Nazi Zombies

I liked Nazi Zombies. I really did. Treyarch, you dun fucked up. Here, I'll make this quick and simple right now. I will list the zombie maps in order of best to worst.

#1. Verruckt - World at War
#2. Der Reise - World at War
#3. Kino der Untoten - Black Ops
#4. Call of the Dead - Black Ops
#5. Ascension - Black Ops
#6. Shi No Numa - World At War
#7. Nacht der Untoten - World at War
---Official separation of maps I enjoy to those I don't---
#8. Five - Black Ops
#9. Moon - Black Ops
#10. Shangri La - Black Ops
#11. Buried/Die Rise - Black Ops II
#12. Tranzit - Black Ops II
Honorable shit mention - Dead Ops Arcade

Clarification, I have not played Mob of the Dead nor have I played whichever one has the Big Daddy/Nautilus from League of Legends in it.

But hey, do you see a pattern here? I sure do. Let's see the ones I don't like. All maps available in Black Ops II and then the last maps in Black Ops (and Five but shut up). Let's delve a little deeper into this.

The maps in World at War are all solid. I put the original as the last one I enjoy purely for the fact that in comparison to the other maps, it just seems a little bare, but I can still enjoy it. The only reason it's as low as it is is because there's only so much you can do. Shi No Numa is also moderately low (for the good games) because again, there's only so much you can do there, or so me and my friends discovered. It succeeds on the fact that it's still zombies and there's nothing particularly annoying except yourself and your friends sucking. Verruckt and Der Reise almost need no explanation as to how and why they're great. The way they're structured allows for many fun options including a FULL MAP ROUNDABOUT in Verruckt.

Simple, solid, wonderful.

You can also be a complete shit and hang out in the BAR room for no reason. Why is that room even there? Just cause. And the fact that this is the only map where people start separately kind of confuses me, as I thought it worked quite well. These maps I can replay again and again without having to do the same exact thing for success.

Black Ops maps on the other hand... They're a mixed bag. The theater is great for the things it does well. It's a large, but clear cut map. There's nothing confusing, you don't really need to be explained anything. The power doesn't need three arbitrary things to be activated, and it's relatively easy to upgrade a weapon. The major fault of this is the introduction of Treyarch making horrible decisions. Every map from here on out has some terrible design choice, some incredibly annoying aspect/enemy. Why are there Nova gas zombies that pop and are fucking annoying? They're not a challenge. They just suck and are annoying and everyone hates them and there is NO WAY to get around it. They felt they needed another enemy to circumvent burnout, so they added annoyance. Thanks.

Call of the Dead and Ascension are really close in terms of quality. I really enjoy both of them, as the maps are (arguably) easy to maneuver through, and there's not much to be explained. Yeah, Ascension, we don't have to do three things for power, but we do for Pack-a-punch. Call of the dead just has both of em straightforward just sitting there, you just gotta get there. But again, with these maps, we feel we have options when playing them. The layout of the maps doesn't make them so crushingly difficult that we feel we have to hold out in one place for success which is BORING. But again, they have some stupid, annoying decisions. Monkeys in Ascension can go fuck right off. Yeah, they replace the dog round AND give you all a free perk if they don't break they machines, but oh they WILL break the machines. They go for the machines you have perks in and trying to defend against small, quick moving things is futile. Machines are usually in corners, so you'll be trapped in this corner trying to defend a machine and just get shit on. Call of the Dead has George, and I don't even hate him that much, but he could have been implemented better. It's fun to harass him for no reason, and he DOES actually add tension when you round a corner and see the big bastard lumbering your way. He takes a while to kill, which scales based on how many people you have, and I actually killed him multiple times with friends using sickles only. I dunno, I had fun doing it. But the biggest problem about this is that he comes back. He shouldn't. If he takes ass-long time and ammo to kill, he shouldn't come back ever, ESPECIALLY not the next wave. That's a dick move.

And now the bad maps... Five is, again, just incredibly annoying. You work your way down the building until you get to the power room and you punch it. Then come the Novas, as well the Pentagon Thief. Ohhh, the pentagon thief. You ever want a fight a bullet sponge who steals your gun? No? WELL TOO FUCKING BAD. It's like playing Rock Band, then reaching a difficult solo which not only has a lot of notes, each time you fuck up, it deletes progress on previous songs. Lose an upgraded gun because you thought it would be easy to kill him with it? You fucked up and it's most likely gone forever. But not only that, during this round, the elevators don't work, so you have to rely on these random teleporters to get from place to place. You'd have a better time just standing in the corner getting wrecked by this guy as it just saves time and you'll be done with this shit again. And again, the only really strategy is hang out in the pack-a-punch room and shoot em as they come in. Or that's the only one I could figure out.

Next on the list is Moon. Oh ho ho hooo, Moon. Moon is a culmination of just awful, AWFUL ideas. The only reason it's above others is it's a bit endearing with its awfulness like a frail puppy covered in its own shit. You can't help but just laugh at the ideas it fucked up. So, you spawn and you gotta run to a teleporter to go the moon, but you can wait and farm some points before round one. I like this idea, but you better hope you and your partner are coordinated. One goes down, you're fucked. You're not going anywhere. But when you DO make it to the moon, there's no air! You know this by your character gasping for air THEN DYING. There are NO instructions, nothing telling to get the fucking breathing apparatus, they just kinda hope you'll figure it out. That's NOT how you make a game. Come on, I know you're working on Call of Duty, but you have to know SOME basics about gameplay and conveying what you're supposed to do. Next on the list of moon-characteristics: low gravity. Low gravity is fun, especially with a dolphin dive. You know what's not fun? Sprinting down a slope, then floating all the way down only to be greeted by the welcome wagon of rag-tag zombies ready to know at your floaty ass. Why are there zombies on the moon? Whatever, I don't care. Next, the map layout. The map layout is horrendous. Between every room is small enclosure between the two rooms that serves two purposes:  having a breathing apparatus for when the game decides to spawn you NOT in the original spawn, and pushing your shit right in. That's right, you will die because of these opaque, ridiculous doors. Too many times a scenario where, "Oh shit, my friend's down 5 rooms over! Better sprint over." You open the door to find 6 zombies ready to greet you with with 6 swipes, INSTANTLY down on your ass, or better yet, finding the astronaut who headbutts you to the spawn. I haven't even mentioned the astronaut yet, he takes some random name as if he was player controlled or something. He's a bullet sponge that grants you NOTHING for killing him. Don't wanna waste ammo but still wanna kill him? Try the knife. Or don't, cause he grabs your ass and blasts you to the spawn. Now, this isn't annoying in itself, but the stupidest thing is this removes ALL of your perks. ALL OF EM. THAT. IS. BULLSHIT. I love losing an insurmountable amount of progress do to BULLSHIT like this. Oh, and as a final takeaway, there's a room with bounce pads, a Bio-Dome. These bounce pads have a predetermined arc that sometimes decides just not to work. You miss your landing because you can't control yourself or do anything in the air? Say goodbye to everything, you're fucked. And when you make a worse Bio-Dome than the one with Pauly Shore, you need to rethink your life. So that is Moon. Not even the worst one yet.

Shangri La is just miserable. This one's balls hard, you never feel like you can do will in this level. There are no good places to hold out, there are no good roundabouts. You play for 5-10 minutes, get your ass handed to you, then you quit or play a better map. From bullet sponge zombies that explode and kill you, to getting trapped by spikes between sections of the map, this doesn't do anything good. And there's not even anything to write home about. Even worse.

To round out the Black Ops maps, I'll say a short a bit about Dead Ops Arcade. Ever wanted to play a more generic, music-less, ugly version of Geometry wars? Well, this is the game for you! A $1 indie game is better than this.

Dead Ops Arcade is a lesser map than I MA3D A GAME3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT

But now we finally reach the Black Ops II maps. Now, I'll say this, I bought every map pack for every map I stated above. Yes, I'm a bit stupid, but that's besides the point. I didn't buy Black Ops II. I didn't play any of these nearly as much as the other ones, and for good reason. I played Die Rise and Buried about 5 times total for both. They're confusing messes of maps. Sure, some may like the freedom and exploration, but when you need to pay money to get to other parts of the map, this becomes a hefty total, and you don't know if these are good ideas. You get lost, then you're dead. And Die Rise has a mix of dogs and monkeys. Instead of a dog round, there's something that moves quickly, jumps on walls, then scratches your eyes out. Then you die, get pissed, and toss the disk into a paper shredder. There's not much to say on these maps, as I didn't play them too much. It just boils down to too complicated, to much shit that's not explained, too much shit I can't be bothered with. Next.

TRANZIT.
Tranzit... Tranzit... This one map could have its own blog. This is the absolute worst. I don't understand people who enjoy this map. I genuinely don't. Not only is it upsetting that Black Ops II was released with less Zombie maps than Black Ops, it's also worse than any of the previous ones. There is so much wrong with this map, from the confusing nature of the map's mechanics, to the enemies, to the map layout, to the characters, to ANYTHING. I can't say there's a single thing about this map I enjoy. Yeah, the original map is in there somewhere, but I tried to find it once (with instructions on how to do so, mind you), couldn't find it, died, couldn't be bothered. But first off, the characters.
CHARACTERS:
The characters first had voices in Verruckt, then were given actual characters in Shi No Numa. Occasionally, the main 4 are different people, like in Five, they were Nixon, Jefferson, Castro, and Macnamera (who is an atrocious asshole), or Call of the Dead where they're 3 actors and Sarah Michelle Gellar who is the only notable one for being annoying. But this one has four assholes and not a single one likeable. The original four where all right, Takeo was kind of annoying with his Japanisms, but Richtofen more than made up for it. This one, everyone talks way too much and says things that make you cringe, or just makes you upset.
MAP LAYOUT:

The map is post apocalyptic, something that's not surprising on it's own, but it has these cracks on the ground and lava pockets that hurt you by crossing over them, which will happens all the goddamn time. Take a few steps, hit some lava, get stunned, slow down, get hit by zombies, die. The mapitself is separated into 5 sections, each one separated by intense fog and a long road. You're intended to travel between the two on a bus which takes some time to return if it leaves without you, which creates waiting, something this map is all about. Occasionally, you'll have to get to the previous section, so you want to wait for the bus to get there, then wait for the bus to go, so you'll leg it. Going through the fog is like wading a maze of hip-deep shit, then getting periodically stabbed for it. You'll occasionally lose direction of where you're going, have to go through extended sections of lava, which you might not make and just die, but worst of all are the "denizens." They fly to you, grab onto your face, and scratch at it. You have to repeatedly knife to get them off. AGAIN, not at difficult, challenging, or fun. Only annoying. The shouldn't be. But since the map is separated into 5 sections, they're essentially 5 separate maps, each of them too small to be interesting, and have some vital perks that you may have to go back to. Traveling from part to part sucks, and staying in any one spot ALSO sucks.
MAP MECHANICS:
So, as you know, the main thing is the bus that transits people from section to section, and as you know, I hate it and it sucks. But other mechanics are stupid and don't make sense. You can craft items if you find all the necesary items, but you can only ever carry one of these. You ca make a zombie riot shield which to be fair is quite funny, but it doesn't give you any points, and you'll need to carry the turbine anyways to unlock the pack-a-punch room. This in itself is a confusing mess that is incredibly difficult to discover on your own. You gotta place a turbine by a green door with a power symbol on it, then in the next section, you have to blow up a vault door with a grenade or ray gun. This in itself is confusing, as there's no way to know that would work. Then, if there's a turbine by that door, a chamber in the vault will open up. Again, this is just asking too much of the player. And if you say I'm just stupid and couldn't piece it together, fine. But having to do this with the constant threat of zombies is annoying. To people who defend things like this by saying that making crawlers were always a part of playing, yeah. That's true, they were. BUT, we didn't play Zombies to get to the crawler part. We didn't play to get to the point where we can stick our thumbs up our asses and wait for shit to be done. Nobody's favorite part was watching other people use the box 20 times. We play to shoot things and have fun. Tranzit is none of that. Tranzit is a test of waiting, patience through bullshit, and having a high tolerance for the map's shit.

Now, after all this, there's one more thing that needs to be mentioned. Treyarch and their "easter eggs." The easter eggs where you activate three stones or bears to play a hidden song is fine. Those are generally harmless and neat to discover on their own. But from Call of the Dead onwards, there are achievements for each level to do a multistep process which takes an ass long time and would no way be naturally stumbled on. Things that take 40 minutes to do, some REQUIRING 4 people is absolutely bullshit. Completeing the easter egg in Call of the Dead grants you NOTHING in game. There's no incentive to do it in the game, only for external bragging rights. They're not fun, they're bullshit. Just take a look at some of these. Seriously. THIS is BULLSHIT. I hate the presence of these. MAYBE in a game on its own, MAYBE in a game where you're not CONSTANTLY bothered by the presence of zombies, especially in a game where you  initially die in only two hits. These are awful and I don't understand how people would figure these out without a guide, or enjoy some of them. They're incredibly luck based, and shit.

And so with all of that, you should be able to understand why Zombies are just a bit dead to me. With each iteration, they attempt to add more shit to make it BIGGER AND BETTER, which like the Call of Duty series in general, has just been a downward decline into mediocrity and frustration. Zombies used to be great, it used to be simpler. I could have forgiven them if Shangri La was the worst it got, but it's not... Every single one in Black Ops II that I've played is just awful. There's nothing good about them except for how great they make the older ones feel and play. So, Treyarch, you've lost me as a CoD Zombie enthusiast. I hope you're happy. I will forever remember the fun I had and will continue to play the good ones, and even occasionally play the shit ones for a brief, BRIEF period for a laugh, or for a fresh experience.

I mean, at least none of them are Extinction level bad, right?