Time to sacrifice your bandwidth on the altar of public testing once more, especially if you like battle royale shooters. Right now, anyone with a Battle.net account can download the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout beta, due to open tomorrow at 10am Pacific (6pm BST). Those who preordered the game can start playing today, but if you’ve more time than money there’s another option.

Want to get into the beta right now? After linking your Battle.net and Twitch.tv accounts, tune into one of four approved Twitch streamers – Ninja, Shroud, Summit1G or TimTheTatman – between 10am PT (6pm BST) and 2pm PT (10pm BST) and stick around for an hour. You can find the full details here, and the beta will end after the weekend – 10am PT on Monday, September 17th.

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As twitchy as the Call Of Duty games have been since Modern Warfare, the series has built up a reputation as a console flagship series. Publisher Activision seem eager to break away from that impression with Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4, and to prove this, they’ve packed their Gamescom ‘PC trailer’ with as many buzzwords and high-end hardware concessions as possible. Blops 4 may not have a single-player campaign mode, but it definitely has support for 4k, ultra-widescreen, variable field-of-view and more. All good features to have, but I’m curious how many truly care.

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We’ll get to try the near-future face-shooting of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 in a free multiplayer open beta weekend in August, developers Treyarch have announced. No, this won’t include that new battle royale mode, Blackout. As a casual observer of Cod I am sorry to see the antics of wallrunning and jetpacking removed this year, though it does have a grappling hook gun and I’m enough of a grapplefan to download the whole dang beta just to try that. (more…)

The best shooters endure. While the state of the art moves on in other genres and leaves old designs in the dust, it’s as fun to fire a well-made shotgun from an early 90s FPS as from one released today. For that reason, this list runs the gamut from genre classics to those released in the last year. There’s bound to be something for you inside.

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Surprising absolutely nobody, Call of Duty is getting another game this year, and as per Activision’s alternating annual release schedule, we’re headed back to the Black Ops side-series.

It’s been too long since we’ve had a chance to use the most accursed of abbreviations, but Cod Blops is back, and possibly now the even more absurd Cod Blops IIII thanks thanks to the series apparently abandoning proper usage of Roman numerals.

The official announcement also confirms that Treyarch are back in the driver’s seat for this one. After finding myself very pleasantly surprised by their previous Blops title, I’m eager to see what they’ve got planned.

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If the rumours are true, and they most likely are, this year we’ll be seeing Call Of Duty: WWII. People have reacted with concern, but I’m here to argue it’s the best possible news.

There was a time when learning a game was set in World War II was deserving of the heaviest of sighs. Not only did it mean that it would be one of seven thousand other games that year plundering the past for an excuse to bob a gun at the bottom of the screen, but it was more likely to be crass and ignorant than a tribute to the bravery and miserable deaths of our ancestors. We got well and truly sick of WW2 games. Then to save us, the march of the zombies began. We had a whole new theme to groan at, and the Second World War has had something of a break.

The temptation of hearing the rumours that the all-conquering shooter series is to return to its own origins is to start sighing once again. But there are some really good reasons not to. In fact, if there’s anything that could save CoD from itself, it’s heading back. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Call of Duty 2 [official site] tends to get forgotten about, sandwiched as it is between the huge success of Call of Duty and the truly gargantuan success of Call of Duty 4 (we don t talk about Call of Duty 3 here in PC town). This is an unfortunate state of affairs, as it might just be the best game in the series. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Like Graham, I ve always felt bad for the Brothers In Arms series of games. The WWII shooter was well into its fatigue stage by the time these games got around to doing something intelligent with it. Rocking up to the beaches of Normandy in Medal of Honor or storming the streets of Stalingrad in Call of Duty were excellent set pieces at the time. But neither game came close to making you think about anything that was going on, it was run and/or gun. That’s it. Brothers In Arms introduced a tactical element – and it was simple too. You just had to point at things.

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Although Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare [official site] is sadly not the procedurally-generated Escherian Nightmare we might’ve hoped for, Activision’s latest war-torn FPS is set in space and you’ll be pleased to know its single-player campaign looks to be shaping up nicely. Don’t take my word for it, though – cast your eyes over six new minutes of gameplay highlights below.

… [visit site to read more]

Activision today announced Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare [official site], the latest in their long-running mega-hit military FPS series, and I am sorely disappointed. Firstly, today is a holiday in the UK, so I’m not even supposed to be here. Secondly, Infinite Warfare is about futurewar with spaceships and everything, not the Escherian nightmare that we were assured it would be. This ‘real’ Infinite Warfare does sound exciting, but I can only assume we were deceived as someone’s idea of a ‘joke’.

Activision also announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, a revamp of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – the game which defined the next nine years of CoD.

… [visit site to read more]