Let’s start with the Campaign. It begins in an immediately intriguing interrogation without even booting up the campaign at all. Upon actually opening the Campaign, you are greeted with an interesting time period of the Cold War, and are left throughout the whole game wondering why Mason is here. The ending is foreshadowed through several events and is one of the best plot twists in video game history. The gameplay itself is memorable and fun. This is my favorite COD campaign of all time.
Next is the multiplayer. It’s fine tuned to be easy to jump into, with a simple custom class system. The classes and score streaks are all laid out in a perfectly understandable way. In later entries, custom classes would get much more complicated, but here it’s simple, while still giving plenty freedom to the player. The guns are well balanced, allowing everyone to feel like they aren’t losing because of weapon choice. Every major category is represented here, including some outliers like the crossbow. The maps are so deliciously perfect, with the obvious standout being Nuketown, but maps like Jungle and Firing Range are also favorites in the community. There’s a good variety of modes (though I usually just stick to Free for All or Team Deathmatch), and once again, this is personally my favorite multiplayer mode of all time.
(Another thing I like is, while there isn’t an option to take a primary as your secondary weapon, there are mini pistol versions of most weapon types. The Python is like a mini shotgun, and the CZ75 auto is pretty much a smaller submachine gun).
Last is the Zombies mode. First off is the fact that 2 maps (plus a bonus mode, Dead Ops Arcade) are included right off the bat. Kino Der Toten isn’t a perfect Zombies map, but it appealed to casual players and had a lot of good elements, including the introduction of the Thundergun, which is an absolute game changer. For me Kino never gets old.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is Five, a complex map that more experienced players could enjoy. Five is controversial, but getting 2 original Zombies maps at launch (when World at War only had one at launch and 4 in total) was astounding. And when you got bored, you could boot up Dead Ops Arcade for a unique Zombies experience.
Ascension was a pretty good map, Call of the Dead was a huge break from tradition, being set in the 2010s when the game released, Shangri-La was fun enough, and Moon had the coolest and best Easter Egg of all time, and if you ever got bored of trying to get the Easter Egg, you could see how long you could survive in Area 51.
The weapon balancing is fantastic, the game controls smoothly, and this was the basis of what COD Zombies is today (or at least what it was in 2015, Vanguard is pretty shit).
So happy birthday BO1, here’s to all the slick memories I made with this one.