Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Beta: First impressions.

Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Open Beta was made available this weekend. We got in on the action and the game has made a solid impression on us.

The Black Ops 4 Beta was exclusively multiplayer. This time the COD game was not available on steam. It had to be downloaded from Battle.net, which was quite an unpleasant experience for me.

I don’t know if it should be here, but it was quite a hassle to get the Battle.net app, because the installer wouldn’t download the Battle.net app. I had to remove my antivirus, since even disabling it did not work. As of writing this article, my PC is completely unprotected.

Performance and Graphics

With this out of the way, lets come to the actual game. The graphics are pretty good, and the game is really well optimised I must say. I was getting above 90 FPS on medium-high settings on my GTX 1050ti with Core i3 7^th gen. The game was running smooth, and I did not run into any bugs or hangs. But fire and smoke effects did cause an FPS drop to around 40-60 FPS occasionally. The sounds of weapons did leave me wanting for more, as they sounded a bit too tame for my taste.

Gameplay:

The gameplay is surprisingly fast. It kind of reminded me of Unreal Tournament and Quake (though not that unrealistic). The Specialist system is back, along with custom class creation and preset classes. You can select the class and the specialist before the match begins, and some builds go great with some specialists and your playstyle. I particularly liked Ruin, with his grapple hook and his gravity gun, a combination which is great at closing gap and taking down multiple enemies (killed an entire team of six people by grappling into them and using the gravity gun. Made it to the best play of the match). Except for Ajax, Recon and Crash, the other Specialists are from Black ops 3, but with new abilities.

You will get mods, attachments, perks and new weapons by leveling up. Certain preset classes have weapons you can use which are otherwise only usable at higher levels.

For the most part, weapons seemed balanced, except for the Paladin sniper, which could one shot you and had a short reload time. Also, the Titan Machine Gun seemed really underwhelming.

Matchmaking:

This is where the game lacks. I could only find people for Team Death Match and “Seek and Destroy” (very much like defusal map from Counter Strike). The rest of the modes had a really long que-time. The teams also sometimes seemed unbalanced, with high skill players and high levelled players playing against comparatively low skilled and in some some cases, really low levelled players. My first game, at level 1, there was an opponent at level 32.

Keeping the fact that the game is still in Beta, Black Ops 4 surprised me. It does not have performance issues and is really well optimised. Black Ops 4 Beta was really fun to play. But there is still room for improvement, especially with balancing and matchmaking (and the client requiring me to make my pc vulnerable).

Black Ops 4 Beta will be back in September with the Blackout test run.