News - Call Of Duty Warzone 2 - Season 1. Warzone Review
Welcome back, everybody. I'm Nick 930, and today I want to share with you my thoughts on the massively popular free-to-play Battle Royale experience of Call of Duty: War Zone, more specifically the newest incarnation of the mode featured alongside the release of this year's Modern Warfare 3. Now, in case you somehow haven't had a chance to try this out for yourself yet.
War Zone is a large-scale first-person shooter experience that pits small groups of players against one another in a bid to be the last team standing. Like most other Battle Royale games, the match starts with players all bailing out of a plane and parachuting down onto a large map as they search for loot and attempt to stay within a constantly shrinking play space.
However, what sets this particular mode apart from those that came before it is the addition of player loadouts, which could be acquired in various ways and used to gain a massive upper hand over players stuck using the default weapons. They are a major part of the War Zone experience as players are constantly searching for the best build configurations to stay competitive, impacting not only War Zone but other modes like the base 6v6 multiplayer experience as well as any Battle Royale.
It's an exhilarating experience with moments of heightened tension around every corner, and while my wins in the mode were few and far between, the time I've had with this latest version of War Zone has been a major improvement over the version of the mode on offer last year. That being said, there are still some glaring concerns that I'd like to talk about today that I feel keep this latest version of the mode from reaching the same heights as its original incarnation in 2020.
But before we get to all that, I want to first thank Nvidia for sponsoring this article. To capture all this footage today. I made extensive use of Nvidia's powerful Nvidia RTX 490 graphics card and was able to achieve buttery smooth gameplay performance even in the most graphically intense circumstances.
Warzone is extremely competitive, so you're going to need every frame you can get. If you're fortunate enough to get your hands on a 40-series card this holiday season, be sure to access the game's graphics settings and turn on DLS, 3, or deep learning super sampling to improve your base performance.
If the image isn't as sharp as you'd like, you can adjust the slider in the menu and even tweak the level of supersampling to suit your needs. For users still running a 20 or 30 series Nvidia GPU, you can still make use of Nvidia DLSS 2.0 for a solid boost to performance as well. Users may also opt to use Nvidia, DLAA, or deep learning anti-aliasing.
An AI-based anti-aliasing solution that uses a native resolution image to boost the image quality, giving you the best possible presentation. Users with 40 series cards can go even further and enable frame generation for a huge boost to the average frame rate, which, as the name suggests, creates new frames between the actual rendered frames to achieve FPS numbers not otherwise possible.
Coupling frame generation with Nvidia reflex low latency technology ensures that your actual gameplay experience will remain as competitive as possible, which in War Zone is a must. So first things first, let's talk about War Zone's biggest new addition, the brand new map, Ukan, Rikan. At first glance, it may look a lot like War Zone's original fan favorite map, Verdan.
With a similar color palette, core layout, and environmental features. Though it's a lot more chaotic than anything I've seen from this mode in the past, as the majority of the map is centered around T door-to-door urban combat, the entire south side of the map is built around an area called Zaran City with lots of towering skyscrapers, storefronts, and apartment complexes.
North of the main river, the map offers a bit more of an industrial combat zone, including a large SE port, a power point plant, a cargo storage facility, and a large resort under heavy construction. These areas offer a lot of variable cover for players to weave in and out of, making them ideal for close-quarters combat.
Towards the center of the map, there's one of my favorite locations, the Oldtown area, complete with a castle fortification at the edge of the river with lots of secret passages in and around it, and finally, on the far east side of the map, players can enjoy some more traditional Verdansk-esque combat locations like the North Military base, the farms, and a massive manor estate in the southeast.
Hidden among all these areas are a number of direct references to classic Call of Duty multiplayer maps, including the countdown from Call of Duty 4 seat town from Modern Warfare 3 subbase and flla and even Harbor from Modern Warfare. Overall, Ukhan offers an impossibly dense arena for combat, giving a huge advantage to players on the run.
Personally. I think the map may offer itself to be too chaotic an experience, and with all the kill streaks, meta weapons, and bizarre new gadgets flying back and forth, newcomers will no doubt feel overwhelmed immediately upon dropping in the first few times, which brings us to our next topic, the core gameplay changes.
This latest version of War Zone basically combines the favorite additions of both the original war zone and last year's war zone. 2.0, features like slide canceling, for example, have made a comeback, giving players more agency over their movements in tight combat scenarios. One-shot snipers also return mainly the cat AMR, meaning players can down a player instantly if they land a head shot, though there's so much cover around the map that I personally found this tactic to not be nearly as effective as it was in the past, and I often ran with just a full auto AR or LMG instead.
Other features, like swimming underwater and the redeployment of drones, all return and are crucial. Tools for getting the jump on players to add to This year's version of War Zone also sees things like horizontal zip lines added throughout the map, which can be used to quickly cross between vertical Vantage points without having to use a parachute.
The game has also been reimagined, this time reverting back to a standard 1v1 scenario and introducing a new zipline escape option in the center rather than the old Capture the Flag objective used before. But easily the biggest change made to this version of War Zone is the massively reduced match timer.
Raven has considerably reduced the downtime in this mode, ensuring moment-to-moment combat really wears you down. The map itself is significantly smaller than last year's Al Mazra, and for the reasons mentioned before, this can lead to frequent firefights with enemies, whether you're ready for it or not.
