Another year another instalment of Activision’s long-running Call of Duty first-person shooter series. This year it’s a continuation of the rebooted Black Ops storyline.

Just as they did with the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot, 2020’s Black Ops: Cold War drew a line underneath the previous instalments. Whilst the game retained some of the characters and the feel of the earlier games, it was a new beginning.

This new game drops the subtitle and returns to the regular series numbering, whilst continuing the story from Black Ops: Cold War. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s campaign, jumps from the Cold War era of the 1980s to the 1990s and Operation Desert Storm.

The story is on-brand for a Black Ops game. Instead of a straight shooter (literally and figuratively), Black Ops campaigns feature convoluted plots heavy on conspiracy and subterfuge. There’s the intrigue, the dark underbelly of covert ops works in a grey area, international espionage and double-crossing. It’s more of a spy setting than playing as a black op commando unit but the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games have kinda co-opted that.

The campaign game starts in 1991 with the player taking on the role of William “Case” Calderon, a CIA operative, charged with extracting a high-ranking Iraqi politician. After engaging Iraqi forces and apprehending the target, the CIA team comes under fire from a paramilitary group called Pantheon. Defeating the attackers and reaching safety, a Humvee pulls up. Out gets the unpredictable rogue CIA operative, Russel Adler, from Black Ops: Cold War who promptly dispatches the captured Iraqi politician, before being apprehended. Adler has a message for his former teammate, Frank Woods.

With the CIA team suspended, Frank Woods, Troy Marshall and Case follow up on Adler’s message leading them to a safe house in Bulgaria. The safe house is a hub area where players are free to roam around and explore.

Whilst for the most part Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a linear affair. The safe house hub area is where you can train, look for clues and converse with other characters as if you are playing a role-playing game.

At the safe house, we learn what Adler’s been up to. And that a team needs to be assembled just like in a heist movie. Over the next few missions, using Adler’s notes in the safe house, tech operative Felix Neuman and assassin Sevati Duma are recruited to join the team. On breaking out Adler, the plot unfolds, revealing that Pantheon is trying to sell a US-development chemical weapon, the Cradle, to Saddam Hussein.

For me, the appeal of the Call of Duty campaigns is the linear first-person shooter gameplay with its set pieces coming across like a no-hold-barred action movie. In recent years Activision has, via its team of rotating developers, tried to spice things up, altering the recipe with what I consider to be so-so results. Whilst I can dig the desire for non-linear open-world gameplay, that’s what we’ve got Ghost Recon for (now) and to a lighter extent, EA’s Battlefield games.

One of the missions is a huge open-world area where you get to kill Iraqis during the dubious Desert Storm 1 (there’s even a not-so-subtle reference to WMDs- the only WMDs in the game being the fictional ones, just like in real life). It’s bold mission choice, a mini open-world game within a game. Whilst very well done, it exposes the joins between the various teams that worked on the game.

Whilst not exactly my cup of tea, the developers have also managed to weave the popular Call of Duty zombie multiplayer gameplay into the campaign story. It’s cleverly done, but it’s another sequence that sticks out a bit.

There are, of course, some breathtaking moments, such as when you first call in for air support during the Iraq level. Fans of Modern Warfare’s Danger Close level will likely enjoy guiding bombs to their targets. Then there’s calling in the British SAS attack helicopter with the player manning the guns.

A bit of fan service has players using an RC-XD remote-controlled car with a C4 payload. This is identical to the one included in the original Black Ops Prestige Edition, even down to the controller.

The stealthier missions are a lot of fun, with only some sequences forcing players to remain undetected. This means that whilst stealth is the best way, you can still go in guns blazing.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign ticks all the boxes and tries to do something new. It’s not the best campaign game in the series, but it does have a few levels that I’ll likely return to again and again, and a few I’d not. The disparity between the missions fits the more abstract clandestine storyline but is likely more to do with multiple development teams working in isolation and their work being stitched together. It’s a good effort, but not up to the standard of its predecessor.