Call of Duty: Warzone Review (for PC)

What a timeline we’re in, one in which an incredibly hot video game is free, published by Activision, and based on one of the most popular franchises. Yet here we are. Call of Duty: Warzone has entered the competitive battle of the battle royale, with a few tricks up its sleeve to shake up the formula. Warzone is not the first attempt in the series in its genre: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 included a battle royale mode in 2018. Warzone, however, is based on the restart of Modern Warfare 2019 and departs from the Black Ops’ focus on equipment, while retaining the gameplay and feel of Call of Duty. It’s an Editors’s Choice PC game.

Warzone features unique battle royale items, such as loading kits and respawn mini-games, that separate it from the competition and have a huge impact on the game. These additions are random, but the overall look is very neat . Warzone has enough meat to attract fans of traditional first-person shooters, regardless of their battle royale designation.

Heart of the shrinking circle

If you are not already familiar with battle royale style games, the objective is relatively simple: to be the last player standing on a massive card, but always shrinking, when you face or avoid more than a hundred others players. A circle gradually cuts off part of the map during the match, forcing you to move and risk hiring other players. There are many variations of this game formula: Apex: Legends presents heroes with unique abilities, while Fortnite adds environmental demolition and construction.

Warzone is a squad affair, but it also offers a solo battle royale mode for those who like to go solo. It pushes the envelope a little further by featuring 150 player lobbies, but the basic rules of play are similar to other battle royale titles: be the last man or the last team in the running. Warzone mixes the battle royale formula by being a Call of Duty challenge, with mission, upgrade and loading kits. These elements have a big impact on the way you play.

Enter the war zone

As mentioned, Warzone is built on the framework of Modern Warfare. Its contemporary weapons, sounds and animations combine with the formidable and incredibly detailed map of Warzone to make it a formidable title. Verdansk, the fictional place of the game, presents a sprawling and abandoned urban landscape full of meticulously designed and furnished interiors. The environments include a city center dense with buildings, suburban cities, mountainous outskirts and other places.

Warzone also has a fantastic sense of verticality. The fall damage is indulgent and your parachute can be deployed when you want, so you can and must jump structures when you want. Here and there you will find mirrored graphic elements, especially with buildings, but even these have a meaning in the environment in which you find them. The interiors are so detailed that they more than make up for the occasional reverse asset.

The game is well balanced, and there are no glaring issues to report, with the exception of a few minor bugs. Matchmaking works well, and leveling your weapons and your rank doesn’t sound like a chore. There are a lot of things that could have gone wrong with the launch of Warzone, especially for a major launch in free-to-play, multiplatform and cross-play, but so far my game problems are relatively minor. Maybe all of this sounds like excessive praise, but given the number of recent AAA games that have been pushed out of the door just for planting and burning, it’s evident that the developers Infinity Ward and Raven Software have made efforts additional to tweak this version.

Higher level

Upgrading your primary and secondary weapon via XP is more a means to an end, not a nuanced facet of Warzone. Improving your character’s XP level unlocks new weapons, as well as camo decals, attachments, and other weapon upgrades. Equipment that expands your range and places your rivals in sights, such as the sniper rifle heat scope, is also acquired by upgrade.

Earning XP is not as much of a chore as I expected, as many actions during a game count towards your XP total. In addition to killing enemies, you also gain XP by filling up the contacts. An alternative game mode, called Plunder (more on that in a bit), also gives you plenty of XP, which makes it a great way to rank between battle royale games.

Contracts are random goals that appear on your card, which you undertake with your team. You can only accept one contract at a time, but they are essential for earning the funds necessary for purchases at the shopping stations in Verdansk, as well as for rewarding yourself with precious XP. Contracts alone radically change the way you approach the game. While many battle royale games encourage a turtle-centered approach to victory, contracts encourage you to take risks and reveal yourself. Contracts range from recovery missions that entice you to visit a specific location, capture a point, or hunt down other players via bonuses. The focus on traveling rather than camping definitely shakes things up so you always do something during the game. This mechanism is easily one of the biggest improvements Warzone brings to the meta battle royale.

The Big Twists

So why do you need XP in a battle royale title, you ask? Well, in the traditional Call of Duty style, you can use XP to unlock weapons, camouflage, accessories, and other perks. The more you unlock, the more you can take advantage of Warzone’s second major turning point on the genre formula: access to a personalized kit during a match. Before a game, you create a load with your weapons and advantages of choice.

Besides XP, you accumulate money in the game while you play. Once you have raised enough money during a game, you can go to the nearest buying station to buy a loading deposit marker. It allows you to invoke a drop containing several predefined loads, as well as your personalized one. With this system, you eliminate a significant amount of randomness inherent in battle royale titles, since you no longer need to recover a valid firearm. If you earn enough money at the start, you can skip the rest of the game with your favorite gear and perks.

Reducing randomness is how Warzone stands out from other games in the genre. You even start with a pistol as soon as you jump, to relieve some of this panic at the start of the game when you run for cover in search of a weapon. The first circle that restricts the map is revealed to you before you even come across a map. Some recognition contracts also reveal subsequent circles. The removal of the luck factor that defines other Battle Royales games puts more emphasis on strategy, shooter and positioning. You won’t feel as stolen as you would say, Fortnite, because a player randomly found a legendary weapon in a living room and turned it against you at the start of the game. Everyone can access their own load if they earn enough money for it, which usually doesn’t take very long during a match.

The flip side, however, is that the drop loads make looting largely irrelevant once you get your kit. The randomness associated with loot research and preparation greatly contributes to the enjoyment of royal battles and gives you a different experience each time you play. Warzone’s loading system removes this element from the game. Therefore, there is no real incentive to proactively engage other teams unless you absolutely need to. Once you’ve grabbed your kit, you basically have everything you need to navigate to the end of the game, so there’s little reward in fighting other players unless you’re chasing contracts.

The benefits are unique passive abilities that enhance your innate skill set. Double Time, for example, increases the duration of the sprint and increases the squatting movement speed. Cold Blooded makes you undetectable by thermal glasses. Tracker allows you to see enemy footprints. There are dozens of these perks, each giving your character a notable advantage over players who don’t. Having access to your favorite weapons, as well as the benefits of your choice, makes Dropout Drop far too attractive to ignore. To re-inject some of the randomness into the game, perhaps the available benefits should come from a random pool each game, so you never know which ones you can access until the start of the game.

Prison release card

The last major gameplay element in Warzone is the unique respawn mechanism, called the Gulag. When you are defeated in combat, you are dragged into a prison alongside other defeated players, and you must fight one in a duel to death to be allowed to return to the map. The equipment is random here, so you have to be adaptable and use whatever is given to you to outdo the other player. It’s awkward and pretty insane, but it’s a smart way to integrate the respawn into the overall experience. However, the Gulag is only available at the start of a game. The prison is closed once a certain number of players have been eliminated, and the only way to get back on the map is to be bought out by teammates with hard earned play money. However, as long as your team has the funds to bring you back, you are never really left out.

Besides the basic battle royale modes, you can also play Plunder mode. This mode consists of raising money: you and your teammates rush to the Verdansk map to collect as much money as possible by tracking down other players, piercing random drops of money, completing contracts or by simply looting food boxes. There is no circle that collapses to annoy you and no gulag either: when you die, you simply reappear after a defined period of time. This mode is quite fun and is notably more relaxed than its battle royale counterpart. As a bonus, the lack of constraints means that you have more opportunities to accumulate XP, so it’s a great way to upgrade.

Kinks in the carpet

Fortunately, I did not experience many problems during my time playing Warzone. The game works well on my gaming desktop, which has an Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 graphics processor and an Intel i5 4690 processor. I got a constant 60 frames per second (ips) at 1080p, with most settings high or medium visuals. You can, of course, change individual settings, such as Shadow Maps, Particle Lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Anti-Aliasing and Motion Blur to get better performance out of the game, but I found Warzone to work pretty well from the jump. I didn’t need to change much.

Call of Duty: Warzone can be downloaded from Activision / Blizzard’s Battle.net site. At a minimum, you will need an Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300 processor, with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 or AMD Radeon HD 7950 GPU. For a more optimal experience, you will want an Intel Core i5-2500k processor or AMD Ryzen R5 1600X and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU. You must also create an Activision account, especially if you want to play with multiplatform friends on Xbox One or PS4.

Aside from the performances, I encountered a handful of weird and annoying issues during the matches. The sound of footsteps can be extremely inaccurate, resulting in panic situations where you hear someone nearby but cannot place exactly where. Likewise, shots can be heard terribly near you, when the real source is so far away that you don’t have to worry about it. I do not know if there is a parameter that I neglected to rectify this, but I could not resolve it. Regarding bugs, during a match, I found that I couldn’t fix my armor, but that got resolved when I died and reappeared. I do not know what caused the problem. But overall, my experience has been relatively smooth and extremely fun.

A fantastic time well

A funny distraction is what the doctor ordered in these difficult times, and who would have thought Activision would be up to the task of providing quality entertainment for free. Call of Duty: Warzone combines much of what you love about the CoD series, alongside the massive multiplayer frenzy found in the battle kingdoms, to create something distinct, yet comfortably familiar and addictive at the same time. Warzone is well worth checking out if you’re a fan of shooters or battle royale, or if you’re just looking for free, easy-to-enjoy fun with your friends online.

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