Posted by Last week I said that I would write about Destiny 2: Forsaken again, but I need to postpone that for a week because it completely slipped my mind that the Blackout beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was this weekend and I couldn’t not talk about it.
Blackout is fine, but in my opinion it really encapsulates everything that I hate about the battle royale genre. I don’t play battle royale games nor am I particularly good at Call of Duty, but I still expected to have fun. But I really didn’t. There was one game that I really enjoyed, but no game after that was ever as fun. This game was fun, because right off the bat I was thrown into action and did well. I enjoyed that game, because I didn’t have much loot, and neither did my opponents. Every single game after that was either boring, frustrating, or both.
The issue with having such a massive map means that finding people can be nigh impossible. Heck in my first game, I made it to the top ten without ever even seeing someone, and then I eventually got shot in the back by a sniper. That game was just boring, and it repeated itself almost every time that I played. Of course the other scenario was arguable worse. In every single game, my friends and I had decent weapons, decent armor, decent everything, and then we just died. My biggest issue with Blackout and battle royale games as a whole is the inconsistency present in almost every fight. In every fight, it would take me close to two magazines before I finally downed a person, but then their friend would kill me in half a magazine. I was hitting my shots, so missing wasn’t my problem, but everything just felt inconsistent, and my friends felt the same way.
The same can be said about armor, which is supposed to protect you and make you tankier. I consistently had level 2 armor, the highest armor was level 3, but I would take three bullets and lose a third of my health (a third being equal to fifty health). It didn’t help that I had good guns or good attachments, no matter what I had or what I did, the match always ended the same way, and it quickly became boring and frustrating.
It wasn’t long before I stopped deriving joy from Blackout and only continued to play because of my friends. I enjoyed joking with my friends, and one of my favorite ones had to do with how one of the default character skins kind of looked like Don Cheadle.
And these aren’t even the technical issues that Blackout had. First, the frame rate dipped constantly and it physically hurt my eyes. I understand that the map is huge, as is the amount of players, and this is a beta, so I this is an issue that should be fixed in the full release, but it was still annoying.
Another issue was joining people. Holy crap was it inconsistent. On numerous occasions my friends couldn’t join up, and it didn’t help that their games kept crashing. I assume that everything will be better in the full release, but these were all just incredibly annoying problems that really shouldn’t have been there
Now that I’ve got my complaints out of the way, I can move on to what I liked. I liked the vehicles and I felt that they handled very well and I think that they could add some real variety to the gameplay. I also liked the fact that you could heal while moving around and reviving teammates was pretty quick. That’s really all that I liked.
But don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Blackout because it’s a bad battle royale game–for all intensive purposes it’s fine–I hate Blackout because I really don’t like battle royale games. I don’t enjoy investing twenty to thirty minutes of my life into a highly competitive game in a game genre where for most people, those twenty minutes result in nothing but disappointment and failure. I like being able to respawn and get a lot of kills. That’s why I love team deathmatch and am not the biggest fan of search-and-destroy. If you enjoy battle royale games, then you’ll probably like Blackout. I’m hesitant to say you’ll love it, because I’ve gotten a lot of mixed reactions from my friends. One of my friends who dislikes battle royale games with a passion thoroughly enjoys Blackout, whereas one of my other friends who plays PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds almost daily really didn’t care for Blackout. Then one of my other friends, someone who played both Fortnite and PUBG for a while enjoyed Blackout enough to keep playing after every game,even in the face of these annoyances. As for me, the genre just doesn’t appeal to me, so I can’t give a truly unbiased opinion of it. All of my complaints, other than the ones about frame rate and joining, are just my opinion, though my friends did tend to feel the same way, and they should be treated as such.
Broad Scope Entertainment 