I have recently played the Black Ops 4 beta on PC and i am pleasantly surprised with it especially coming from someone who has absolutely hated multiplayer with COD games in the past few years and i am excited for the release of the game. I will split this review into a few different sections regarding my experience with the game.
Gameplay
Once again Call of Duty is keeping boots on the ground for this game but also keeping the fast-paced frenetic gameplay of Blacks Ops 3’s Overwatch style of gameplay with the individual specialists and their abilities. It still keeps that “Call of Duty feel” and people will easily pick this game up despite the changes from previous games.
The major change that people will noticed in this game is the change of the health system which first prevents health regeneration and allows manual regen with a Stim pack. The best change for me is the change from the base 100 health to 150 which slows the time to kill down allowing for gunfights to be more skills based rather than a shoot first kill first gameplay.
This makes someone who played older Call of Duty games happy as it doesn’t seem to be a hail of bullets where you get picked off instantly and rather a more skill-based game where you have to be consistent in order pull off multiple kills.
Performance/Optimisation
For comparison’s sake i am currently running a PC with an Intel i7-6700K @ 4.00 GHz, 16GB Corsair DDR4 2133MHz RAM and Nvidia GTX 1080. With this type of PC, you would expect a game to run great anyway however the game seemed to run almost perfectly with only a few crashes which is common with most Beta’s.
The game contains the same as expected settings you would get with a PC game allowing to edit almost everything to pick and choose what you feel is necessary. My game ran smoothly at 144 fps on ultra-settings whilst also maintaining a good GPU Temperature. Overall i am impressed with the performance and I’m sure that any crashes that i have been experiencing will be resolved as Treyarch have a very good track record with their PC versions of their games.
Concerns
The few concerns I have aren’t really regarding gameplay as once again Treyarch are very good at balance in their games and any glaring issues with certain guns/specialists have actually been resolved within the one week between the closed and open beta. My issues are regarding the future monetisation of the game which unfortunately seems to inevitable and I hope the way they go about it doesn’t cause the same “Pay to win” where someone with have an entirely different gun you don’t own and may be better in almost every way.
I will reserve judgement for the game until release as we still have the Battle Royale mode in “Blackout” and of course zombies. Finally, I am looking forward to a COD release for the first time in years.
