header is screenshot from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

It was somewhere between the boss fights against the mutated zombie super soldier and the shape-shifting bipedal insect monster that it became really apparent that Call of Duty has, with Black Ops 6, lost the plot.

At one point, Call of Duty was about war. It was never as grounded as it tried to present itself, with its elastic-bodied soldiers sprinting through hails of bullets and shrugging off headshots in Western European battlefields or its pair of operatives holding off waves of enemy soldiers from their cover in ankle-high grass behind a Ferris wheel. But there was always an attempt by the series, however absurd or odious the result may be, to engage with the real world.

This has been changing over the years as Call of Duty drifts further away from focusing on collective military actions and more on smaller scale missions carried out by special forces, 2021’s Vanguard and its plucky, invented group of international Nazi hunters representing what seemed like a nadir until the arrival of Black Ops 6. In this year’s entry, the player, as yet another of the series’ brain scrambled government experiments, finds themselves embroiled in a conspiracy involving a secret paramilitary group called Pantheon. Before long, the player has their very own special headquarters, an old Bulgarian castle complete with secret areas to uncover—a sort of Tom Clancy Presents: Mighty Max pocket playset rendered in 3D.

A series of recruitment missions later and they have a motley crew of comrades assembled, too. There’s a tough, muscle-bound assassin, a haunted ex-Stasi computer expert, a gravelly-voiced Vietnam vet, a bespectacled CIA agent, and the return of Black Ops’ no-nonsense Robert Redford clone, face obscured by a trademark pair of aviators. None of these characters are people, per se, but Avengers-style members of a comic book superhero team, each with their own special attributes and abilities to deploy as needed.

Black Ops 6 has been described as being, in part, a game about the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Gulf War. There are missions set in Kuwait and Iraq, glimpses of Desert Storm iconography provided in flames belching from burning oil wells in rolling desert dunes and a sprawling palace with multi-storey Saddam watching over the battlefield through concrete eyes. But there are more levels that take place in locations like: a nondescript snowbound Russian military facility; a baroque, gold-accented casino; and, the home of the mutants and monsters mentioned above, a ‘70s-style secret laboratory that calls to mind The Prisoner. It’s all Bond pastiche and grab bag spy media miscellany, populated by a cast with outsized personalities and larger-than-life plot devices from both that subgenre and the superhero film. (A nefarious CIA handler is referred to at one point as having turned out to be “a supervillain.”)

Probably for box-checking Black Ops subseries purposes, Bill Clinton shows up as a minor character, fulfilling the quota for an era-appropriate political guest role. In one especially ugly joke, the game winks at the player that the Pantheon’s evil plot involves framing Saddam Hussein with the possession of a weapon of mass destruction. In these examples, Black Ops 6 comes about as close as it ever will to engaging with its historical setting.

War, in Black Ops 6, isn’t a worthy topic in and of itself. It’s only suitable as a backdrop for the struggle between superheroes and supervillains. This is a tendency that began with its named point of view characters in past games, Call of Duty gradually turning Captain Price, Alex Mason, et al. into mascots and heroes of their respective agencies and outfits, their personalities more important than the conflicts they starred in. Now, it's metastasized into the worst version of itself. As Yussef pointed out in his review of the game, the problem with this approach is that the game still makes choices, like “[using] … Iraqi men, citizens of a real nation, as cannon fodder to be shot at and killed, without lifting a finger to tell us why …”

Apart from the dehumanization inherent to this approach, an accompanying effect is the creation of a Call of Duty that appears at surface level to be less overtly ‘political’—and therefore easier for a wider range of players to enjoy without feeling as if there’s much of anything to think about in the process. Despite the series’ failures, in design and general narrative, over time, it’s always been compelling, at least, to witness the ways in which it tries to wriggle through real history and current events, annually presenting a vision of the world that can sort real (or thinly veiled representations of) groups of people into faceless shooting targets while justifying their slaughter as dubiously moral. With Black Ops 6, this same intent is present but hard to see beneath so much technicolour distraction. There is only the kernel of unquestioned historical representation—of fighting the Iraqi and Russian troops and rogue American soldiers as an extrajudicial, world-saving coalition of special agents—buried beneath layers of intentionally outsized military signifiers. A politically repellant game is, in the end, more honest than one that obscures its values beneath the over-the-top, plausible deniability of comic book frivolity. It forces the player to look at a vision of the world that others hold and, just maybe, confront the ways in which that vision fits with or clashes against their own.

Now, with war and politics relegated to set dressing, it’s the superheroes and supervillains that stand out, the laboratory monsters and zombies that serve as assurance that there’s nothing worth taking seriously in Call of Duty’s wars, and that its accompanying military imagery is similar to a bucket of smooth, uncomplicated action figures, meant to be played with and discarded without thought.

Before one of Black Ops 6’s missions, in the headquarters where the player wanders around upgrading their abilities at equipment stations, solving puzzles using a blacklight, and working through banal dialogue trees with their team of international soldiers, two of the game’s characters, Marshall and Woods, have a conversation. Marshall reassures Woods that he’s still an excellent asset to the team, even though the loss of his legs means he can no longer work in the field. He explains that Woods was, before, kind of like Captain America. Now, still valuable thanks to his military intellect, he’s more like Professor X. Woods responds to this point, his identity and efficacy as a soldier now compared to the roles of various superheroes, by asking, simply, “Who?”

Maybe, if the player remembers older Call of Duty entries, they might have a similar question in mind.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.

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