By their very competitive, dog-eat-dog nature, battle royale games don\u2019t tend to be about making friends with the people you meet. But with its big 2.0 revamp, Call of Duty: Warzone has made some admirable efforts toward inspiring us to work together, communicate, and socialize even as we fight to be the last ones standing. Some of its other new ideas don\u2019t pay off quite as well, such as the relatively bland new map and its ill-advised backpack system. But even if you put all of that aside, the introduction of an excellent new PvPvE mode is more than reason enough to round up a squad and drop back into Warzone for a few matches. After all, the real victory screen might just be the friends we made along the way.<\/p>\n\n
The first thought-provoking new social idea is that you can actually recruit enemy players to your team in squad-based lobbies if you end up losing a teammate at any point. This is a clever way to give weakened teams or solo stragglers a fighting chance, and to keep more people invested in a match for longer. It\u2019s also just fun to make friends in a battle royale, though it\u2019s an idea that might work better on paper than in practice. Most people still tend to open fire on sight, so I\u2019ve yet to successfully convince anyone to join my team, but the fact that I can at least try is a fun addition on its own. <\/p>\n
The Unhinged Trios mode even lets you invite up to six people to be on your team mid-match, living up to its name in the chaos that creates. Well, that it could<\/em> create \u2013 a lot of people don\u2019t really seem to want to play with six people on a team and would often just not work together. I guess we all took it to heart when our parents told us you can\u2019t trust anyone on the internet, and you mostly see people playing Unhinged Trios as normal trios. I still liked it just fine in that context too, but the actual gameplay mechanic of it being a squad building simulator was a little disappointing when no one really wanted to participate in that aspect. <\/p>\n\n New Stomping Grounds<\/strong><\/p>\n Our new battleground, Al Mazrah, is an interesting map to explore thanks to its many cities full of buildings to loot from and 18 points of interest, from a literal fortress to airports and even a mining city. That said, the vast stretches of terrain between those exciting locales aren\u2019t quite as varied, and I felt like I was really just looking at a lot of sandy and beige backgrounds as I ran through the map. I understand Al Mazrah is a take on a realistic region with cities and industrial areas sprinkled throughout, but the fact that buildings and houses in those cities all look so similar and the same color palette is applied through the entire map makes it less pretty to look at than a lot of other current battle royale arenas. Apex Legends and Fortnite, by contrast, have extremely varied terrain (and even weather), particularly with Apex\u2019s World\u2019s Edge that contains snow, lava, and urban landscapes splayed out in one single map. <\/p>\n However, Al Mazrah is the biggest map Warzone has seen to date, allowing it to comfortably accommodate 150 players, and it has some new cool water passageways throughout that let you travel via boat alongside land and air vehicles. I like that it opens up travel options to water because it means you\u2019re not always forced to take a car or attempt to grab a helicopter from an extremely exposed location. It also gives us more options for escape routes, especially since the waterways take different turns through the map from roads. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve enjoyed the twist of having to constantly watch the map and pivot my movement in less predictable ways.<\/p>\n The areas between each cluster of buildings are pretty open and really demonstrate how big the map is when you\u2019re on foot and trying to run from one location to another. This could\u2019ve been a problem, but with the way Warzone 2.0 has reworked the ever-tightening circle it\u2019s not too big of a deal. The original Warzone had a traditional single safe circle; in 2.0, there\u2019s a chance for that one circle to split into three that are spread across the map, forcing you to scramble to the closest one to survive. The three circles will then collapse back into one for the final minutes of a match, forcing the survivors among all three isolated groups to finally face off in one area. This is a fresh and unique approach to the battle royale format, and I\u2019ve enjoyed the twist of having to constantly watch the map and pivot my movement in less predictable ways. Even better is when my team and I find good buildings to hunker down in and try and pick off stragglers who weren\u2019t paying attention to the splits.<\/p>\n\n Gulag 2.0<\/strong><\/p>\n Warzone 2.0 also brought in a novel new take on the Gulag mode (where you go when you\u2019re knocked out of the main match) in which you may be paired up with a random enemy in a temporary truce, so you have to make nice with a stranger to get a second chance at life. It\u2019s clever, but it did get a little frustrating since communicating with your random teammate isn\u2019t exactly consistent, sometimes leaving me feeling like I was really fighting a 1v2. Also, if you get sent to the Gulag and find there\u2019s only one other player there, you often times can\u2019t get into a full Gulag match \u2013 once the timer runs out you simply get kicked back onto the battlefield. So while this new system is interesting, I still prefer the old 1v1 Gulag because you could rely on yourself and match times were short. <\/p>\n However, one fun change in the Gulag is that you don\u2019t necessarily have to beat all the enemy players to get back into the match. Instead, everyone can band together to take down an AI-controlled Juggernaut Jailer that jumps into the arena after a certain amount of time has passed; if you\u2019re successful, everybody who is still alive can redeploy. Alternatively, you can continue to try for a full enemy team wipe as chaos ensues \u2013 and predictably, most of the time people have opted for the bloodthirsty option of killing each other in the hopes of a selfish revival. I also had a match where the Jailer actually ended up taking out the last enemy player for me and I got redeployed with my teammate, so the new variation of the Gulag certainly has some really fun moments when it works properly. Hopefully over time we\u2019ll see people team up against the common foe more often. <\/p>\n\n Hold Your Friends Close, and Keep Your Enemies on Proximity Chat<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the best new additions in Warzone 2.0 is proximity chat, which allows anybody who gets close enough to listen in on your voice coms. That\u2019s a fun and sneaky experience that you don\u2019t get very often in battle royales. I could, for example, hear a team in the building next door discussing how they could hear me and my teammate looting, giving away their location when they might otherwise have gotten the drop on me. Warzone has always had death comms where you\u2019d hear the enemy player\u2019s mic just after you\u2019d killed them, which is a fun way to revel in their defeat, but proximity chat really changes that in an interesting way.<\/p>\n Proximity chat has made the whole experience of Warzone so much better.<\/p>\n Proximity chat is one of those mechanics I didn\u2019t think an FPS or battle royale needed but it\u2019s made the whole experience of Warzone so much better. Because Warzone is crossplay, you can sometimes hear people unknowingly playing with their mics open on their controllers once you get near them. I\u2019ve had some fun conversations with enemies too, just talking to them casually and butting into conversations, or throwing playful banter around as we try to hunt each other down. It\u2019s also allowed for some really funny moments where people will get creative with it and, say, pose as taxi drivers for otherwise hostile players in a temporary truce and exchange money for rides around the map. <\/p>\nWhat We Said About Call of Duty: Warzone<\/h2>\n