(This is mainly a review of the Multiplayer, and a mention of the Campaign. I have not played Warzone past the bare minimum)
Man, I really wanted to love this one. I've been an avid Call of Duty player since 2013, and have a range of opinions on all the games in the series. But this has got to be the biggest letdown of them all. All of the trailers and promotional material really set my expectations high, and given it is a sequel to one of the best COD games, Modern Warfare (2019), I was expecting a lot from this release.
Then the game released. I don't know where to start. To begin, the UI is terrible. Instead of the clean and concise menus of MW(2019) where all of the option can be clearly seen, this game opts for a side-scrolling mess. I guess the developers didn't get the memo that literally no other games are doing this, or chose to ignore it to become "different". Either way it sucks. This menu style isn't just for the main menu, oh no! This is done for the Class-Creation menus as well, and for the Class selection at the start of every game. Its messy and constrictive.
The weapons and equipment range from "you are actively disadvantaging yourself by using this" to "you'd be stupid not to use it". A good example of the former is the Tactical Camera "Field Upgrade" as the game calls it. The worse piece of equipment from Black Ops 1 comes back as the worst piece of equipment in this game. It is incredibly situational, such as watching an angle while you camp another, or watch as a Domination Flag gets captured because your teammates won't play the objective. You could be using any other Field Upgrade, like Dead Silence, which silences your footsteps, but not before alerting everyone around you that its being used.
The weapon progression system is bad too. This game introduces the idea of weapon platforms, in which similar weapons, such as the AK-47 and the AK-74u, can have interchangeable components, meaning you can switch from Assault Rifle to Sub-Machine Gun without having to reconfigure the gun from scratch. This would be a good idea, except it doesn't take all that long to do a reconfigure, and the majority of the time, you will be switching gun to level it up, which means none of the components will carry over. In addition some guns are locked behind another gun's level progression, rather than player level.
I could go on, but I wanted to talk about his games main issue: Skill-Based Matchmaking. If you didn't know, this is a type of matchmaking that grabs players of similar skill levels and matches them up into a lobby. This means you will always be playing against those with equal skill to you. That's the idea anyway, in execution, its much worse. This type of matchmaking breeds two distinct groups: smurfs, meaning those who purposely throw games to be put in lobbies of worse players, and sweaty try-hards, who seem to think their life is on the line in every match, thus play like they have severe ADHD. If you have a good match, well done, your prize is having the next match filled with bot teammates and the best enemy team you've ever seen. This is bad for an avid player like myself, but its downright unplayable for the more casual players: the tired businessman wanting to unwind after a long day, or the new players who have never played a COD game in their life and though it would be a fun game to play. Relating to this, skill-based matchmaking will ensure that your friend in a party with you who is level 30 while you're level 300 will have an awful time.
My next point of contention is the Ricochet Anti-Cheat software the game uses to catch cheaters. It doesn't work. Or rather its highly inconsistent. The player who just so happens to aim his gun at you despite having zero indication you were there; The player with the Ghost perk active before its timer runs out; The player who just blatantly doesn't take damage when you shoot him. And don't bother expecting Activision or Infinity Ward to read your reports, because they could not care less!
And that really the best way to describe this game, the developers simply do not care. Why bother with the multiplayer when Warzone Battle Royale is such a cash cow. To add to this, if it saves money on development, then why bother buying the licenses for all the gun names. That's right, the game series that started the trend of contemporary military shooters with real gun names didn't pay the licensing rights for any of the guns in their game! That may look like an MP5 or an AK, but its not, just trust me dude. Its even more of a joke because they didn't do this for MW(2019)!
I could actually go on all day about even more gripes I have, such as the useless game modes no-one plays, the lacklustre Co-Op missions, the horribly boring PVE Raids, or the actual false advertising in their content promises, but this review is very very long. There are positives, if you can believe it. The campaign is quite good, if a little unmemorable; the gun play is actually quite good, most are fun to fire, and the quick-draw mechanic on pistols leads to some really cool moments, a la the John Wick 2 Catacombs scene. The graphics are awesome, little details like reflections in gold guns and the detail in the maps really goes to show that at least a few people working on this game enjoyed making it. Its just a damn shame about the rest of it.
And I think we can all agree, its time to let the Battle Royale genre die.