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I didn’t expect to say either of these things to you when 2024 began: the new Call of Duty single-player campaign is a blast. And you can play it for $1.
A week before the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Microsoft removed the ability to try 1-month of Game Pass for $1. However, the option has returned with a tweak: $1 now buys you 14 days and appears to be exclusive to PC. On console, you can get a month for $9.99, which remains comparably reasonable for a new Call of Duty campaign. Which means, you can now play the entirety of the Black Ops 6 campaign this weekend for pocket change. And trust me: you should.
I’m not a Call of Duty zealot. Despite an early obsession, beginning with Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360, my fandom disintegrated around Black Ops 2 in 2012. And though I’ve played nearly every campaign, I haven’t enjoyed that time since Infinite Warfare. That was eight years ago.
So when I say Black Ops 6 campaign is a treat, I am doing so with the context of the full franchise. Good and bad. I wouldn’t say this campaign’s a return to form. Instead, its creators cleverly reimagine other great gaming franchises through the lens of COD. Each mission riffs on a sub-genre of first-person shooters, from an open-world map à la Far Cry to a science laboratory that echoes the works of Arkane Studios and the late Irrational Games.
Holding together the disparate stages? An abandoned mansion hub, where characters chat about their bizarro alternate Cold War history while the player is free to solve little puzzles and unlock perks and buffs to carry into the next mission. Taken holistically, the Black Ops 6 campaign is like a Mission: Impossible movie, but instead of setpieces set in iconic international locales, they’re dropped into a syllabus for FPS 101.