Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a bloated, turgid mess. It’s bloated with genre. Do you want your Desert Storm simulator? Do you want your '90s, Clear and Present Danger-style political thriller? Do you want to shoot a gajillion zombies in an uncanny underground lab out of an SCP Foundation story? Black Ops 6 packs it all in, and more, leaving me spinning and dizzy, unable to decide where to look or how to feel.

Beyond the campaign, the bloat continues, spreading out across a vast list of modes and mini-games. I can play any of the regular multiplayer options, like deathmatch or zone control, or I can join a cooperative Zombies match, dropping into a complex, inscrutable world, with its own separate, series-spanning fiction, to be barked at by NPCs who will not explain any of the stakes or my goals as a player and who’ll be half drowned out by the moans of the zombie horde and the incessant rattle of machine gun fire anyway.

Then there’s the ever-evolving Warzone mode that comes packaged with every Call of Duty installment, and probably other activities I haven’t discovered yet or have forgotten to mention. Getting Black Ops 6 onto my PS5 takes hours as I watch module after module download and self-install, consuming all of my precious hard drive space in the process.

But Black Ops 6 is new and vital and different! I can sprint in any direction now! I can jog backwards at a ridiculous clip. I can flop forward dramatically onto my stomach and get shot a dozen times before I am able to swivel my heavy head around to locate who is shooting me. (This is literally what you are instructed to do in one of the game’s tutorials.)

All of this is supposed to help me feel like an action hero, like a super soldier from a John Woo film, flinging my body through the air and taking out other players with comical lethality. But graceful, I am not. I may have been given new options for movement, new ways to orient my digital body, but my body retains the same weight, the same wooden clunkiness of a human soldier weighed down with rifles, ammo packs, and grenade launchers. I still move with the stiffness of one of those cowlicked good old boys who stormed the beaches of videogame Normandy nearly twenty years ago.

Trepang2 is a shooter from 2023 with an awful name and a refreshing mechanical approach. It’s military themed, with realistic weaponry and steel-walled bunkers, but it goes further to literalize the super soldier you effectively are in the Call of Duty games. Instead of just being able to soak up bullet damage and recover, as you do in Call of Duty, in Trepang2, your character can launch into the air, swing their legs up, and deliver a powerful wallop to enemy soldiers, sending them careening across the room. You can turn invisible and slow down time; you can slide across the floor and take down a half dozen men, watching them sail languidly through the time-slowed air, a tangle of limbs and body armor. Battles in Trepang2 are frantic and exciting, bursting with chaotic energy.

As a whole, Trepang2 suffers from issues of pacing and originality. Its second half drags and it’s a bit too reliant on its generic, tech-infused military template to feel holistically successful (though its secret-lab-with-zombies level is far more frightening and cleverly designed than the one in Black Ops 6). By the end of Trepang2’s campaign, even the luster of its inventive mechanics fades a bit, unable to carry the rote execution of the rest of the package.

But at least the game commits to a direction and earnestly explores it. It may have been pieced together from the mismatched Lego pieces of half a dozen other games, but it’s got a bold, experimental approach, and comes from developers who seem willing to take a chance and make something that pushes the medium forward, no matter how marginally.

Black Ops 6 has none of the energy of Trepang2. Instead, it is inevitable, industrial. It’s a new, slightly updated model of the same old toaster. This toaster toasts your bread a few seconds faster than the last one. Also it comes with an extra slot that turns your sliced bread into orange slices. And a button that lets a teenager call you a pussy.

All the bells and whistles that bloat out the corpse of Black Ops 6 barely distract us from its encroaching rigor mortis. Its new moveset, its Zombie mode with its GobbleGum upgrades and mad scientist plots, are just frayed laces holding the rotting flesh together.

“The old is dying, and the new cannot be born,” wrote the Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, in 1930. He continued, adding: “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We seem cursed, in the mainstream gaming space (and society at large) to live our lives within this morbid interregnum. Let it come to an end. Let a dozen new, rushed, uneven, slipshod experiments like Trepang2 burst from its corpse and, finally, take its place.

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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.