Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – Blackout review by an FPS gamer

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 poses quite a steep learning curve even to experienced FPS gamers

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout is undoubtedly one of the biggest hits recently for gamers, not only because it is the latest installment of the Call of Duty series, but also because of the new Battle Royale mode popularized by Fortnite and PUBG. I am an experienced FPS gamer with decent game hours on CS: GO, Overwatch, PUBG, and Fortnite, but no experience at all with Call of Duty. Although I am still satisfied with my new experience with Black Ops 4, I found myself still stuck in the learning process after 5 hours of gameplay. In this game review, I will focus only on Blackout, the famous Battle Royale mode in Black Ops 4. I will look at the game from a specific angle, that of an experienced FPS gamer, to highlight what players should expect from this game.

As the game is highly rated by several websites like IGN and Metacritic, I am not really surprised by how good it is. My positive impression is mainly thanks to its magnificent graphic design in everything and the improvement in most of the flaws from the previous Battle Royale games I have played. For instance, the smooth movement that gives players a good sense of control over the character and the great variety of map features compared to PUBG, which consists of mainly repetitive buildings all over the map. Some new features have also been added to improve players’ experience. For example, players are able to move while healing and shoot while swimming, and the ability to maneuver a helicopter is definitely one huge highlight.

However, I have to admit that my first few game hours of the game have been a little confusing despite my experience in similar titles. The major reason of confusion was the variety of items that I did not see in other Battle Royale games, including new guns, attachments to guns, grenades, equipment items, healing items, and perks. For example, players would find it hard to master all the 21 different perks, which are consumables that can boost a player’s certain ability for few minutes; and also players would have to learn how to strategize the new equipment like Barricade and Recon Cars, which have added a lot more variety of gameplay to Black Ops 4 compared to traditional FPS games. The learning curve could be quite steep if one does not read any quick guides online because the in-game description does not provide a lot of information about the items. New players may need to spend quite some time to understand and make good use of these items.

New players, including those with experience in FPS games, will also need to test out all the 30-ish guns in order to eventually find out their favorite one, and then to study its spraying pattern, the best attachments, the bullet drop, etc. as I realize that they are quite different from similar games. While looking through other game reviews, I noticed that even professional gamers would commonly say they have no idea what the guns’ features are and which ones are the best in certain situations.

Nonetheless, I would still recommend it to fellow FPS game lovers, and I can imagine that after mastering all these new features, players can have an amazing gaming experience with Black Ops 4.

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Key information:

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Treyarch, Beenox, Raven Software

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4

Release date: October 12, 2018

Genres: First-person shooter, battle royale

PEGI Rating: 18

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PC spec requirements (Source)

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
WINDOWS® 7 64-BIT
INTEL CORE I3-4340 OR AMD FX-6300
8GB RAM
GEFORCE GTX 660 2GB / GEFORCE GTX 1050 2GB OR RADEON HD 7950 2GB

RECOMMENDED SPECIFICATIONS
WINDOWS® 10 64-BIT
INTEL® CORE™ I5-2500K OR AMD RYZEN R5 1600X
12GB RAM
NVIDIA® GEFORCE® GTX 970 4GB/GTX 1060 6GB OR AMD™ RADEON™ R9 390/AMD RX 580

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