Back in November I gave my initial thoughts on the Zombies mode that came along with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. Now that some time has passed I thought I may as well stick up a review, based on the way I have experienced the mode. As an aside, I am not playing this in the way it was meant to be played, and that is not entirely my fault.
Zombies for this years Call of Duty takes place in an open world setting. It actually uses the new Warzone map rather than be its own unique location. The setting works fine for a zombie outbreak mode, with me getting Dead Island vibes. This is designed for up to three players, and while you can play solo (something I always do), you are going to have a much tougher time if you are planning on doing the many story missions. The general format is that you are air dropped onto the side of the map, the map being made up of three concentric zones, each one having tougher enemies than the one before. In theory, you are meant to search buildings for supplies, which if you extract are carried with you, making subsequent playthroughs easier. There is an hour time limit, with you needing to extract before the poison gas area closes in.
All of this sounds perfectly fine until you bring into account the killer for this mode, an issue which has seen me give up completely on ever trying to play Zombies as intended. Currently, at two months in, the mode is near unplayable, and that is down to server crashes. There is an honest one in three chance that the game will crash when playing it. That isn't a chance that the game will crash every one in three matches, but that each game you play there is a one in three chance you won't get to see the end of it. Should the game crash then you will be severely penalised. Not only will you loose any mission progress and loose all XP earned, but you will also have any items, weapons, upgrades and perks stolen off you permanently, setting you back to square one. Last month I played this, was doing great and then the game crashed, I lost everything. Holding back my anger, I decided to cool off and try the mode one last time before writing a review. Surprise surprise, my next go a few days back saw the game crashing before I had even gotten ten minutes into a match.
Call of Duty: Vanguard's Zombies mode was a disaster due to how tedious it was. I had thought that there was no way anything could be as bad as that. Unfortunately, this low bar has been beaten. When everything works, this new Zombies mode isn't bad at all, by no means classic round-based fun to be had here, but as somewhere just to chill out in and mindlessly kill zombies it had its benefits. My experience of playing it has been nothing short of shocking, I've lost count of the number of times I have been kicked out to menu, losing all progress through absolutely no fault of my own. There is no point trying to do the story mode due to the servers being so unreliable. Even just going in to grind for camouflage's for my weapons has seen me met with frustrating disconnects, leading to a feeling of walking on eggshells whenever I dip into this mode.
If it was not for the flaky servers then I would be much more happy with this. Gameplay wise it is a lot more fun than Vanguard's mode. It is impossible to recommend when it crashes so constantly. Two months after launch and Modern Warfare III Zombies still constantly crashing makes me think its never going to be fixed, and as such is sadly too unreliable to recommend.
SCORE:
UPDATE 20/01/2024: I chanced a go at the Zombies mode again last night and had so much fun. When the game doesn't crash it can become really immersive, even if I sound a bit sad having made up my own head canon for the game I had. In my head I was a tourist who had paid to be placed in a zombie infested zone to hunt them for sport. This was reflected in my game as the few times I was near death was when other players happened to be in the area to help me out. In my head these were stewards whose role was to stop me getting overwhelmed by the undead. I had a chilled half hour popping zombie heads, before a tense evac in which two heavily armoured super zombies were firing energy blasts at me. If the mode didn't crash so often I would have had more very fun experiences like I had last night, and this would have scored a whole lot higher. Likely a high seven or an eight out of ten.
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