In typical Call of Duty multiplayer, dying is meaningless. Respawn timers are as fast as one can hit F on the keyboard and scoreboards hide death counters until the end of matches. The game is so fast paced that there’s no time for long term planning. It’s not like most folks have a plan anyway. During free weekends of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), I accrued a 57% win rate despite only killing 0.93 enemies per life. My only strategy was to haphazardly throw my body onto objectives. As a battle royale game, Call of Duty: Warzone is different from its predecessors. But as a Call of Duty game, it still retains some of its trademark game flow (and assorted bullshit).

Like many games in the battle royale genre, Warzone has a big map, looting, and high penalties for dying (i.e. all equipment is lost when killed). These attributes incentivize players to slowplay. “Slowplay” is not part of the Call of Duty ethos, something Infinity Ward, the studio that has shepherded the series through the past 17 years, probably knows well. But they make it work.

What makes Warzone most distinct from its genre peers are contracts, custom loadouts, and respawn opportunities. Contracts encourage teams to move around the city of Verdansk and complete objectives for money and rewards. For example, bounty contracts tasks teams to track down and assassinate other players.

Money earned upon completion of contracts can be used to buy equipment such as gas masks, air strikes, and loadout drops. That last item is the most interesting Warzone mechanic in my opinion. Upon usage, players can choose any loadout (i.e. weapons, attachments, equipment, and perks) they’ve put together before queueing into the match. Some folks don’t prefer the de-emphasis on looting, but I quite like that players can play how they want. For example, I enjoy sniping so my go-to loadout has an HDR as my primary weapon. I also use Overkill as my red perk so that I can use a RAM-7 as a secondary for close-to-mid range fights. My friend uses a heartbeat sensor for his tactical equipment, but I take stun grenades so I can play aggressively when I feel like I need to.

Money can also be used to bring back fallen teammates. The worst thing about playing on a team in a battle royale game is dying and having to wait for the rest of the group to get killed or win outright. In either case, the fallen will have to wait upwards of 30 minutes. Other opportunities to come back are winning an at-most-once-per-game 1v1 in the gulag or a random once-per-50ish-games prison break. This way, Call of Duty: Warzone mitigates some of the pain of dying while preserving some of its consequences.

Infinity Ward concocted a match flow that is a healthy marriage between battle royale games and CoD games; optimal Warzone playstyle is between slowplay and fastplay. But as with even the happiest marriages, there are some problems. Sometimes, there is an overcentralization in the weapon meta such as with the Bruen in season 4. Vehicles can be lethal even when rolling at 1 km/hr. Car chases, which are usually chaotic and exciting in other video games, are much more tame since car ramming is ineffective. There are technical problems like weapon model glitches (fixed as of writing) and aim/wall hackers (not fixed as of writing).

Still, there aren’t many feelings more rewarding than winning a Warzone match and then seeing the names of 140+ losers roll across the screen.

4/7

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