its a cliché but there really is smthn special about loading into a lobby in a COD and just immediately hearing a 40 year old OG tellin some kid over the mic to stop flipping weed packs. or finishing a demolition match and hearing two friends say good night to each other and exchange pleasantries. or hearing a dude ask "is the daddy still in the picture?" when his mom gaming buddy talks about her kids (shooters gotta shoot). im glad this series has over anything retained that strand of anonymous, impermanent interaction--everyone joins a lobby with their mic unmuted, and the mute all feature is legitimately bugged i think. there's little to no carryover of players between matches (crossplay is really seamless which adds the exchangeability of teammates & enemies). COD is rlly like living in the city where these other popular battle royale-tinged shooters are like living in the suburbs where everyone is contained in their own little silo's. not that there's anything wrong with fragmentation & keeping the circle small! but sometimes i just want to be with some strangers for the night. u stay crashin bout a nigga we don go on dates😒

as a game its a lil shite tho lol. but not in an unlovable way. the last COD i played was advanced warfare which had the same sorta lootbox/premium system....coupla years and its still rlly bad. reusing maps from the original Black Ops 2 is so funny, and kind of embarrassing that is the state of the FPS multiplayer experience. weapons are really anonymous, which is a problem i've had with treyarch titles and every COD not named MW2. spawn system is as cooked as it was in the old titles. scorestreak rewards feel extremely underwhelming, at least the nuke was funny. having the usual weapon system level on top of the regular level progression system on top of an operator level system on top of a callcard & emblem system on top of a daily/weekly challenge system makes one of the insane end game screens imaginable. smthn is deeply cooked if im skipping through my unlocks at the end of the match like theyre youtube ads. all of the perks feel inconsequential save a select 6 which every experienced player seems to use. only new positives are i think the scorestreak system here is rlly the best killstreak overhaul they've done & i like the addition to CTF the standard game queue. oh and the level of modularity in the attachment system is rlly quite cool, idk if those are unique additions to this entry but they were appreciated.

the appeal here for me is that this the last title that feels like a complete COD from what fans on the internet say, and the least that's like, fucked with ig. and that the simple truth is that ADS hitscan feels as good as it did in 2010, squeezing the trigger and seeing the hitmakers pop up is some real "neuron activated" gaming what can i say. its infrequent but when you load in a match and its already lit in voicechat and you start puttin up SGA numbers with your red dot SMG hittin all the flanks its like perfect videogame junk food.