Call of Duty: Black Ops III takes the series into 2065, where soldiers are wired into their weapons through the Direct Neural Interface and warfare belongs to whoever controls the machines. Treyarch's third Black Ops entry delivers three complete experiences in the standard edition: a Campaign built from the ground up for co-op, a Multiplayer suite that rethinks how you move and who you play as, and a Zombies mode that opens with the film-noir sprawl of Shadows of Evil.
A Campaign Built for Four
The story follows a newly augmented Black Ops soldier and their partner Hendricks as they track a rogue team led by Taylor across Singapore, Egypt and Zurich in the wake of the Coalescence disaster. The Direct Neural Interface gives you Cybercores, three trees of combat abilities that let you hijack drones, scramble enemy soldiers or send swarms of nanobots through a room. Choose Control, Martial or Chaos, then build a loadout that suits the way you fight.
For the first time in a Black Ops campaign, every mission can be played online with up to four players. Larger arenas and branching routes give a squad room to split up and flank, and the Safe House between missions lets you customize weapons and abilities before you deploy. The difficulty scales with your group, so a four-player run is a different animal from a solo one.
Multiplayer with Momentum
- Specialists
- Nine characters, from Ruin's Gravity Spikes to Outrider's Sparrow bow and Reaper's arm-mounted Scythe, each carrying a signature weapon or ability that charges over the course of a match. Choosing a Specialist is a choice about how you want to turn a fight, not just what you look like.
- Movement
- Thrust jumps, wall running and power slides all flow together without draining a stamina bar, and you can shoot through every one of them. Maps are laid out with that freedom in mind, so the routes over, under and around a lane matter as much as the lane itself.
- Gunsmith and Pick 10
- The Pick 10 create-a-class system returns, and the Gunsmith lets you stack attachments, optics, camos and custom paint jobs onto any weapon. The result is a loadout that reads as yours the moment it appears on screen.
Shared and split-screen play is supported locally, so a second player on the couch can jump into Multiplayer or Zombies alongside you.
Zombies: Shadows of Evil
The base game's Zombies map drops four sinners into Morg City, a 1940s film-noir nightmare stitched together from jazz clubs, canals and a ruined theater. A magician, a boxer, a crooked detective and a femme fatale are offered one path to redemption by the Shadowman, and taking it means surviving wave after wave of the undead while unraveling a story that ties into the wider Zombies saga.
Shadows of Evil introduces Beast Mode, which transforms you into a tentacled creature able to open new areas and power up the map, along with GobbleGum perks and a progression system that unlocks weapons and gear across sessions. It is a dense, puzzle-heavy map that rewards groups who learn its secrets together.
Mod Tools and Steam Workshop
Owners of the full game can install Treyarch's free Mod Tools and build their own content, and the Steam Workshop makes sharing it straightforward.
- The Radiant level editor and the APE asset editor let you construct custom Multiplayer and Zombies maps, with worked examples of the map Combine and a Zombies map to learn from.
- Subscribe to community maps and mods through the Workshop, then load them from an in-game Mods menu, so a fresh Zombies map is never more than a few clicks away.
- An unranked server browser lists custom games running community content, giving modded matches a home outside the standard playlists.
Treyarch built Black Ops III to be played with friends and kept for years, and the community has made sure there is always something new to load. Suit up, wire in and find out what a Black Ops soldier looks like in 2065.