Review Key provided by Activision
The zombie mode in Call of Duty has been around since Call of Duty: World at War, and it's been quite a journey. It began as a straightforward survival game – just team up with friends and try to survive as many rounds as possible. Over the years, it evolved into something more intricate, with Easter eggs to solve and a full-fledged story. When the Call of Duty: Black Ops series came into the picture, it introduced two separate storylines – the chaos and aether stories.
Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War completely shook things up, and I was loving the new direction, especially when it came to zombies gameplay – some of my all-time favorites. The maps that were released felt fresh and exciting, and I was eager to see where the zombies storyline was headed. But then, along came Call of Duty: Vanguard, and it felt like too much, too soon. To quote The Godfather, "Look how they've massacred my boy!" Going from Cold War, one of my favorites, to Vanguard, one of my least favorites, felt like a quick turnaround. Later, when playing some random zombie events in Modern Warfare, I got my hopes up for a round-based zombies mode in a Modern Warfare game. Unfortunately, I was in for a surprise – we were handed DMZombies instead.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's zombies mode is basically DMZ with zombies thrown into the mix. In case you're not familiar, DMZ was a large map extraction game mode from MW2. Personally, I was never a big fan of it; the Call of Duty mechanics didn't quite gel with an extraction shooter, in my opinion. The same holds true for the zombies version. Despite successfully completing a few extractions, I found myself getting bored quickly. Fully geared up and comfortably navigating the third-tier area, it became easy pickings for me. It feels like they added zombies as an afterthought, almost as if they took the DMZ mode and slapped the zombie code onto the regular enemies. Zombies just doesn't have the same impact anymore. Here's to hoping the next Call of Duty brings back the Cold War format.
