Activision’s Treyarch game studio is taking us back to round-based Zombies with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
I’ve played it, and fans will be happy to know that you can make progress toward your multiplayer progression by playing everything in Black Ops 7, including Zombies. This new Zombies is a mix of new and familiar experiences.
Players are once again trapped in the Dark Aether and will need to escape as they go through a massive circular map that at launch includes six major arenas where you fight hordes of undead. It’s all part of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which launches today.
Zombies has become a must-have in Call of Duty’s annual releases, and this year it returns on to round-based combat. You can team up with a crew of four total and play co-op, surviving increasing hordes of Zombies in a single arena or traveling across as many as a number of locations via a combat truck dubbed Ol’ Tessie.
Zombies features reimagined versions of the original crew and characters from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. In this Ashes of the Damned map, Zombies is more like a set of six arenas than a single map.
You use Ol’ Tessie, the pickup, to move from one arena to the next. The map is more or less a ring, all connected by roads. You don’t want to try to run down the roads, though I had to do that once. The undead hordes are even more chaotic and scary when they’re chasing you down the foggy road at night.
It’s best if you consider the roads to be No Man’s Land when you’re running on foot. But for the adventurous, I suspect there are rewards for those who venture into the fog. Tessie is great for running over zombies, even in the limited driving areas of the arenas.
I’ve spent a few hours on Zombies at a recent review event at Treyarch, making my way through most of the six arenas. I highly encourage you to do the tutorial so that you can figure out all of the complexities of zombies, the weapons, the different upgrades and paths to making your character more powerful. Also, aim for headshots.
My favorite arena was the Vandorn Farm, which was the easiest to maneuver through as the Zombies chased me around while I was in a state of panic. My co-op partners were good at the game and so they kept me from totally freaking out. And they also constantly revived me, without complaints.
This map has chokepoints where you can take out a lot of zombies, like the stairs or doorways in the barn. But you can also run wide circles without getting pinned down by the hordes as they chase you through the farm.
And it also has a trap on the side of the barn. You can flip the switch when it is green and it will turn on a spinning saw blade. It plays music that attracts the zombies and they run right into the saw. It’s a great way to survive when the big hordes are after you. Brain rot is also a wonderful trick to pull on the zombies, where you can turn them against each other.
When you do a lot of damage to the zombie hordes, you get green power-ups that float above the bodies of the damned. You trigger the power-ups immediately upon running over them. You can get a Nuke that takes out every zombie on the map at the moment. It really pays to go through the experience with co-op partners, as they can revive you.
When you set off a Nuke, it gives you a moment of relief to go level up your guns or collect some ammo until the zombies repopulate the map.
My favorite weapon was the light machine gun (LMG) because it had the most ammo and a rapid fire rate. But the Akita shotgun, which is available at one of the locations on a wall in Ashwood, is a murderous weapon that can take out one or two zombies in with one shot. On top of that, it’s a fast reload, almost like an automatic rifle.
It’s a bit hard to find the Akita but you can get it through Mystery Boxes or Create a Class if you are above level 40. In both the farm and Ashwood, you have to shoot a bunch of pulsing orange pustules off a set of pumps to make progress. In the Mystery Box, you get a random weapon. Sometimes it’s worth trying out. You can also must buy guns off the walls, if you have enough money.
If you stop in the Mechanics Garage, you can get your truck fixed up and upgraded. Exit 115 was an easy starting point map. I also played Lakefront, Janus Towers, and Launchpad. I did not distinguish myself in any of these places.
It was fun to be able to exfil from the levels under high pressure. You can exfil the whole team under a timer at a phone booth. Toward the end of the Zombies experience, when things are hot and heavy, the bear comes out.
This zombiefied bear, Zursa, can take you out if it catches up with you. That’s when the teamwork of co-op really pays off. When Zursa comes after you, it’s a do or die moment. When you take him out, that’ll open up the portal to get you to the safe zone.
The game will have modes like Survival and Curse. The round-based launch map is called the Ashes of Damned, and players will have to drive the Ol’ Tessie vehicle that can plow through zombies as they go through the fog zones in between the arenas within the larger map. Tessie has a new Wonder Weapon: Necrofluid Gauntlet (not playable at launch). Tessie is upgradable, repairable and aided by T.E.D.D.
Players will be able to reach round 999. The dedicated crew includes Maya, Weaver, Carver and Grey. You can meet alternative versions of the OG crew: Richtofen, Nikolai, Takeo and Dempsey.
Perks include Perk-a-Cola: Wisp Team; ammo mode Fire Works; Field Upgrade: Toxic Growth; 66 new Augments to unlock at launch out of 192 total. GobbleGums returns from Black Ops 3, where you build packs of five, store up to three on you and activate them at any time.
There are new features like Solo Save, Load and Rejoin features continuing from Black Ops 6. New additions include Firing Range loadout testing, expanded Zombies Intel inspection, Weapon Prestige, Weekly and Mastery Badge Challenges and more.
My co-op partners were able to use Crash Cart to revive me from afar. The experience gets a lot harder around level 15, said Steve Biachi, lead game designer at Treyarch, in an interview with me. I can attest to that.
Modes include Standard (every round-based map will have a main quest with special completion rewards). Survival (Stay alive as long as you can with all the tools you need in a confined section of the round-based map experience). Cursed (mode for hardcore players; unlock Relics and face additional challenges. Start with a pistol, no loadouts, no mini-map, and classic point system). Directed mode (launches in Season 1 for Ashes of the Damned with a guided experience through the main quest).
And this is important to remember. One of the things that could get more people to play Zombies is cross-progression when it comes to leveling up. Since the game is built on a single game engine, now players can earn Prestige points and level up their weapons across all of the parts of the game, like Zombies, multiplayer, single-player/co-op campaign and Warzone.
Given the changes in Zombies this year — adding Prestige points, creating multiple arenas, the addition of Ol’ Tessie — I think Activision has a shot at attracting more players into the Zombies experience this year. And it might even get the company to think about whether Zombies should just become its own game at some point.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to visit Treyarch, where I played the game for the purpose of this review.