I was reluctant to start Cold War, because I wasn't looking for another period shooter, but when I was looking into it and saw that it was the continuation of Black Ops, I decided to give it a try. I started the campaign on 7/1/25 and completed it 7/20/25.

The game was fun.  I wasn't sure how much I'd like the Cold War setting, but I really dug the 80s vibe of the game. Smoke-filled CIA rooms, smokey East German cafes, sneaking around in East Germany and the Netherlands...and all in an awesome 80s visual.  So, yeah, while it was a Cold War story, it was a lot of spycraft with "pew pew" rather than just shooting communist soldiers in some mysteriously named communist country, which kept the game interesting.

Story summary from Wikipedia

In January 1981, CIA operatives Russell Adler (Bruce Thomas), Alex Mason (Chris Payne Gilbert), and Frank Woods (Damon Victor Allen) are sent to Amsterdam to target Qasim Javadi (Farshad Farahat) and Arash Kadivar (Navid Negahban) for their roles in the Iran hostage crisis. With intelligence gained from interrogating Qasim, the trio tracks Arash to an airfield in Turkey, where they witness him executing everyone in the vehicle he arrived in. The team eliminates Arash's men and corners him; he gloats that the Soviet spy Perseus (William Salyers)—who Adler believed to be dead—was the one responsible for organizing the hostage crisis before being executed. After being briefed of his threat by Adler and Jason Hudson (Piotr Michael), U.S. President Ronald Reagan (Jeff Bergman) authorizes a black operation team to neutralize Perseus.

Adler's team consists of MI6 intelligence officer Helen Park (Lily Cowles), CIA operative Lawrence Sims (Reggie Watkins), and Mossad operative Eleazar "Lazar" Azoulay (Damon Dayoub), with Mason and Woods providing tactical support. The final member of the team is an agent known only by the codename "Bell", who allegedly served with Adler and Sims in MACV-SOG during the Vietnam War. The team asks Bell to recall Operation Fracture Jaw in 1968, where Adler believes he, Bell, and Sims first encountered Perseus. Afterwards, the team proceeds to East Berlin to apprehend/kill Anton Volkov (Rafael Petardi), a Russian mafia boss with ties to Perseus.

The team learns that Volkov helped Perseus smuggle a nuclear device through East Berlin; they also find encrypted coordinates to an unpopulated region within Ukraine. Bell and Woods are sent to these coordinates, where they infiltrate a secret Spetsnaz training facility and discover that Perseus has infiltrated "Operation Greenlight", a top-secret American program that planted neutron bombs in every major European city to deny their use to the Soviets in the event of an invasion. Intel retrieved from the Spetsnaz facility indicates that Perseus is excavating Nikita Dragovich's destroyed base in the Ural Mountains; Mason and Woods are deployed there to retrieve Dragovich's list of sleeper agents.[b] However, the team finds out that Perseus has wiped the data from the base's mainframe, leaving their only option to infiltrate the Lubyanka Building to retrieve the list.

Enlisting the help of KGB double agent Dimitri Belikov (Mark Ivanir), Adler and Bell manage to enter the Lubyanka Building. The team learns that an Operation Greenlight scientist is one of the sleeper agents and has fled to Cuba, where the team follows. They learn that Perseus has managed to steal the detonation codes for every Operation Greenlight bomb, meaning he can devastate Europe and lay the blame on the United States. The team comes under heavy fire and Lazar and Park are injured, leaving Bell only enough time to save one of them.

After rescuing Bell, Adler continues to press them by provoking their memories of Vietnam once more. At this point, Bell's true identity is revealed as an agent of Perseus, having been shot by Arash in Turkey out of jealousy. Adler found Bell and brainwashed them using Project MKUltra into believing they were his comrade. With Bell's memory returned, Adler interrogates them on the location of Perseus' headquarters. Bell can either choose to remain loyal to Perseus and lie to Adler, or choose to betray Perseus and reveal his location. Should Bell choose the former option, they will tell Adler to go to the Duga radar array, where he and his team will be too far away to stop Perseus from activating the nukes. Otherwise, Bell betrays Perseus and joins the CIA in their assault on Perseus' headquarters in the Solovetsky Islands, where they destroy the transmitters needed to send the detonation signal. Later, Adler takes Bell out for a private conversation, assuring them that their choice to turn against Perseus was of their own free will and that they are a hero, before eliminating them as they are a loose end for the CIA.

Overall Thoughts

Great game, which I would play again. I've said this before of similar games: I hate Zombies. I don't like them. I don't want them in my games (unless I am playing a zombie game), and I really wish that game developers would just cut it out with zombies.  That said, this game had zombies, but they found a good way to integrate the paranormal elements (while your character is drugged, so plot-wise it makes sense).  I am not a huge fan of being killed at the end of the game. I basically chose the "good" ending where the player character, upon finding out that he's a sleeper agent, chooses to cooperate with the Americans, and in the end Adler takes you out...or so we are led to believe. The game fades to black, and you hear a gunshot. Yes, I get it. Spies and all that, but in my headcanon the character still lives somewhere and is living his best life...

Achievements

Time played: 9h 4m

Campaign Achievements: 14

Gamerscore: 255/1000

No zombies or multiplayer achievements