Alpha Omega first impressions and map review. A pleasant surprise…

I figure I’ll do a mini series of BO4 zombies map reviews rn. Long story short, I’ve always hated BO4 because of some of the changes they made. Specifically the perk/class system. This led me to refunding the game when it originally came out. Apparently, however, Sony still left BO4 and the season pass on my account. So recently I redownloaded BO4 and have been playing some of the maps for the first time.

Here’s my review for Dead of the Night: https://www.reddit.com/r/CODZombies/s/RpPV3zNKfw

Now back to topic. I just played Alpha Omega for the first time and holy cow do I love the map design. Have I figured out how to unlock Pack-a-Punch yet? No. As the game is currently paused while I type this. But I want to point out how well the retro-futurism aesthetic fits the world of zombies. I feel like I’m thrust into the Fallout universe on this map and it’s amazing. It’s a completely superior map to Nuketown zombies from BO2 and it improves upon it in many ways. The first improvement is the expansion of the map. It’s like quadruple the size now. They brought in the superior nuketown map (Nuketown 2025 from BO2). And there’s other houses, plus an underground Fallout shelter. They also added more training routes. Overall, great choice in map design. Next, I love the sound design. The retro-radio jingles when each round starts just fit the mode perfectly. The return of hellhounds is always nice. And finally, getting to power is not difficult.

I’ve never been one to care about Easter eggs so I don’t know how difficult it is on this map. But as a pure “kill zombies and get to a high round” map, this map accomplishes that task.

I do want to emphasize how well retro-futurism fits into the zombies mode as a whole. I wish we got more maps with this aesthetic as opposed to the weird sorcery/magic stuff we’ve gotten in the past. I think this aesthetic as well as the WW2/vietnam aesthetic fit zombies the best. (Zombies in spaceland would fall into the retro-futurism aesthetic as well which is another reason why it’s such a cool map).

Overall, I’d rank Alpha Omega as a solid 8/10. Is it perfect? No. But the vibe of the map feels like zombies and it’s a fun map to mess around in, which usually makes for a good map. The biggest change I’d make to this map if it were to come back in a future chronicles pack include: making zombies only spawn behind barriers and bringing back rebuildable barriers. One of my biggest gripes with BO2 zombies was that zombies would sometimes just come out of the ground. I think this is a poor design choice and messes up training and defeats the purpose of rebuilding barriers. That would be my biggest gripe. Still a great map, although this is something I would change.