Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will debut with Dead Ops Arcade 4: Papaback in Black, and this time, lead developer Treyarch isn’t making a secret of it. Black Ops 7 debuts today on the consoles and the PC.
Dead Ops Arcade 4 is a twin-stick control game that you can play in 2D from a top-down perspective or in 3D as a first-person shooter. It’s the latest brainchild of Dave King, CTO of Treyarch, who spoke to the press at a review event. And it’s available in the menu in the Black Ops 7 game. In that way, it’s come a long way since the first game, which was hidden as an Easter Egg. And it’s an action-packed game that makes you feel the intensity of Zombies without all of the horror and realistic gore.
Dead Ops Arcade 4 is a farcical top-down arcade shooter with 80 levels and various ways to play. There are a total of eight characters. It features ammo mods, field upgrades and GobbleGums for the first time. It has both top-down and first-person perspective options. There are 80 levels, 20-plus arenas, and you can play co-op in a squad of up to four players. The XP progression is in DOA for the first time.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if you haven’t heard of this mode before, as it’s always been a bit underground. It’s a passion project of mine,” King said in a press briefing. “Dead Ops Arcade is inspired by the 80s and 90s twin-stick shooter genre, which means that you move with your left stick and fire with your right stick. It’s pretty simple.”
He added, “It’s super intense in terms of the Zombie carnage that you’ll be experiencing, but it’s also quite deep as well.”
We started out playing in Casual mode, which takes about 75 minutes or so to get to the boss. You can collect around 35 power-ups along the way, which improve your character. This game has new elements that make it resemble roguelike styles of gameplay.
On each level, you can drop a bomb that wipes out everything on the map. You can also use two lightning strikes, which send you from one part of the map to another. Those are useful in getting you out of a hairy situation. The bomb was very satisfying.
You can also play this mode entirely in first person. I experienced that, but didn’t play it. But I did play the 2D game up to level 14. It was fun and sweaty, just like a Zombies game. Only this one evoked the 1980s graphics.
You have to move constantly and dodge and avoid hitting the Zombies, or you get injured and eventually die. If you die, you have to start over from the beginning. There is a section of the game called Slayer Arena, which is an intense challenge for the player. The game is also getting some traditional Call of Duty: Zombies mechanics like Gobble Gums. There are nine or so weapons in the mode, and you can level them up and get faster rates of fire or better spraying of bullets.
The game supports up to four people in co-op mode. And you can earn Battle Pass and character experience and progression in Dead Ops Arcade 4, as well as in every other mode in Black Ops 7. There will also be a Normal difficulty mode, which can take about six hours to play before you get to the final boss.
Origins
The previous installment of the game was Dead Ops Arcade 3, which came out with Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War from 2020.
It was the obsession of Treyarch’s CTO, David King, who has been the visionary behind the game series. He launched Dead Ops Arcade 1 in 2010 as part of Call of Duty: Black Ops. And Dead Ops Arcade 2: Cyber’s Avengening came out in 2015 with Call of Duty: Black Ops III.
The original was a kind of Easter Egg reward, where you had to access a terminal in the main menu and type DOA to launch it. Due to its popularity, Treyarch made the subsequent games more easily accessible from the main menu.
The new game simulates the old twin sticks in the arcade machines of old, like Robotron: 2084 from Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar. On a top-down 2D map, you move your character around with the left controller stick, and you fire your weapon by moving your right stick in a particular direction.
There are moments like the end of round 10 where you get a glimpse of the game in 3D. I decided to focus on the 2D game and made it up to level 13, where the action gets pretty furious.
Is this a reason to buy Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which is loaded with a co-op campaign, multiplayer combat, and Zombies, as well as the free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone? No, this is the smallest element of that whole package. But it’s still a fun game, and one that Activision could have considered selling as a separate game. But the intention is to load the game up and deliver lots of value to gamers so they stay with Call of Duty longer.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to Treyarch for the purposes of writing Black Ops 7 stories. I played the game at Treyarch on the PC.