Start the latest Call of Duty, I was greeted by terrible menus, an overwhelming amount of options, too much information and some ugly ads. It’s not a good first impression and it feels like a paved mess. In other words: It’s bad.
There was a time when I played every novelty Call of Duty games. I would play the campaign over a weekend and then spend many hours online for a few months. But around Black Ops III I started skipping games. Partly because I had other things to play, partly because my friends stopped playing, and also because I just got bored of everything. The growing installation sizes of every game also did not excite me to jump back.
Me CoD holiday ended then Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War recently went on sale on PS5. I cleared up some space by removing older games I had finished and installing Activision’s latest giant game with a dumb name.
First impressions are important, and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Oh My God, I hate typing this name makes a super bad first impression. The moment you upload it, you are confronted with three games to choose from, like a horrible monster built from older pieces put together to create one creature. And as much space as Cold War consumption, War zone, Call of Duty‘s hugely popular free royal battle, remains an additional installation that should accommodate your hard drive.
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After buying and downloading the right game, I decided to play a multiplayer. It was then that the really awful menus appeared.
Cold War, like other recent Call of Duty games, are filled to the brim with options, modes, features, equipment, etc. It does make you feel like you’re worth your money, which is nice. But all of this has to be organized, listed and presented to players and Cold War do a terrible job at it. This is extremely overwhelming. At one point, my friend looked at it and said, ‘This is awful. It gives me a headache. Readers, she was not wrong. For example, look at the store page Cold War:
Looks like I came across some online ads from the early 2000s. Oh, and this screenshot does not show that many of these items move and glow, like a herd of annoying gifs.
I started browsing around and found that the rest of the menus and UI were terrible as well. There is a tab dedicated to a mode called ‘Outbreak’. But I can not really understand what I’m looking at when I open it, and it honestly never gets me involved in the mode, because if it is my point of entry, I’m not interested.
There’s also the main screen you end up with when you start online multiplayer, which displays an ad, various meters, progression levels and game modes while your soldier walks around nervously. This guy is trapped in the awful UI. Someone help him!
There are also strange little quirks. One that I found very funny is that all the challenges for singles in the game are located in the multiplayer menus. I do not know why they are here, but it is possible that another part of this crazy menu buffet contains the answer.
I finally played Call of Duty: Black War Ops Something Anything, and I had a great time! The fight feels good, especially with 120 frames per second. I played a bunch of Nuketown, got some solid kill strokes and had fun. But getting there cost too much work and shuffled menus. I am unfortunately not sure that there is an easy way to solve this problem as modern CoD games have become so big and overloaded with features that maybe not much streamlining can be done without removing content.
I miss the parent Call of Duty games, which had simpler, easier to navigate, which made the action much less troublesome. There was also less content in the games, which made more enjoyable menus that were less difficult to navigate. So my solution is simple: smaller Call of Duty games. What do you think?