Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War
Skip · Shooter · 2023
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $59.99.
- Length
- 5.5h
- Value
- $10.91/hr
- Reviews
- 79% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 or AMD Radeon HD 7950, 175 GB of storage. Windows only.
Black Ops Cold War, the direct sequel to Call of Duty®: Black Ops, will drop fans into the depths of the Cold War’s volatile geopolitical battle of the early 1980s.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
September 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $14.99. 31 discounts in the 4 years on record. They run about 67 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Call of Duty®: Black Ops ($39.99, scores 50) and Call of Duty®: Black Ops ($39.99, scores 51) both outscore it.
25 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written February 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 69 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 40 percent of the 1,819 reviews written there were positive, against 79 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
5.5 hours to finish it, 19 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 3.4 times the campaign.
It came out 3 years ago and 644 were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
56% start to 1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
644 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I played a ♥♥♥♥ ton of this back in 2020-21, the zombies + campaign still hold up very well today. (playing multiplayer is a fool's errand) As far as I am concerned, the Dark Aether story began and ended here, the foundation for greatness was in the palm of Treyarch's hands, and Activision had to destroy it with the development fiasco that was bo6 and 7. However I won't let that take away from, what I think, is the...
Great game, no intrusive anti-cheat requiring BIOS updates (looking at you, MW4), nice mixture of old-school and new-school movement, and, albeit with a few minor bugs remaining, it plays very well under Linux now with none of the texture issues or memory leaks that some Windows users face :o The game looks to be going on Game Pass now, so the playerbase may increase greatly due to that. I would love to get some...
this game is ♥♥♥♥ do not buy or download if u bought it refund it rn this game is complete ass dont buy a game by this company at all
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War scores 28/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1985810/call-of-duty-black-ops-cold-warThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 19, price as of Sep 23.
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