Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X and S, PS4, Xbox One, PC
Current goal: Get as high as I can in Zombies

Surprise, surprise, I’m excited about a Call of Duty game. After playing a bunch of them throughout middle school and early high school, I sharply fell off the series until some friends brought me into their regular Warzone nights a few years back. Every now and then, we’ll bemoan to one another how CoD has moved away from the classic experience it delivered in our youth, which mostly consisted of back-to-back summer days of playing the Treyarch games’ cooperative horde mode, Zombies, from sunrise to well beyond sunset. Well, Zombies is back in Black Ops 6, and while it’s still more convoluted than I care for, its inclusion here has been pitched as a back-to-basics moment and I am here for it.

Last night when Black Ops 6 launched, I came home from a concert, loaded into a party with my best friends, and was immediately glued to the screen for longer than I care to admit. In my first shot at it, we made it to round 34, and it was astonishing how much my decade-old muscle memory kicked in to save my ass on countless occasions. There’s a lot I was just wrapping my head around about the newest iteration of Zombies, but there was even more that felt deeply familiar to me. It felt a bit like coming back to your childhood home. I think I’m going to be here a long time, because god, does it feel good to be back. — Moises Taveras