After dabbling with a battle royale mode in last year’s Call Of Duty, Activision have finally caught up with 2017’s hottest trend and today launched a free-to-play new battle royale. Call Of Duty: Warzone is its name, and shooting lots of people until one team stand triumphant is its game. I’d thought myself done with trying new battle royale games but the idea of one with the slickness of CoD is tempting me. Tired as it may be after years of annual sequels, CoD at its core does a whole lot right so I’m curious about this.
CoD: Warzone boasts 150-player battles royale with three-player squads, going down on a map partially built from other CoD maps. Drop, loot, shoot, and pootle around in vehicles until everyone else is dead. It does have some options for revives, including buying squadmates back and something called ‘the Gulag.’ Downed players get thrown in there and pitted against another corpse in a 1v1 fight to the redeath, with the grand prize of a second life. That’s novel, that.
Warzone has a second mode too, named Plunder. With unlimited respawns and custom loadouts, players scrap to gather the most cash by raiding key drops and locations, killing people, and such.
Call Of Duty: Warzone is free-to-play, available through Battle.net. It’s a hefty 85GB so, ah, time to uninstall some other battle royale game? If you do have CoD: Modern Warfare installed, Warzone will download as an update and be available through there.
Activision do sell a battle pass with 100 tiers of bits and pieces to unlock. It seems they’ve copied Fortnite’s idea of putting enough digicash rewards into the pass to pay for a future battle pass if you play enough, which is nice. Persistent progression is shared between Warzone and Modern Warfare too.