Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, review – An impressive shooter with some troublesome politics

Activision’s latest Call of Duty instalment focuses on US-Soviet tensions during the Cold War

For all its military-issue bells and whistles, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War feels ill-equipped for these modern times of ours. A sequel to a decade-old first-person shooter (the original Black Ops) and the 17th entry in the Call of Duty franchise, Cold War manages to dance on the very cutting edge of video game design, while its political sensibilities seem like they belong way back in the Eighties, in the mucky Reaganite years in which the game is mostly set.

Throughout Cold War’s single-player campaign mode, you play as an enigmatic secret operative in the 1980s known as “Bell”. Cold War tips its head towards the language of progressivism: you can choose Bell’s real name, skin tone and backstory, along with whether they are male, female or non-binary. Though of course, in a first-person shooter like this, you’re not really anything more than a pair of hands and a gun, anyway.  

As Bell, you embark on a string of dangerous action set pieces worthy of Michael Bay, set in stunningly well-recreated international locations. The gunplay here is first-rate – between the graphics, foley and character animations, blasting someone in the head at close range feels hugely satisfying, likewise picking some Soviet malefactor off with a long-range headshot. In Cold War’s very well-oiled multiplayer mode, this makes for an experience par excellence. Divorced of any real greater context (barring the sort of broad military fetishism that pervades the genre as a whole), CoD’s gunplay is pretty much all you could want from a shooter like this – snappy, polished, addictive.  

However, in the game’s main campaign, there is no separating context from content. One of the story’s first scenes features a strange, reverent cameo from a digitally reconstructed Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the whole game seems to revel in the troublesome foreign policies of Reagan’s US, and weaves conspiracy into history with a sinister assuredness.  

There is an argument to be made that the game’s politics are mostly skin-deep, that Cold War is simply an affectionate homage to Reagan-era action movies – gung-ho anti-Russki shoot-em-ups like John Milius’s Red Dawn. Indeed, Cold War is not explicitly pro-war per se, rather an ostensibly neutral – perhaps even quietly condemnatory – depiction of it. But when war is being sold as mass interactive entertainment, it’s hard not to construe depiction as endorsement. What are you supposed to feel while playing Black Ops Cold War? A flashback mission to the Vietnam war sees you spraying villages with bullets from the side of an attack helicopter. Another sees you throw an unarmed Iranian suspect from the roof of a tall building. If this is meant to be horror, it sure feels queasily like sport.