Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Is At Its Best When You Don’t Fire A Gun

December 2, 2024

Written by Jamie Galea

There’s several moments in 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 where you don’t fire a gun. Not in an optional way either, more in a “the game disables the shoot gun button” kind of way. This isn’t a concept that’s inherently new to Call of Duty specifically, but it highlights a much more interesting side to the game that is drowned out by the shooting and explosions.

It’s something that’s been on my mind playing through the campaign, and while I enjoyed the wide variety of missions, whilst being baffled by separating each mode into its own large game (the campaign is 80GB on its own!), I can’t stop thinking about the moments in the story where you just don’t fire a damned gun.

If you’ve genuinely unaware, the core idea of the Black Ops series, compared to Modern Warfare, is that BO is ostensibly meant to be a more spy and espionage focused subsection of Call of Duty. Instead of playing as generic military people, you’re playing as spies. There’s a bigger focus on trying to mess with the player and characters, which doesn’t always land, but neat when it does. While covert ops have always been a reoccurring theme in the Black Ops games, this game tries to be more ambitious with how it presents its story and world, and I really do respect the attempt.

The best example is between missions where you’re wandering around a former KGB Safehouse. It’s not an entirely new concept to the Black Ops series – 2020’s Black Ops Cold War had a very similar mechanic, but the concept is the same. You can walk around, chat to your team (complete with dialogue trees!), upgrade your safehouse with facilities to help you out in the campaign, and even solve a few puzzles. It presents a surprising amount of downtime that the series isn’t really known for. Sure it’s basically a glorified mission hub, but as a break from the action, I think it does a solid job. It’s also not entirely new for Black Ops to do things like these. Going back as far as the original Black Ops, you could leave your main menu, navigate a very tiny space and just go play the original Zork if you wanted to.

Yet there’s something about interacting within this space and how large and detailed it all is that’s kind of remarkable. There’s a joy in just hanging out with your team and finding out bits and pieces about them. Sure it’s not great, because lord knows you’re not coming to Black Ops 6 for particularly deep and meaningful character writing, but it’s a surprising amount of work that I wasn’t at all expecting. Even the puzzles do a neat job in fitting in with the concept of secrets and lies the series is known for.

I just wish there was a little more to do here. The puzzles are much smaller in scale than you’d think, and they’re also remarkably straightforward. For a series known for testing players with all sorts of weird Easter Eggs, you won’t really be taxed or challenged doing these puzzles. The reward you get for doing all of them is useful, but not at all essential. Yet it’s all really neat and way more involved for a mode that shouldn’t at all have this.

It just really surprises me that here is this extremely expensive video game that is all about big military and bigger explosions, and the game is more than happy to just take a moment and have you hang out with these characters. You never need to worry about shooting or dolphin diving or anything. It’s just a really interesting and neat addition that I really do enjoy.

Another great example of Black Ops excelling without guns is the early mission Most Wanted, which has previously been highlighted in the leadup to the games release. Effectively, the mission is divided up into thirds, but the first and most interesting being trying to infiltrate a secret facility on top of a building hosting a function for then Senator Bill Clinton. This opening section sees you taking on one of three tasks to obtain a facial scan for a senator to get into the facility. You can only ever do one per attempt, but all three see you genuinely engaging in some form of subterfuge. Sure it’s all very scripted and you can’t really fail it, but it’s a neat little diversion from where the mission ultimately goes.

In fact, that’s kind of the biggest downer of a lot of these levels – it’s that pretty much every level that starts off with you not firing a gun or killing someone ultimately ends with a gigantic thrilling setpiece where you’re firing all the guns. For a game that’s ostensibly about espionage and spies, every level ends in these massive encounters where you can’t get away with not firing a gun. It reminds you that regardless of what the game sees you doing, you are still playing Call of Duty, and Call of Duty is mostly known for one thing. It just seems counter intuitive?

To be clear, I’m in no way advocating for a Call of Duty game where you don’t fire a gun at all. I know that’s impossible to ask for given just what this series is about. I might as well be asking for the series to not feature any Americans whatsoever, something that sure as hell isn’t going to happen. I’m also very well aware of the legendary Doom (1993) review from Edge Magazine that posited a version of the game where you spoke to the monsters instead of shooting them.

But for several brief and shining moments through its campaign, Black Ops 6 presents something slightly different: a game with the funds and resources of Call of Duty, but one where sometimes it doesn’t play like Call of Duty. It’s undeniably novel and refreshing, in a campaign that feels more refreshing than in years past, and I’d love to see a future Black Ops go further in this direction.

Will it happen? Probably never. Yet for right now, we have Black Ops 6 to show us that such a game is a possibility, and I think that’s kinda rad.

I’ve been playing Black Ops 6 thanks to a code from the publisher. If you want to follow me on social media, I’m mostly on Bluesky these days!