Let me be clear from the off: The act of playing Warzone (as it will henceforth be referred to) is fantastic. The game feels amazing to control, taking down enemies is satisfying and the production values are second to none. In that regard it really is a great game, which makes it that much more unfortunately that everything around the act of playing varies from confusing to outright terrible.
Apart from the obvious non-comic or sci-fi setting, Warzone differentiates itself from other Battle Royale games by having 150 players on the massive map at once, be that in the quads, trios, duos or Solo modes. Some of these modes are cycled in and out, but to be fair that makes little difference unless you can only scrounge up one friend to play. I mainly played Solo’s because I have few friends to play with and it was a good time up to a point.
The big innovation, and it is one of the coolest things Warzone does, is The Gulag. When you are killed for the first time in a given match, it isn't a game over straight away. Rather, you are sent to The Gulag, which is basically the shower room scene from The Rock in game form. There you wait your turn until you are put into the centre against one other opponent You get a gun and some other kit and in true battle royale style, the last person standing wins. If you win, you’re immediately dumped back into the map to continue playing, sans weapons and equipment.
You get one round of Gulag, then when you die you’re gone for good. At least, that's in Solo’s, in the other modes if your team have enough cash they can buy you back into the game ala the reboot system from other games. The Gulag is a very cool addition and distills the game down to that final battle and that first win in that is such a great feeling that dying can make you pumped to continue the match.
Another difference is the sheer amount of weapons available to you. Whereas Apex Legends or Fortnite give you a relatively small loot pool with a set of clearly defined more powerful weapons - the gold level gear in both, Warzone gives out lots of different guns and equipment. These are organised into assault rifles, smgs, shotguns, LMGS, marksman rifles and sniper rifles for the primary weapons. There is a melee category too but that consists of the Riot Shield and seems a bit pointless as a primary weapon.
You can also carry a secondary weapon which consists of either pistols, launchers or another Melee category, this time just holding the combat knife. On top of these, you have three equipable perks that grant things like more sprinting time or the ability to use two primary weapons. That last one is probably the most useful in the game, or at least it was for me, as it meant I could carry an assault rifle and a sniper rifle at the same time.
The last set of weapons are the Lethal and Tactical equipment. Lethal are basically various forms of grenades, while Tactical are things like smoke grenades or the heartbeat sensor for detecting close by enemies. There is a lot of kit in Warzone, and that's before you even get to all the attachments for the weapons which improve accuracy or reload times or a number of other stats, and these are individual to each gun and unlocked by using said gun while playing.
I have written three paragraphs about what kit is available to you in Warzone, and needless to say it can be overwhelming. That is before you add in ‘blueprints’ which are developer designed weapon combos with different names. So for example, there is the ‘Black Asp’ assault rife, which is a weapon I have found from chests but had no idea what the difference was from any other gun apart from a name change and fact it was blue coloured. Turns out this is a standard Oden rifle with a bunch of attachments and renamed, though I had to figure that out by picking one up and swapping the between it and a normal oden to look at the pictures in the bottom right of the hud.
I have had to google multiple times to work out the best load out to take into the game, but then the load out options all feel a bit dumb in the context of Warzone. Most BR games have you get loot from chests, in game drops or just the ground, and while all of these are present here, you can only get the loadout you created outside of a match by either buying a loadout marker from a buy station or hoping beyond hope that no one is camping one of the randomly spawned free loadout drops.
It replaces, in a manner of speaking, the luck of the draw aspect of the chests as by opening enough chests and grabbing enough ground loot you can buy the best guns in the game after a few minutes. It’s an interesting take on the concept, but it simply isn’t as good, as it removes the feeling of besting a better equipped opponent. Plus it adds in an extra thing for annoying players to camp near for free, cheap kills and this being COD, of course they do that.
To be fair to Warzone, it is trying to do BR a different way so all these weapon options fit in with that as do the loadout drops, and it does some genuinely interesting things to stand out, for example if someone is aiming a sniper rifle at you, you can see the light reflecting in the scope so you know its a sniper shot coming your way. It might not seem like much but it's a cool little addition.
Another is the cash drops that pop out of chests and are strewn over the ground. Grabbing these means that when you find one of the buy stations scattered around the map you are purchasing kill streaks, armour plates (warzones shield equivalent), loadout drops and in the team based versions a killed squad member. Again though, the buy stations are just another thing for players to camp on and get free kills, so it's not exactly worked.
It's not this stuff that brings Warzone down though, it's everything around the act of playing it. The download is 100GB for just Warzone. 100GB. The problem here is it isn’t just Warzone you get, you actually get the whole of Modern Warfare as part of the install, it's just the main game is hidden behind a £50 pay wall to unlock it. Which would be fine, if you weren’t limited to just two operators (character skins) if you don’t make that purchase.
It's a shady thing to do in what is supposed to be a ‘free’ product. This is compounded by the fact that all of the options and settings available to players of the full game are available here, which again, would be fine if it doesn’t cause stupid issues. For example, there is the option to turn off crossplay, so you only play with players on the same platform as you (in my case PC), except Warzone requires that it be turned on, so you can’t play with it off. If that was the case, what is the point in the option even being in the client?
Then you have the killstreak screen that lets you pick which killstreaks you will receive depending on how many kills you get. Except this is pointless because you don’t earn killstreaks like that in Warzone, just the main games multiplayer, so again, why is this in the game client if you can’t use it?
The UX in Warzone is also terrible. There are so many menus for different things, and icons denoting you have something to look at, that it can be hard to figure out where to go. But then those little icons don’t show up in logical places, adding to the confusion. For example, using a particular gun and getting kills with it will increase your level with that weapon and unlock attachments and gun skins or charms. When this happens and you are dumped back to the main menu, the weapons tab will have a little green icon to say you have unlocked something for a gun. However, clicking on the tab means that icon disappears, it won’t show up on a particular weapon type.
Clicking on a weapon type and scrolling down the list will also not show you which weapon has something unlocked. Only by clicking on a specific weapon will you get the ‘gunsmith’ option to customize it, and at that point, two menus down, do you see the icon to say something has been unlocked. Would it really be that hard to put the same icon on the weapon type tab and the actual weapon icon?
Now I do appreciate that this might be something that only annoys me, but this is Call of Duty, the budget would suggest that some of the best developers in the industry are working on it and yet no one seems to have figured out this relatively easy fix? It’s a dumb thing that just annoys and brings the game down.
This is all assuming that the icons even work properly because I have had a couple of instances where I have looked at everything and the icon remains for no reason. Another little bug is that when the match is starting and your character is walking to the back of the plane ready to drop, your character skin will change for no reason whatsoever. I normally play as an asian woman operator but several times I have swapped genders and outfits just at this screen for no reason at all.
In Solos, it will randomly add a teammate into screen while the game loads, confusing you as to whether you clicked Duo’s or not. All these are little things but they add up and take away from what should be a seamless experience.
Actually dropping in and playing the game, though, is fun to a point. When you are killed you can get the same feeling you would get playing standard COD multiplayer, like you have been decimated before you could react, or even see the person firing on you. This isn’t helped by the real world setting and clothing on the character skins - they don’t exactly jump out at times so it can be easy for players to hide and get the jump on you. I suppose that is just part of the game, but it can be frustrating when you can’t see them cause they are hiding in the corner of a building, covered in shadow while in all black clothing.
Getting a few kills in a row is a great feeling, especially since characters are very squishy and can be ripped apart in stand off if one is a slightly better aim than you. I played on PC and it was slightly weird to have this happen so much because I was mainly playing against Xbox and Playstation players due to cross play, so in theory I should have the advantage but I really didn’t and I could never figure out why. I suspect it was my own skill more than anything, but there was this sense that they always seemed more powerful.
Of course, they could have had better guns so that’s why, and I do freely admit my skill at COD is lacking after years away due to frustrations with how the standard multiplayer always pans out, so this might just be a case of getting used to how the game plays, as it is very different to other BR games.
I want to be clear on one point though: Warzone exists as a way to get you to buy Modern Warfare. It is NOT the benevolent freebie the marketing would have you believe, and everything is geared to getting you to spend money on either the main game or the battle pass and skins. I wouldn’t have an issue with the battle pass if this was a proper stand alone game, and might even invest in it because the moment to moment gameplay is good enough. It’s just unfortunate that the shady practices that surround this put me off rewarding the developers, despite knowing that it was a business decision above their heads.
It’s also rubbish that Warzone’s lifespan is probably exactly one year, and a new version of Call of Duty Battle Royale will most likely appear with this year's game. That is cynical, I admit, but perfectly justified given the annualised history of the series. It will be, however, very successful, because there is a very large subset of people who don’t want sci-fi - making Apex Legends a dead end, who want an antithesis to the ‘kids game’ that is Fornite and who want a free Call of Duty.
Cynically it is very shrewd to release Warzone given these parameters, but it is clear business has trumped giving the users a decent experience, and that is very sad, because as a small, stand alone experience that sells a battle pass and some skins Warzone is a very good Battle Royale game for the most part.