News - Call Of Duty: Warzone 2 Review
Foreign; dog, eat dog nature Battle Royale games don't tend to be about making friends with the people you meet, but with their big 2.0 revamp. Call of Duty Warzone has made some admirable efforts towards inspiring us to work together, communicate, and even socialize as we fight to be the last one standing.
Some of its other new ideas don't pay off quite as well, such as the relatively bland new map and its ill-advised backpack system, but even if you put all of that aside, the introduction of an excellent new PVP mode is more than reason enough to round up a squad and drop back into Warzone for a few matches.
After all, the real Victory Screen might just be the friends we made along the way. Foreign, the first thought provoking your social idea is that you can actually recruit enemy players to your team in squad-based lobbies if you end up losing a teammate at any point. This is a nice workaround to give weekend teams or solo stragglers a fighting chance, but most people still intend to open fire on site, so I've yet to successfully convince anyone to join my team.
Our new Battleground Almazura is an interesting map to explore thanks to its many cities full of buildings to loot from and 18 points of interest, but the vast stretches of terrain between them aren't quite as varied, and I felt like I was spending a lot of time just looking at a lot of sandy and beige backgrounds.
Also, the fact that buildings and houses all look so similar makes it less pretty to look at than a lot of other current Battle Royale arenas. To its credit, Almazura is the biggest map Warzone has seen today, allowing it to comfortably accommodate 150 players, and it has some cool new water passageways.
I really like that it opens up boats as travel options and extra escape routes, especially since the waterways take different turns through the map than roads. Mobility is important because of how the circle works. The original war zone had a traditional single-safe circle, but in 2.0, there's a chance for that one circle to split into three that are spread across the map, then collapse back into one for the final minutes of a match, forcing the survivors among all three isolated groups to finally face off in one area.
That's a fresh and unique approach to the Battle Royale format, and I've enjoyed the twist of having to constantly watch the map and pivot my movement in less predictable ways. Warzone 2.0 also brought a new take on the gulag mode, which is where you go when you're knocked out of the main match. Now you may get paired up with a random enemy in a temporary truce and work together to get a second chance at life.
It's clever, but it did get a little bit frustrating since communicating with a random isn't exactly consistent sometimes, leaving me feeling like I was really fighting a 1v2. Also, if he gets into the gulag and finds there's only one other player there, you often can't get into a full match. While this new system is interesting, I still prefer the old 1v1 Gulag.
However, one fun change in the Gulag is that you don't necessarily have to beat all the enemy players to get back into the match; instead, everyone can band together to take down one AI-controlled player. Juggernog Jailer, if you're successful, everybody who is still alive can redeploy. I also had a match where the trailer actually ended up taking out the Last Enemy player for me, so the new Gulag certainly has some really fun moments when it works properly.
There's no one left. One of the best new additions in Warzone 2.0 is proximity chat, which allows anybody who gets close enough to listen in on your voice communications. I could, for example, hear a team in the building next door discussing how they could hear me and my teammate looting and giving away their location when they might otherwise have gotten the drop on me.
I've had some fun conversations with enemies too, just talking to them casually and butting into conversations or throwing playful banter around as we try to hunt each other down. This is one of those things I didn't think a battle royale needed, but I have to admit it's made the whole experience so much better.
Okay, you know, we don't have to kill each other. I just want my friend, and we can leave. Let us get our guy too. Todd, calm the shitdown; yeah, Todd. Of course, this doesn't always mean those interactions will be great. I've gotten some less than tasteful remarks and overheard certain conversations I'd rather not have, but most of the time it's a fun option to turn on if you're interested in being social or hearing where an enemy is nearby to get a slight advantage.
I'm less enthusiastic about Warzone 2.0's new bootable backpacks, which allow you to carry more items without sacrificing ammo and armor plate space. I found myself frustrated when I was running out of ammo or armor plates because I couldn't carry enough with the standard backpack and wasn't able to find an ammunition replenishment crate or armor supply crate to carry as backups previously.
Ammo and inventory management weren't really an issue since you could just collect the maximum amount of each type and auto-fill your tactical and lethal equipment as well. Having limited slots on a backpack is a bit annoying, especially now that in order to loot specific items, you have to click on what you're looting, say a box or an enemy's dropped backpack, and individually click on what you want to take or swap.
This slows down the looting process and can mean an aggravating death if you're caught in the act. One nice thing about this change is that when you hit an enemy, you get an indication as to what armor they're wearing. Blue hit markers reveal an enemy has the two-plate fest, and purple indicates a three-plate back.
On the plus side, a revised ping system has finally caught War Zone up to other battle royales, which was long overdue. It gives you a whole wheel's worth of options for how you'd like to point out enemies, even adding a new live ping where the marker moves with a marked enemy for a short amount of time, revealing their movement in real time.
The biggest disappointment of Warzone 2.0's launch event and season one was that in its 10-battle pass, there's a free track and a paid track for unlocks, but both use a new system that I'm not really sold on. I'd be happy with the straight battle pass line where I can see what I'm unlocking next without giving me five different menus to click through to get what I want, but Warzone has gone uncopied.
Fortnite's new page system has converted to an overly complicated system of sectors and battle maps, and the first batch of rewards is pretty underwhelming and complicated for no reason. The overall user interface looks at how the gunsmith unlocks work; you have to progress through a new gun family tree called platforms.
