
Look Back: What We Said About Black Ops 4's Zombiesīlack Ops 4’s Zombies is the showcase of a confident team that has iterated and improved the formula they created. That’s something to keep in mind because if you die here – or anywhere else – before making it out, you’ll get no bonuses. However, once you do decide to cash in your chips while you’re ahead and call it in, while you wait for the chopper to arrive the intensity is cranked up to 11 and the horde gets larger and more chaotic than ever in the final moments before your attempted escape. If you skip it at wave 10 and fight on to earn more rewards, you get another chance for a chopper every five waves after that. Once you hit wave 10 in the Endless mode, you have the option to call in an Exfil chopper to rescue the team. There’s a new Exfiltration mechanic now, too, and it thickly layers on the risk/reward tension.

Classic Zombies features like the Power-Ups are of course back there’s nothing quite like getting downed and desperately crawling onto and triggering a Nuke that wipes out the entire wave just as your team is about to be killed off. “Mystery Boxes stashed around the levels add more spice as well, since you never really know which gun they might spit out. I also felt liberated by the fact that there’s no limit on how many mid-game perks you can have, so unlike in previous Zombies modes you never need to second-guess whether it’s worth grabbing one or not. Those are persistent upgrades, but within each match there’s also weapon rarity to keep an eye on: as you progress deeper and purchase more weapons, a higher rarity level denotes better attachments and damage, which gives you motivation to check every gun you come across to see if it’s better than what you have instead of basically forgetting about the loot system after a certain point.

Perhaps most notably are all of the Skills: Field Upgrades are special attacks you charge up over time, like the Frost Blast that slows zombies and Weapon Classes let you specialize and upgrade your loadout with new abilities, such as transforming the rifle butt melee hit with R3 into a knife slash for more damage, which very helpfully conserves ammo. The classic Zombies experience gets a handful of other minor new features as well.
