Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II For PS5

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II For PS5

By their very competitive, dog-eat-dog nature, battle royale games don’t tend to be about making friends with the people you meet. But with its big 2.0 revamp, Call of Duty: Warzone has made some admirable efforts toward inspiring us to work together, communicate, and socialize even as we fight to be the last ones standing. Some of its other new ideas don’t pay off quite as well, such as the relatively bland new map and its ill-advised backpack system. But even if you put all of that aside, the introduction of an excellent new PvPvE mode is more than reason enough to round up a squad and drop back into Warzone for a few matches. After all, the real victory screen might just be the friends we made along the way.

The first thought-provoking new social idea is that you can actually recruit enemy players to your team in squad-based lobbies if you end up losing a teammate at any point. This is a clever way to give weakened teams or solo stragglers a fighting chance, and to keep more people invested in a match for longer. It’s also just fun to make friends in a battle royale, though it’s an idea that might work better on paper than in practice. Most people still tend to open fire on sight, so I’ve yet to successfully convince anyone to join my team, but the fact that I can at least try is a fun addition on its own.

The Unhinged Trios mode even lets you invite up to six people to be on your team mid-match, living up to its name in the chaos that creates. Well, that it could create – a lot of people don’t really seem to want to play with six people on a team and would often just not work together. I guess we all took it to heart when our parents told us you can’t trust anyone on the internet, and you mostly see people playing Unhinged Trios as normal trios. I still liked it just fine in that context too, but the actual gameplay mechanic of it being a squad building simulator was a little disappointing when no one really wanted to participate in that aspect.

New Stomping Grounds

Our new battleground, Al Mazrah, is an interesting map to explore thanks to its many cities full of buildings to loot from and 18 points of interest, from a literal fortress to airports and even a mining city. That said, the vast stretches of terrain between those exciting locales aren’t quite as varied, and I felt like I was really just looking at a lot of sandy and beige backgrounds as I ran through the map. I understand Al Mazrah is a take on a realistic region with cities and industrial areas sprinkled throughout, but the fact that buildings and houses in those cities all look so similar and the same color palette is applied through the entire map makes it less pretty to look at than a lot of other current battle royale arenas. Apex Legends and Fortnite, by contrast, have extremely varied terrain (and even weather), particularly with Apex’s World’s Edge that contains snow, lava, and urban landscapes splayed out in one single ma

The areas between each cluster of buildings are pretty open and really demonstrate how big the map is when you’re on foot and trying to run from one location to another. This could’ve been a problem, but with the way Warzone 2.0 has reworked the ever-tightening circle it’s not too big of a deal. The original Warzone had a traditional single safe circle; in 2.0, there’s a chance for that one circle to split into three that are spread across the map, forcing you to scramble to the closest one to survive. The three circles will then collapse back into one for the final minutes of a match, forcing the survivors among all three isolated groups to finally face off in one area. This is a fresh and unique approach to the battle royale format, and I’ve enjoyed the twist of having to constantly watch the map and pivot my movement in less predictable ways. Even better is when my team and I find good buildings to hunker down in and try and pick off stragglers who weren’t paying attention to the splits.