Seeing Soap brief Zombies missions to us was probably the last thing we’d have expected from a Modern Warfare game. By a shared timeline with the Black Ops series, however, it became a possibility with MW3 Zombies, AKA MWZ. But the mode fell short as soon as MW3 Season 1, and now, nearly a year after its release, Sledgehammer Games is trying to revive a portion of it by bringing back the round-based Zombies experience in MWZ Season 4. I’m not going to lie; it’s a great idea. But this iteration of round-based Zombies mode has a ton of issues to start with.
A Smidgen of Round-Based Zombies Called The Unstable Rifts
Looking over at what’s coming to the MW3 Zombies Season 4, we’ve got only one tiny detail on the surface. This new gameplay update is called Unstable Rifts, which shares a sense of similarity to the Dark Aether Rifts from the previous seasons. However, it won’t be a rewarding adventure, as there’ll be no schematics to farm and no story cutscenes/missions to follow.
These Unstable Rifts teleport the players to the Dark Aether, where they get to survive waves of Zombies. By the sound of it, this is long the awaiting round-based Zombies we’ve been asking for since the release of MW3 Zombies/MWZ last year, but it ain’t.
The devastating element of the Unstable Rifts is that only a few players get to teleport to this area each time you deploy to the Urzikestan map. Judging by the randomness of how spawn locations go, the team that deploys near an Unstable Rift will get to play it faster. Other squads can just watch them go through if they even get near the rift before it disappears.
On top of that, there are no new items to unlock by going inside one of these rifts. At least we had the reward system that’d be giving us something to achieve for beating zombies. So overall, this is a failed attempt to revive the MWZ in MW3 Zombies Season 4 by adding a 5% of what a classic round-based experience would look like.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is currently available to play on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.
