With the return of the Black Ops series with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 comes a fateful resurrection–Treyarch’s signature round-based Zombies mode. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III took a more Warzone approach with Zombies, but with Black Ops 6, the mode is returning to its more familiar form, albeit with some significant mutations.

I recently played about an hour of Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode during a preview event at Treyarch’s studios. Alongside a massive information dump about what the developer is adding to, returning to, and changing about the mode, the play session made it very clear that Treyarch is putting a big emphasis on bringing back the kind of experience hardcore fans are most excited about. But in addition to the wave-kiting, Easter egg-finding, secret-unlocking approach to Zombies, Treyarch is also working to find ways to bring in new players.

Black Ops 6 will feature two Zombies maps at launch: Liberty Falls and Terminus. Both take place simultaneously in the Zombies’ storyline, picking up right after the Dark Aether Saga that began with Black Ops Cold War. We played Terminus, an expansive island prison map where you find out what happened after Edward Richtofen had Grigori Weaver, Elizabeth Grey, Mackenzie Carver, and the other major characters arrested. Terminus sees Maya Aguinaldo, a new character in Black Ops 6, staging a prison break to free the returning characters with the help of Cold War’s William Peck. Despite some past grievances, everyone has a bone to pick with Richtofen, and the plan is that they’ll all work together to get their revenge.

Then, of course, zombies show up.

Terminus is a huge place–developers said repeatedly that they thought it was the largest playable space they’d created for a round-based Zombies map, and it shows. In addition to the rusty, decaying cellblock, there’s an outdoor dock area covered in shipping containers, an underground laboratory area where Richtofen’s scientists have been experimenting on zombies and other gross creatures, and the control area of the prison where the guards were stationed. And expanding the possibilities is the addition of multiple islands. You can travel between them by spending money to summon a dinghy at one of multiple docks all over the area, and the other islands include more sights to see, like a zombie-infested sandbar and a shipwreck, as well as additional facilities.

Maps have been designed with Black Ops 6’s omnimovement system in mind, which allows you to sprint, slide, or dive in any direction at any time. Though we only got a quick look at Terminus, the design did feel like it was encouraging quick thinking and agile movement to stay alive, emphasizing the ability to quickly climb up to higher elevations, vault over guardrails, or leap into the ocean and swim to get away from sticky situations.

Fighting through Terminus, though, it’s clear the familiar pillars of Zombies are back, but with more of it. Wall buys and unlockable doors are scattered all over the place, as are Perk-a-Cola machines and mystery boxes. Treyarch is pulling most of its inspiration here from Black Ops 3 and Cold War, developers said, bringing back a few older elements and making some quality-of-life adjustments along the way.

Among the Black Ops 3 elements that’ll make the biggest impact are Gobblegums. These are similar to Perk-a-Colas in that they give you an upgrade to your character when you use them, but instead of being persistent until you’re downed, they’re random and largely only work for a short amount of time. When you grab a Gobblegum from its machine, you don’t use it immediately and instead store it to pull out when you want it. You can pocket three Gobblegums at a time, too, so you can choose how and when to deploy them.

The return of Gobblegums is part of an emphasis Treyarch wants to put on allowing players to create more specialization for their characters in the way of makeshift builds. For example, one new addition is the Melee Macchiato, a Perk-a-Cola that powers up your punches so you can focus on fighting zombies hand-to-hand.

You can also unlock permanent upgrades to your character in a system that riffs on one from Cold War. As you play Zombies, you’ll unlock Augments for every perk, ammo mod, and field upgrade available in the game. Augments come in major and minor varieties and applying them to a particular power-up or piece of equipment lets you tweak how it works. We didn’t see these in action, but the developers explained how they’re injecting meaningful choices into using those power-ups, while making Augments easy to unlock just by playing the mode.

Unlike in Cold War, you have to choose which Augments you want to use. A perk, ammo mod, or field upgrade can only have one major and one minor Augment equipped to it, and you can only have three majors and three minors in total. So while there are more than 100 Augments to unlock in Black Ops 6’s Zombies, which ones you choose to use will come down to how you want your Zombies character to play.

Alongside Augments, Black Ops 6 also offers further customization to your weapons. There’s still a lot of randomness, like pulling weapons from mystery boxes or wall buys, but you can also now set Zombies loadouts ahead of time that will factor into what random gear you get. As with other recent Call of Duty games, Black Ops 6 uses cross-progression across all its modes for unlocking things like weapons attachments. And with your Zombies loadouts, you can set which attachments you want on a weapon, so that if it comes out of a mystery box or a wall buy, you receive your version of the gun–not a random version. Treyarch emphasized that the weapon build system is optional and players don’t need to use it, but it is another way you can try to customize the Zombies experience to your play style.

While Treyarch is bringing back and tweaking older elements of the Zombies formula, what’s more interesting is everything that it’s adding. During our playthrough of Terminus, zombies we killed would sometimes leave behind Vermin–the zombie’s head sprouting spidery legs and running around independently as a creature pretty similar to what you see in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Vermin are a little less deadly than zombies but quicker and more agile, and you still want to take them down quickly if you can, because if you leave them be for too long, they’ll mutate into flying Parasites, similar to those in Black Ops 3, that spit dangerous acid at you.

The addition of mutant monsters that can spawn out of the bodies of zombies you’ve already killed was one of the most fun changes in our play session. The creatures add some fresh weirdness to ongoing Zombies rounds and require you to pay a little more attention to the horde as you gun them down or sprint away from them. Treyarch showed off a few other fun things in our play session, like the new Shadow Rift ammo mod. It adds a new elemental damage type to the game, giving you additional damage against certain types of enemies the way incendiary or freezing ammo usually does. Shooting enemies with Shadow Rift also has a small chance of teleporting them up into the air and dropping them for more damage, a feature that is pretty much always hilarious.

Black Ops 6 will offer other additions, like new wonder weapons and field upgrades. And there are new traps, like a tentacle creature you can activate above doorways that’ll snag and eat zombies as they pass through–and which can grab players, too, if they’re not careful. You can also find and inject yourself with mutant goop that will briefly turn you into one of the tough Mangler enemies that populate later rounds, offering some fun opportunities to smash through the horde. While I didn’t get to try out that one in particular, the footage Treyarch showed made playing as a Mangler look pretty satisfying.

Our group made it to Round 20 before we jumped in our boats to run for Raptor One’s helicopter and exfiltrate from the map, and by that time, things were getting pretty hairy as special zombies like Manglers started showing up. Developers made it clear that they’re thinking a lot about the hardcore audience for Zombies, with the intention to pack in a lot of Easter eggs and side quests into Black Ops 6’s maps. However, those elements weren’t in our play session–nor was much of the main quest progression, apart from unlocking doors to open up new areas of the map.

While our venture through Terminus showed off a lot of what Black Ops 6 is adding to Zombies and how it’s improving the mode, what might be most exciting for the majority of Call of Duty fans is the changes Treyarch is instituting to make the mode more approachable. The developer acknowledged that while there’s a community of Zombies players who are very dedicated, the vast majority of the player base never really engages with Zombies beyond the wave-based battles. Most never complete a map’s main quest, for instance, and many players have no idea that Zombies maps even have main quests, to say nothing of the side quests and secrets that make the mode so appealing to those who really enjoy it.

To deal with that aspect of the audience, Treyarch is adding a new « guided » mode for playing through Zombies maps. Where in the past, Zombies didn’t tell players what to do beyond pushing them to use the Pack-a-Punch machine, the new guided mode will indicate to players what they need to do to advance the main quest of any given map. It’ll also institute round caps at certain points to make sure you’re making good progress. If you haven’t opened up a certain section of a map by Round 5, for example, guided mode will pause round progression there so difficulty doesn’t spike and keep you from finding your way forward.

Treyarch said that guided mode will only show players through the main quest of a map, so you’re on your own for unlocking secrets and side quests. The mode also won’t be available immediately at the launch of a Zombies map, since for the dedicated Zombies community, uncovering and puzzling out everything a map has to offer is a major part of the experience.

Other improvements include a new « save and quit » feature for solo Zombies players. Since Zombies sessions can be lengthy and intense, save and quit will allow you to take a break now and then. However, developers also said they’re being careful about making sure players can’t exploit the save and quit feature to cheat the mode: you only get one save slot, saves are tied to a checkpoint system at the start of a round, and you can only save if you have full health, so you can’t use the feature to avoid dying.

Treyarch is also making lots of little adjustments. You’ll be able to rejoin a Zombies match with friends if you’re disconnected unexpectedly; teams can now share the cost of opening doors to unlock new areas of a map; drops are player-specific so you won’t have to fight with other team members over the salvage currency; menus like the Arsenal and Pack-a-Punch are streamlined; and armor is available from wall buys.

It was tough to keep all the new and improved elements of Black Ops 6’s Zombies in mind as we were playing, but from a visceral gameplay standpoint, the mode feels just as intense and satisfying as it has in the past, with a lot of additions that freshen up the return to form. From the sounds of things, Treyarch has thought very deeply about how to approach Zombies in order to capture what’s best about the mode, while making it easier for new and casual players to get into it. The idea of a more approachable Zombies is an exciting one, especially with larger maps that play at a fast pace, thanks to omnimovement, and seem like they’ll include lots of fun and fascinating things to find.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is set to release on October 25 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PS4, and PC.