Black Ops 6 Beta - My Thoughts

This weekend I spent some time playing the beta for Black Ops 6, which is due to release on October 25th 2024. I've been a fan of the Black Ops line of Call of Duty games ever since the first one released back in 2010, in fact, one of my earliest and favourite memories is playing Black Ops 1, when the North East of England was going through the worst snow fall it had had since 1993! It was super cosy!

I even somewhat enjoyed Black Ops 4, despite there being absolutely no campaign, but I got to play Warzone and Zombies with some insanely good players whilst we were mopping up achievements!

So onto Black Ops 6, the beta comprises of just Multiplayer, although you can see from the start menu that the game does have a Campaign (yay) and Zombies! After the Zombies mode introduced in MWIII last year, I'm so happy we're back to round based Zombies.

At the time of writing this, I've probably played it for 3-4 hours and I'm level 13, which is nothing compared to some of the people I've seen 🤣 but the daily missions helped out a lot. I want to explore the beta a bit more and get more into some of the different loadouts. I've played with a few different guns but my most common loadout was:

• XM4
• GS45
• Knife
• Concussion Grenade
• Frag Grenade
• Assault Pack

This seems to be the loadout I get on well with but I want to have a play around with some of the other weapon classes and perks. I played a lot of shotgun games in MWIII so I'll definitely be creating a shotgun glass, it looks like there's only one shotgun in the beta, the Marine SP, so I'll see how it gets on!

I played a variety of maps and enjoyed them all! I'm not sure if I played them all, but for a beta, there was a good range of maps which offered close quarter combat to long range shooting. Weirdly, there was a couple of maps which actually made me feel a bit travel sick, not sure if it's the panning of the camera but I may need to investigate that a bit further but I'd rather not play for too long if I'm going to feel sick each time! I took some screenshots in my games of some of my favourite maps:

Hopefully those pictures do some of the maps justice, I'd say my favourite one was a fairly small map set in a jungle with a train and some buildings, the map is called Derelict and I seemed to do really well on that each time I played it!

I also really enjoyed playing on Skud, which is set in an abandoned military outpost and also Rewind, which is set in a strip mall.

Gameplay was classic Call of Duty, run and gun. That said, I did find the "move in any direction" mechanic handy. It allows you to sprint, dive and slide in any direction, which is new to the series, which seems odd now that I think about it!

I'm not usually that big into congratulating games on their soundtracks, but this soundtrack is so awesome! It's got an industrial metal vibe going on and I can absolutely see myself stick it on whilst I'm working!

The beta comes with a handful of modes split across a couple of playlists although I stuck with "Core Moshpit" which came with a handful of modes such as TDM, Domination, Hardpoint and my favourite Kill Order, where a High Value Target is randomly selected on each team and you have to kill the opposing teams HVT.

The beta actually ends tomorrow (at time of writing) so I need to be quick to explore everything I haven't yet explored, I'll definitely be playing it on release day as it will be getting added to Xbox Game Pass on day 1!