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Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War singleplayer reviewImplausible deniability
Implausible deniability
Heads up, your yearly package of guns and gimmickry has been incoming ever since we discovered its name from that most reliable of informants:a Doritos packet. As ever,Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold Warwill see you wordlessly slaying any number of Iranians, Turks, Vietnamese, Russians, Germans, Cubans, all in the name of Uncle Sam and, this time, under the approving, wrinkled eyes of Ronald Reagan. The story is set in 1981 and it does not take a revisionist pen to history so much as it wraps a cloth bag over history’s head and hoses it down against a chainlink fence. It is incoherent numbskullery, tasking you with avoiding nuclear war, while at the same time insisting that gunning down the entire staff of Moscow’s KGB headquarters will not be interpreted as an act of war in itself. Plausible deniability is at the heart of what we do, argues one of the idiot spooks on your squad. But within the stupidity of this story hides an insidious and intractable message about the necessity of doing wrong.
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To that chunk of the gaming audience who pop in to video games once a year for an explosive ridealong they saw advertised on the side of a bus, that’s probably fine. Likewise for those who like to slap on a Callodutes like it’s their favourite t-shirt and eat crisps all weekend on the sofa. This is the bulletpointed newsletter of an industry. Who needs to play detective inObra Dinnwhen CODWAR lets you use a blacklight to find handprints in level three? Depending on how many games you play, this parade of novelties may feel like the peak of cinematic videogamesing, or it will be like slurping on a watery FPS soup sparsely garnished with diced cubes of other, better games.
The stand-out example is an extended mission where you wander around KGB headquarters as an undercover Soviet informantHitmanstyle, strangling comrades, hiding their bodies, and having a meeting with Gorbachev himself. The future General Secretary is a mirror image of Ronald Reagan, who appears in his own earlier cutscene to play the part of platitudinous daddy of the nation. But more on that in a moment.
This gunless enemy HQ sequence is a continuation of previous infiltrating digressions of the series, and it’s as close to immersive sim as COD is likely to get, offering you multiple ways to complete your mission in plain sight. Will you poison a baddie? Frame him as a mole? Or convince a prisoner to kill him? Your avatar, head of security Belikov, has the best moments of the game, wriggling in suspense amid the paranoid colleagues of a Russian spy ring, including some familiar faces to fans. But like all the other toys, Belikov is soon discarded.
The form also lets you choose skin tone and gender, including a non-binary option that changes the way others address you, using “they” and “them” pronouns in lines of dialogue. I don’t know if this is a step in the right direction or meaningless pandering, but it has invitedat least some ridiculefor summoning the comical idea of the CIA as a place of both high-profile assassination and socially progressive ideals. Don’t ask me. I just filled in my name as “Bullet Patriotism” and moved on.
Unfortunately, the attention to detail committed to its aural soundscape doesn’t extend to the plot. While Cold War lets you carry out atrocities in the name of big action (napalming villages, gassing enemies, executing surrendering enemies), there is no deeper examination of those atrocities. Some players will argue there doesn’t need to be - this is a stupid action game after all. But living as we do in the hinterlands of the Terror Wars, a time in which theUS military recruits young people via Twitchwhile simultaneously pointing guns at other young people andrecording it for laughs on TikTok, I’d argue that a game developer has some responsibility to examine US war criminality beyond exclaiming: “wow these dudes are bad but also gritty and cool”.
It is set in our reality, yet makes no effort to remark on our reality. It only seeks to provide cheap thrills on infinite airport tarmac. Ronald Reagan stoically invokes the concept of the unsung hero, the true American who kills to ensure eternal liberty. COD has long worshipped this ideal; the soldier as a fundamentally noble occupation. Even today it insists on telling you the name of every incidental trooper you look at, their moniker hovering for a moment as your crosshair passes over them - Jackson, Davis, Serio, Gilmore - doubling down on the idea that US soldiers are heroic men who gave their all, and not also war criminals who routinely level entire towns in whatever district of the world merits punching that decade.
Just as it rarely engages with the humanity or inhumanity of any of its walking gravestones (Skiver, Erikson, Jones), it does not engage with the legacy, actions or inaction of its lovingly rendered President, who is essentially there for set dressing, looking over his off-leash war dogs with disarming face crinkles and the assenting nod of a proud father. Earlier this yearWasteland 3, for all its faults, at least presented Reagan as a figure of ridicule, and US leaders in general as questionable demagogues. Here, no such attempt at satire or observation is made. CODWAR’s entire cast play their roles with the scowls and grunts of the spec ops boys in Zero Dark Thirty. There are moments where that breaks, and a half-hearted quip emerges. The problem (aside from the jokes not being that funny) is that they are not satirical jabs or wry observations. They are squadbants, there to signal that these hardened killers are just buds, dude. Good bros like your bros. You could be friends with these killers.
It’s predictable too. There are enough familiar sights to fill your Call Of Duty bingo card in the first few hours. The bad dude chasedown, the teamwork snipe, the being captured and tied up, the getting rescued at the last minute, the nuke the baddies have somehow sequestered away in their baddie hole, the multiple choice forking paths that invariably come down to “kill” or “spare”. It asks nothing of you. Shoot as you have always shot. Trust in your fingers, never the voice in your head saying “wait, haven’t I seen this before?” as you witness another kneeling antagonist coolly executed with a bullet to the back of the skull.
Please recognise, as I hack away with this hatchet, that I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have our stupid set piece war games. I gleefully used Northrop Grumman fighter jets to shoot down the pilots of fictional countries inAce Combat 7. I killed a whole bunch of people inThe Division 2under the orders of another cruel president. I enjoyed these games despite the collar-tugging inference of justifiable militarism. But CODBLOPS: Cold War doesn’t reach the levels of self-awareness required to overpower its poor taste. It feels written to justify the actions of ruthless men and doesn’t offer the most basic character development required to give its deathsquad the benefit of the doubt. As a game, it’s a predictable ride. As a piece of fiction, it is servile. Lead wetworker Adler says in one ending: “Some of us cross the line, to make sure the line is still there in the morning”. The game uncritically reinforces this squalid concept of US foreign policy, arguing it is not only necessary but fun.
