Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the 2024 entry set in 1991, following a framed team that operates from a Bulgarian safe house between missions. The campaign runs about eight hours and spans Kuwait, a crime-riddled city, Washington, an Iraqi desert and a research facility.
The Rook safe house is a treasure hunt in itself, with a black-light room, piano code, keypad and radio puzzles and a hidden safe rewarding money for base upgrades. It is the best iteration of the hub idea the series has tried.
Level variety is the standout, from an unexpected open-world desert mission to a Doom-like level with boss fights and a casino heist. The facility missions add a grappling hook, and the music shifts to a different track for each major fight.
The armour-plate system is the most persistent gripe, carrying bad memories from the previous entry. The Kuwait airport mission stacks super-armoured, grenade-heavy enemies with no good cover and useless AI companions.
Graphical glitches mar the presentation, with black smoke puffs, black glass and enemies bursting into squares, an unpatched variable-rate-shading bug on AMD cards. The white quick-time prompts are hard to read, and the balance leans heavily on cutscenes over gameplay.
The closing gauntlet throws overwhelming damage and crowds, and it is the campaign’s weakest stretch. The weapon-card pickup display reads like an action RPG and makes hovering over gear harder to parse.
Overall, mission variety, the safe-house puzzles and the boss-fight music make Black Ops 6 a high point of the series. The armour plates and unpatched visual bugs are the main knocks on an otherwise stable campaign.