After some of the abysmal films I have watched and reviewed this semester, I’m going to switch it up.

If you’re like me, you have played more video games in the past two months than you care to admit. With that in mind, I will review my first video game: “Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies” game mode.

The zombies game mode was first inducted into the COD franchise in 2008 and has appeared in half of the games since.

When I was eight or nine years old, I recall arriving at friends’ houses and immediately sitting down in front of their TV to play.

Like many youngsters, I was not allowed to have M-rated games. So if that friend pulled out the forbidden disc and put it into their system, it was bound to be a fun day.

COD is a war game, so there was blood, swear words and shooting — all things an adolescent rascal loves. But then zombies entered the picture and it was a match made in heaven.

Fast forward to the present day. I have barely touched a COD game in years, much less the zombies mini-game.

The beauty of COD zombies was always its simplicity.

The only goal is to shoot every zombie and continue to do so until they finally overtake you. When I was younger this experience was thrilling, terrifying and awesome in every way.

Now, after my middle school years were spent with my eyes fixated on a TV while my brothers, friends and I shot pixelated zombie after pixelated zombie through every weekend and summer, I find the concept uninteresting.

The simplicity of COD zombies wore out its welcome for me.

Much like our current pandemic, the game is never-ending, repetitive and exhausting.

More features have been added, but even those no longer appeal to me. If one is willing to spend countless hours learning all of the maps and secret weapons, the perks can be uncovered.

The only problem with these new features is that you have to spend a lot of time not killing zombies to unlock them, which defeats the purpose.

If I wanted to not kill zombies, I would not play a game where an infinite number of zombies attempt to kill me until the end of time.

COD is caught in a catch-22 in its attempt to captivate me. Just killing zombies becomes repetitive and mundane. Yet, not killing zombies to secure more powerful zombie-killing abilities seems counterintuitive, overcomplicated and pointless.

I think the true problem with the COD series lies within their consistent annual release.

It may sound foolish to complain about tons of new games being released every year, but I am way too cheap to spend the money on a nearly identical game every single year.

I don’t want to spend $60 every year, but I can’t buy one game every few years because then none of my fellow gamers will be playing it with me.

Other than sports games, few — if any — other games release as much content as often as COD.

In sports franchises, it makes slightly more sense because there are new players every year that need to be added into the game.

With COD, all the games are either based off of historic wars, like WWII, or completely made up wars. Nothing new worth $60 happens in 12 months.

If COD released every three or four years, I would likely not be sick of it. I would happily shell out the money to see what cool new editions the developers have added.

With their constant releases, COD zombies ends up being a completely uninspired carbon copy of the previous game. Little effort and creativity got put into it, making the $60 almost always feel like a waste of money.

Johnson can be reached at [email protected].