With November seeing the less than enthusiastically received release of Call of Duty : Infinite Warfare, and the subsequent release of the Zombies in Spaceland game-mode/map, I hearken back to my experience with the zombies game-modes of Black Ops 1 and World At War. I reminisce to the adrenaline fueled half-marathon, half-massacres that raged through the decrepit halls of Nazi strongholds, echoing with the frantic rhythm of heavy metal. The over the top guns, the over the top violence, the churlish and brash banter between the characters, and the utterly absurd story-line made for an indulgent, engaging experience that greatly contrasted with the dire, and drab personality that the Call of Duty campaigns always provided.
How the mighty have fallen, however. From Black Ops 2 and onward, the game-mode gradually lost its charm, and its quality. The addition of awful mechanics, like crafting and leveling brought flashy, and superfluous extensions to a solid formula. The cluttered and constricting arenas of maps like “Mob of The Dead” and the, unremarkable “Shadows of Evil” map hindered the potential for intuitive, smooth maneuvers and subsequently formed a barrier for reaching higher rounds. Don’t even get me started on the unbelievably convoluted and tedious so called “easter eggs”, featured in the later maps, that require a massive sum of your time to be completed, require the use, and study of lengthy YouTube tutorials and are required to access the game-mode’s best content.
Beyond the the mind-boggling gameplay decisions however, my main gripe with CoD zombies is its new found themes and its lacking sense of “character”. Gone is the immature, and cheesy, dark humor of grizzled veterans, and Hollywood action and horror stars caught in a zombie onslaught. Gone is the the contrast between the feel of the zombies mode and the feel of the campaign, with Black Ops 3 Zombies’ characters being just as drab and dire as the typical CoD story line, while Infinite Warfare’s zombies is just as much a desperate joke as the current state of the franchise.
CoD Zombies was the part of Call of Duty that took the Macheesmo and “2edgey”, (dark and brash to the point of being unintentionally humorous) themes of CoD, stopped taking them seriously, and amped them to the point of being scary, stupid and genuinely badass. Now CoD Zoms, with its break dancing undead, its neon, 1980’s aesthetic, and it’s tedious convolutedness escalated to the max, isn’t badass, it’s just stupid.
Chunks of gaming 