Treyarch, the “other” developers of the Call of Duty franchise, have had a problem with how people perceive them; that problem being summed up in four words: they’re not Infinity Ward. Despite the fact that Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops went on to become one of the best-selling games of all time, gamers still look down on Treyarch for not being the ones who created the Modern Warfare franchise. Regardless of how you view Treyarch, you have to give them credit for adding one very popular (and rightly so) game mode to Call of Duty – Zombies! The “Zombies” mode that is present in the Call of Duty games World at War and Black Ops has you fighting zombies, and now with the new DLC Rezurrection you have a chance to take the fight to a new planet. Anyway, the basic game formula for Zombies is similar to that of the Left 4 Dead games, with a few neat twists – as four players battle the undead horde that comes after them in progressively more difficult waves, they earn points/cash or whatever you want to call it that can be used to buy things such as better weapons, power-ups to increase one’s chances of survival, and most importantly, routes to get through the map and eventually escape it.
It’s a really clever take on the zombie-killing formula, combining elements of classic and modern-day first-person shooters and presenting it all with a light-hearted sense of humor, as the zombie combat is often peppered with witty (or really corny) one-liners from the cast of characters the players play as. The point I’m getting at with this is that the most recent map pack to be sold as downloadable content for Call of Duty: Black Ops, “Rezurrection” (what’s spelling resurrection with a “z” supposed to mean (my guess is zombies but who knows), capitalizes on Treyarch’s greatest strength, as this new map-pack is all Zombies, all the time. That may sound like good news at first, until you read the fine print – four of the “new” Zombies maps included in the Rezurrection DLC are actually recycled maps from the first game to have the Zombies mode, Call of Duty: World at War. I guess it would make sense to have these previous Zombies maps available again in Black Ops, considering Black Ops sold a lot more than World at War did, but if you were one of those Call of Duty diehards that actually played World at War’s Zombies mode, this may come across as a bit of a disappointment.
There is an incentive for those World at War players – as well as the players new to Zombies mode – to buy Rezurrection, and that is in the form of the new Zombies map known as “Moon (this map by itself is worth a purchase).” And just as the name implies, in the new map, you fight zombies on the moon…and this is just as much fun as it sounds, which is to say a lot. Even though the regular trademark Zombies mechanics are still present, the new elements of low gravity combat, having to wear a spacesuit (since there’s no breathable air on the moon, duh), and having a new juggernaut-type zombie that moves ultra-slow but does ultra-damage (and also searches your Friends list for a random Gamertag to attach to itself) actually add quite a lot of fun to the undead-slaying shenanigans. I must admit, it is quite satisfying to send a corpse sailing in low orbit across the lunar landscape with a shotgun blast. Even with the addition of the new Moon map, though, the Call of Duty: Black Ops - Rezurrection DLC is still asking for a lot of your Microsoft points for what you get – at 1200 points (or $15 of your Earth dollars), it would’ve at least been nice to get more than one brand new map. Still, if you’re part of the Black Ops generation of Call of Duty players, and thus haven’t played Zombies until now (or play it every day), it’s worth picking up if you’re an undead-killing cheerleader (add to that the fact that doing it all on the Moon is freaking awesome).
Final Recommendation: Buy It
