Ladies, gentlemen, beloved they/thems, the Zombie-curious, wretched undead, at last, my watch is over (mostly). After two weeks of ups and downs with Call of Duty Black: Ops 7’s Zombies mode, my feelings are mixed. I think this version has all things that make Zombies good – a cleverly designed quest line, a cool map, the joy and despondence of the Mystery Box and Call of Duty’s consistently fun gunplay. But those returning strengths don’t shine this year in the way they usually do, with an Easter Egg hunt that’s too big, too time-consuming, and too unwieldy to wholeheartedly recommend. It’s not bad, per se, but it can be frustrating in a way that might make you bow out early. And that’s lousy.
First, I come with a confession, one that serves as the foundation for the thesis of this review: my squad and I, brave souls who conquered Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode last year, and several others before, have not beaten Black Ops 7’s signature Ashes of the Damned map at the time of this writing. Instead, the attempt fractured our group, perhaps permanently. One member threw up his hands and simply walked away after a particularly devastating loss, leaving us down a man and his not-insubstantial institutional knowledge and skill. Another was temporarily banned from our Discord after our last, best run. We were so close, friends. So tantalizingly close. And we came up short.
“Well, Will,” you might reasonably ask, “why issue a review if you haven’t finished it?” A few reasons, dear reader. First, we always try to learn the map and discover the process for ourselves, because that is how the average person will do it; second, because our failure mirrors what I feel many other teams will experience playing Ashes of the Damned, making it a crucial part of both this year’s game and this review; and third, because I have seen damn near everything the mode has to offer except the finale itself, and I already have a good idea of what Ashes of the Damned is: a very good map that can be exceptionally frustrating, especially if you use matchmaking to team up with random players, that often doesn’t work as it should.
Before we get started, allow me a chance to tee off on Black Ops 7’s PC anti-cheat system. This is Call of Duty. We will not be playing this game in a year because there will be a new one, and requiring me to flash a new BIOS to my computer and then go into my BIOS so I can flip the right switches until the Powers That Be decide I can play Call of Duty is ridiculous, even if this anti-cheat requirement remains in next year’s game, as Activision claims it will. You will never create an anti-cheat so good that it can’t be beaten, and whatever is gained from requiring all this is likely not worth it, nor the access it requires you give Activision to your computer. It is ludicrous, frankly, and the battle is unwinnable. If you create a better shield, the other guys will simply craft a better spear. Okay, rant over. Back to Zombies.
There is allegedly a story here – your characters are dropped somewhere into the Dark Aether where they run into a guy called the Warden who looks like the sexy ghoul from the Fallout TV series. After transmogrifying you into the semi-living by having a weird skull in a birdcage sap some of your life essence away like he’s the six-fingered man from The Princess Bride, you’re dropped into Ashes of the Damned and left to figure out what the hell is going on. All of it is very well-produced and so goofy that the only thing I could do was watch the introductory cutscene while emulating the face that I imagine a cow would make if you gave it cocaine, chuckle a little, and get on with it. Yeah, choosing certain characters gives you more story dialogue, but there’s nothing crazy here unless you’re already far too invested in Zombie lore. If that’s your bag, Godspeed. I’m here to shoot stuff.
Many of the pain points from last year remain early on – for instance, you can’t make your loadout until you hit level four, which means if Zombies is all you want to do in Black Ops 7 (and for me, it is), you’re stuck with a pistol and whatever you can earn by buying stuff on the walls after you’ve dispatched enough undead. Remember when games just let you have fun from the outset instead of unlocking it?
Otherwise, the underpinnings of Zombies feel much the same. You’re on a map, you open up new doors and paths with currency you earn, and you’ve got Pack-a-Punch machines to upgrade your guns. There’s additional armor you can apply plastered to the walls, an Arsenal to really crank up specific aspects of your weapons, Gobblegums for a little flavor if your mouth is lonely and you want a mid-battle pick-me-up that can make your run easier, and so on. And of course, while you’re managing all of this, the undead rise and hunger for flesh. Ghouls, man.
The gameplay here is similar to last year’s – I still love sliding at a group of zombies and firing off a shotgun until they’re just paste and all that. No, what’s new are the maps. Vandorn Farm is there for your classic, round-based survival attempts on a smaller map, Dead Ops Arcade for something a bit more ridiculous, and Cursed for the ultra hardcore (there’s no guidance here, loadouts and your HUD are limited, and you can equip Relics for additional difficulty). But the seven-course dinner of it all is Ashes of the Damned, the Easter Egg-heavy, “how does anyone figure any of this out?” gauntlet that you’ll have to clear if you really want to say you’ve beaten this year’s iteration. Ashes of the Damned is utterly massive, a monstrous figure eight with several different sub-sections (including Vandorn Farm) that, in years past, might have stood alone as a single map. Now they’re all connected by roads you’ll travel in a truck called Ol’ Tessie.
I love Ol’ Tessie. You can stand on the roof and lean out her windows, and if she takes too much damage, she’ll explode and you’ll have to repair her. She’s your way to and from places without dying (short of the jump pads you can activate), but early on she also becomes your Pack-A-Punch machine (which juices any gun you use it on, essential for the tougher zombies of later rounds), so something as simple as where you park her becomes a lot more important because you might need that boon or to get going in a hurry. You can also slot her with a turbo booster and three monster heads that shoot lightning. Tessie forever.
A lot of our runs began the same way: get Tessie outfitted, pray to pull the Ray Gun at the randomized Mystery Box (we had a shockingly good track record here; my friend Thomas kept pulling one on on his first or second try, and I am baffled by his power), and then start doing the rest of the Easter Eggs. Part of this becomes something you can brute force – you can use certain extremely rare Gobblegums to make it spawn a Ray Gun or the map’s Wonder Weapon – but it’s kind of essential for your long-term survival. Doing the map right means doing it quickly, before the round count gets too high and the Zombies get too strong, and there’s a fun sense of progression that comes with that. Not in a “yay, we’re getting more/better stuff” sense, although that is true, but in a “look at us mastering this” sense that I appreciate, especially since so many games now are about making your numbers go up and not actually improving as a player.
All the wacky Zombies stuff is still here. At one point, you have to throw an axe at the foot of a zombie hanging from a barn and then use a molotov cocktail to turn the severed foot into bones you can use for something else. At another point, you’re killing zombies inside of an old diner until one of them drops a key to the refrigerator in the back carrying a pretty grotesque surprise. It’s goofy and fun and I don’t know how anybody solves this stuff through anything other than trial and error, much less how the dev team comes up with it every year.
This is what makes Zombies so hard. Not only do you have to figure out all these steps, but you have to do them in order and remember where everything is on the map, and do all of it without your team dying. A full Zombies clear will take you several hours, and if you screw up and your whole team buys the farm late in that process, you’ll need to restart from scratch. You will lose every Gobblegum you spent, every weapon you jacked up with a Pack-A-Punch, every Perk you guzzled from a soda machine. Do everything you just did all over again.
It can be demoralizing, but I don’t actually mind this stuff. I’m a fighting game sicko, an action game degenerate, a beat ‘em up guy. I play in a competitive Madden league. I like learning the ins and outs of a system, mastering it, and watching what felt impossible become routine. That is one of the joys of playing games for me. But one of the crucial things you have to understand is that my Zombies group has never been made up of other game critics. It’s regular guys with nine-to-fives in fields like accounting and medicine and law and IT who play games only for fun. It’s always been something I’ve felt is necessary to review something like this: playing it with regular people. And this year, it was too much for some of them.
Part of that is how big Ashes of the Damned is. It’s a well-designed, varied map with a ton of different environments, but its sheer size means it can take a minute to get from Point A to Point B, even with Ol’ Tessie or a jump pad, and you’ll have to go all over Creation to finish it. The other issue is the number of steps involved to get things done. It’s a lot to remember! A lot to figure out! A lot to execute! And you’re expected to do it all in one run without all of you dying.
Even the rare Gobblegums that feel necessary for a good run are limited with the $250 Vault Edition, which was the version of Black Ops 7 we were provided by Activision for review. Using one of the rare ones that essentially makes the Mystery Box spawn a Ray Gun or loads you up with every perk at once and then failing on a run feels bad because you’ve lost a limited resource with little to show for it aside from whatever progress you’ve made in learning the map and whatever experience you gain for meta progression. Naturally, you can buy Gobblegum packs for real money, because of course, right? But the whole thing feels exploitative, like it’s hard because it wants you to give in and open your wallet and just buy the stuff that will make it easier.
And that’s assuming the map works properly. At one point, you have to use stun grenades to wake up a robot named Klaus. He’ll join up with you afterwards, and you can command him to interact with a computer that will then trigger a retinal scan that someone in your group has to stare at until a meter fills up. The problem is you’re being attacked by zombies the whole time. If everything’s working right, you can just have someone do that while the rest of the crew defends them. But we ran into an issue where Klaus simply wouldn’t activate the control panel no matter how many times we commanded him to. Instead, he’d stand dumbly in front of it like “Well, what do you want me to do?” while we fought off zombies before peacing out, requiring we spend valuable currency to bring him back. That time, he did activate it, but no matter how hard I stared at the retina scanner, the little bar wouldn’t go up. Needless to say, we died.
And that’s the thing, right? You’re going to die. You’re going to die because someone forgot to get an item you needed and you weren’t high enough level to craft it at the bench (this, for the record, is extremely dumb; just let me make a throwing axe! Yes, you can find one on the map if you know where to look; that isn’t the point); because OI’ Tessie took a bunch of damage and exploded, stranding you in the No Man’s Land between proper segments; because somebody got knocked off a truck and you had to go back for them; because you got cornered and made a mistake; because you forgot what to do for step 227 and had to look it up; and on and on and on. You will have to start over again, and remember, a full run takes hours and must be done in a single sitting.
And yeah, I know the tricks to make it easier. Kill all but one zombie that you kite around so the next wave doesn’t spawn, make sure everyone has a self-revive, load up with perks and armor, and so on. All of that adds interesting depth. But if you screw up and you all die, it doesn’t matter how good that run was because, aside from whatever account progression you earned during it, it all gets wiped away when you fail. After a ton of attempts, I understand why some folks just throw up their hands and spend their limited time on this Earth doing something else.
Again, this doesn’t personally bother me; failure is part of the gig, and I fully intend to finish this year’s Zombies mode at some point in the next few weeks. But it did break up a group that has a long history of doing this, and I get why they were demoralized. After our best run, where we got really close to the end before someone screwed up and it all came crashing down, one of our best guys just refused to play anymore. “I already have a job and it’s really stressful,” he told me afterwards. “The last thing I need is to come home and have to deal with this nonsense.” I wonder how many people are going to try Ashes of the Damned and come to a similar conclusion.
That sentiment feels like an indictment of this year’s Zombies to me. It is so big and so long and so unforgiving that a lot of people simply won’t be able to complete it naturally even if they do know all the steps because they’ll either have bad teammates or get unlucky or just get discouraged after failing several times and give up. It also feels more than a little pay-to-win with the Gobblegum situation, and with how much simply grinding levels improves your chances because you have better stuff. If all you want to do is play Zombies, both of those things drag the experience down. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a challenge, but it probably shouldn’t have people comparing it to their job, either. I fear the good folks behind this year’s Zombies mode have gotten so lost in the sauce that attempting to please the hardcore Zombies community may have come at the cost of letting regular people complete the map.
Honestly, the biggest problem we ran into on most runs was other people. We had teammates that didn’t speak English (I don’t hold that against them at all, it just makes communication difficult), teammates that ran off and left the rest of us to die, teammates that barely contributed or didn’t collaborate at all, and so on. In fact, basically every good run we had early on was derailed by our matchmade fourth player; we normally roll with a full squad of four, but not everyone was available to play every night. I cannot imagine trying to do this with an entirely matchmade group. Eventually, I just turned off auto-fill and we ran a group of three when our fourth couldn’t make it, which was better than adding another random player to the mix.
