. It’s quite striking.

Next up there’s Moscow, an urban map with lots of narrow corridors, sharp corners and different levels to play with. Lots of blind points and mid-range shootouts. It’s all very grey, as well, reflecting Soviet-era utilitarian design.

Finally, of the 6v6 maps in the alpha, there’s Miami. I’ll have more to say about this map in the next section, but there’s no denying it brings even more variety to the table. The map takes place at night on a beachside block replete with glowing neon signs, high-rise hotels and a pool you can swim in. Lots of long, open avenues here.

In Combined Arms we have a snow map (Crossroads) and a map that takes place across several ships on the open sea (Armada), both of which are designed for vehicles and larger teams of 12v12. Lots of variety, lots of color. It’s nice.

Map voting is also back for Cold War, which I think is a fine thing though not something I particularly missed in Modern Warfare. It’s all well and good getting to vote until everyone starts voting for the same damn map over and over again. Democracy has its downsides. But overall, it’s not a bad thing.

I am more neutral than anything when it comes to two big changes to game mechanics, though these also make me wonder about how this will be incorporated into Warzone. Mounting is gone, for one thing. It let players in Modern Warfare stabilize their guns on various surfaces—crates, the corners of walls and so forth—in order to gain more stability and less recoil. Some people decried it as a way to make camping too easy, but I never found much use for it one way or another. Mounting can also mean you’re stuck in place when an enemy flanks you.

The second change I’m mostly neutral about is the ability to open and/or burst through doors. Once again, this is also in Warzone so I’m not sure how they’ll incorporate Cold War’s lack of door opening into that game. There are doorways in Cold War but no doors. You will not open them or burst through them, for better or worse. I kind of like doors, actually, but I don’t really mind the change one way or another.

Alas, it is here that we must segue into section number two…

The Bad

Now, take all of this with a grain of salt. After all, I have come clean as a fan of Modern Warfare and the things that make me a fan of that game, actively hinder my enjoyment of this one. On the other hand, both games also share some problems. We’ll start there.

At launch, Modern Warfare was widely critiqued for having too many large maps—maps that seemed awfully big for 6v6 gameplay, though you could play these in 10v10 mode to make them feel a little less sprawling and empty.

Maps like Piccadilly have earned plenty of scorn from the community, though I think it makes for a pretty engaging Domination map. Over time, Infinity Ward released more and more small and medium-sized maps to the game, which helped. (Not to mention the 2v2 Gunfight mode which remains the funnest competitive shooter experience I’ve played in ages).

I’m sure Treyarch will do the same with Black Ops Cold War but the alpha’s maps, however pretty, do not inspire faith in the game’s design. Miami is the worst of the 6v6 maps. It’s way too big with far too much going on and too many blind spots and flanking positions, not to mention sniper perches. The map is littered with cars and other obstacles. There are several different streets, multiple interiors, the whole boardwalk area, and we’re supposed to battle it out in 6v6? Occasionally that means a big firefight basically centered in one location, but I had plenty of experiences just running around looking for the action.

All three 6v6 maps feel too big for 6v6 gameplay, and they also feel less sensibly designed than the big Modern Warfare maps. This is especially true in modes like TDM and Kill Confirmed, since—unlike Domination or Hardpoint—they can take place across the entirety of the map rather than around control points. Alas, in all my hours of play I only got into a single Domination match. Every single other match was TDM or Kill Confirmed (these are the only three modes available in 6v6). So I wasn’t able to test out Domination on any map but Moscow, and there it worked fairly well but still felt too big for its own good.

Add to this yet another changed mechanic that makes these maps even more painfully slow to navigate: Treyarch has removed double-sprint from the game, a great tactical run option in Modern Warfare that allowed players to rush to cover or cross an open distance more hastily. Its removal adds to an overall sense that Black Ops Cold War is too slow, or at least too slow on such large maps. Gameplay just feels slow, clunky and awkward.

Finally, we have Combined Arms, the new 12v12 mode that incorporates vehicles like really zippy snowmobiles, waverunners, gunships and tanks to the game. It’s essentially this game’s version of Ground War, which incorporated vehicles into big 20v20 matches.

I don’t really like any of the vehicles in Combined Arms and I think the maps are too big for 12v12. Normal maps should be closer to 10v10 or 12v12 and these even more sprawling affairs could easily handle 20v20. But who ever asked for Call of Duty to ape Battlefield? I mean, okay that’s a fine thought in theory, but Call of Duty excels in closer quarters. Its best maps are often small-to-medium with five or six player teams (or the glorious 2v2 fights in Gunfight, which will not be a mode in Cold War, alas).

I laughed out loud when I first played Crossroads and watched all my teammates hop on snowmobiles and go zipping off across the map with literally no sense of physics-based acceleration or friction whatsoever. Tanks are taken down easily with an LMG. But eschewing vehicles on this map means running out in the open and getting sniped.

Speaking of which, you know how I said up above that the divide will be between Modern Warfare and Black Ops fans? Well a secondary divide may be between snipers and non-snipers. This game is a sniper’s dream come true. Tons of sniper perches in just about every map, no glint from a sniper’s scope, almost no sway whatsoever. It’s a mess. Get ready to get no-scoped constantly also. I enjoy sniping from time to time but this is just ridiculous.

Let’s move on now, shall we? To …

The Ugly

It’s a combination of things at play here. While the levels look good, the game itself looks . . . dated, at least on PS4. Pretty environments are marred by lackluster animations that feel like a huge downgrade from Modern Warfare.

But graphics are neither here nor there in the bigger scheme of things. When it comes to Call of Duty, for me it’s all about the gunplay. Alas, this is where I have to say Cold War falls short of Modern Warfare to a truly egregious degree. I want to say that the gunplay in Cold War is objectively worse than in Modern Warfare, but I won’t go quite that far. I will say, however, that it’s a huge letdown.

Much of this is in sound design and recoil. In Modern Warfare every gun has a sense of impact, both when you shoot and when you connect. From the burliest LMG to the most basic handgun, shooting feels great.

Cold War’s shooting does not feel great. Quite the contrary. It feels airy—every bit as piddly as the early gameplay previews made it appear. Guns have little weight to them. Recoil is almost nonexistent (and yet shooting feels less smooth and accurate). One thing I love about Call Of Duty is how satisfying the gunplay is when your bullets connect with an enemy. That’s just not the case here. Gunfire is tinny. Hitting your target doesn’t have that same sense of impact. It’s not good (and again, how do they incorporate this into Warzone? I can’t imagine the Warzone community will be happy with a major downgrade to gunplay, the removal of double-sprint and so forth).

If Activision is going to have an integrated Call Of Duty experience across titles, something needs to change. We can have different stories set in different eras, we can experiment with map voting, different kinds of map design and so forth, but what we can’t really do is have wildly different gunplay and movement mechanics. Guns in Cold War feel subpar compared to their Modern Warfare counterparts. Operators look more stilted. Movement and animations feel clunky and dated. It’s great that the game is more colorful and has more diverse maps, but there needs to be more unity between games at this point if Warzone is somehow supposed to exist from one to the next, incorporating Battle Passes and so forth.

It should be noted that one of Modern Warfare’s best innovations has remained in Cold War: The Gunsmith. This allows you to tinker to your heart’s content with every gun in your arsenal, changing out optics, stocks, barrels and so on and so forth, even in the middle of a match. This pretty much had to stay in the game if Activision hoped to weave it into Warzone, but that only serves to highlight how these other changes present a major hurdle.

Will we simply stop double-sprinting in Season 7? Will all the excellent Modern Warfare guns vanish and be replaced by subpar Cold War guns? Will the shooting and gunplay change as well? Is that even possible? Would they have to release an entirely new Warzone build to make that happen?

In the end, I had some fun with Black Ops Cold War but not as much fun as I’m still having with Modern Warfare. And for the first time, I truly believe this franchise would be better off skipping a year (though it’s too late now) and focusing on making Modern Warfare even better. Many of us have invested a great deal of time and money on the game, and it just isn’t the same moving on to yet another premium-priced title and saying “farewell” to that investment. I don’t do that with my other games-as-service titles like Fortnite, Apex Legends or Destiny 2 (the vaulting of some locations and content in that game notwithstanding).

This feels like an error in judgement on Activision’s part, or a sticking to tradition despite evidence to the contrary. They made the right move releasing maps for free and switching to a seasonal Battle Pass system. This is obvious in terms of sales and in the ways it makes the community stronger by keeping everyone on the same maps. But releasing a new Call Of Duty one year later has the opposite effect, splitting up a thriving shooter community for no good reason. If Cold War felt as good as Modern Warfare, then I wouldn’t care as much.

But honestly, maybe it’s time to start releasing these games as expansions rather than stand-alones. Instead of one new game each year, keep making this game bigger and better—cycle different maps in, but keep the gameplay pretty much the same.

Of course, that comes back at least in part to my own personal preferences, and many other Call of Duty fans out there would be horrified by this idea. For those who prefer the gunplay, map design and so forth in Black Ops Cold War, seeing the backside of Modern Warfare is a good thing. I’m just not among them.

I’ll play more today and during the Betas and, of course, the whole thing for a full review. At this point, I’m just not feeling anywhere near as optimistic as I was in the lead up to Modern Warfare. Then again, that was 2019 when hope sprung eternal. 2020 is a whole different ball game.

If you’ve played the alpha or watched footage of it, what’s your take so far? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

You can read about the maps, modes, start and end-times and so forth for this weekend’s alpha right here.