DLC #144 - Call of Duty : Black Ops - Rezurrection Map Pack

Once I'd finally finished up the Annihilation Map Pack back in January 2021, I felt like I was practically over the hill and Black Ops was, at last, merely a formality - A judgement I don't think I could have gotten more wrong.

There haven't been many more games I have frequently had to re-visit as much as Black Ops 1, and the fact I still have an entire catalogue of DLC packs to go through with Black Ops 2 still fills me with dread. It's been a very mentally exhausting experience trying to finish this game to 100% completion, but we have finally managed to get there.

The Rezurrection Map Pack adds 6 new trophies to the Black Ops list, purely focused around the new Moon map, which adds a completely different dynamic to the zombies experience.

It has to be mentioned that I seriously dislike the Moon setting, and this was my least favourite DLC pack within Black Ops as a direct result.

I hate the way player movement is impacted by gravity because it makes it harder to fight and escape zombies. I hate the randomly spawning astronaut that grabs you and teleports you to another part of the map, detaching you from your squad. I hate the P.E.S system because you can't survive in certain areas of the map without making sure you're wearing one. I hate the launch-pads in the Biodome that will kill you if you don't land safely on the padded parts of the floor.

These mechanics have a direct impact on the difficulty of the trophies too, and they all offer perilous situations that cost me on numerous occasions when all I was trying to focus on was fulfilling the requirements of the trophies at hand. It becomes a real pain, and having to juggle these environmental challenges whilst going for a complete set of trophies at the same time is hard work.

The Easter Egg trophy is, thankfully, fairly forgiving this time round compared to the Annihilation Map Pack, and can actually also be done solo, though a team is always the recommended way to approach any Easter Egg trophy, in my opinion anyway.

The other trophies are fairly straight forward too, though a couple of the required tasks at hand will need you to accumulate a reasonable amount of points. The "Fully Armed and Operational" trophy requires you to Pack-A-Punch 3 weapons simultaneously, which will cost 5,000 points each, as well as obtaining the Mule Kick perk, allowing you to wield 3 weapons at once, which will cost an additional 4,000 points. The expenditure of the 3 weapons on top will mean you'll need in excess of around 20,000 points for this, so may need to progress fairly deep into a game to achieve it.

The same logic can be applied for the "Perks in Spaaaaaace!" trophy, which is awarded for purchasing every perk in one game, which will require a combination of 17,500 points across the 8 perks available throughout the map. It is possible to grab these within the same game, like I did, but you're probably better off separating them.

However, the overall difficulty of this DLC pack peaks specifically with one trophy;

Ground Control - In Moon, prevent each excavator from breaching the base in one game.

The "Ground Control" trophy, awarded for preventing each excavator from breaching the base in one game, requires you to stop the giant saw from penetrating 3 separate areas of the map within the same game, using the hacking tool in order to get back to the starting area and hack the relevant terminal to prevent the excavation process.

The 3 different areas are Tunnel 6, Tunnel 11 (which are both situated either side of the starting area) and Bio-dome, which is the large area found on the other side of the map. You're given advance warning at the start of the round via an announcement that excavation of one of these areas is to commence, from which point you have around 2-3 minutes to get back to the starting area with the hacking tool and hack the relevant terminal to cease the process. You'll receive a further warning at 60 and 30 seconds remaining, and if you don't make it back to the starting area in time to hack the terminal, the excavation process will occur and you'll fail this trophy.

There are 2 main things that complicate this trophy. The first one is the fact that the excavation announcement is not at set intervals, and the first one usually occurs anywhere between rounds 3-7 within my experience, and will follow a similar pattern thereafter, making it hard to predict how many rounds you're going to need to playthrough in order to be able to prevent excavation for the 3 different areas.

The second complication is that you're not guaranteed to be given the chance to excavate all 3 areas within the first 3 announcements, and there could be duplication along the way where you've already prevented excavation of one area that pops up again within a latter round where you're left still waiting for the first call of another area, which prolongs the amount of waves you have to attempt to stay alive for. This is definitely the bigger issue of the 2, though it does help ever so slightly that you do not need to prevent excavation for the same area more than once in a game, and therefore can afford to allow the breach to occur in any given area you may have already prevented once prior.

For a bit of context, in my eventually successful run, I managed to finally excavate all 3 different areas at wave 24 after a pattern that went as follows; Tunnel 6, Tunnel 11, Tunnel 6, Tunnel 11 and then Bio-dome, meaning I had a call to excavate both tunnels before even getting a first call for a warning breach of the Bio-dome, and this was a common theme within this trophy. 

By the time you start to reach the latter teens upwards, things begin to start getting hectic, and there were a handful of occasions I was attempting the trophy where we got so deep into the rounds, we eventually got overwhelmed and lost the game by just waiting on the final area we needed excavation for, which was a huge frustration. This was combined with the game mechanics I have mentioned above also contributing to the experience. Imagine trying to scramble back to the starting area with the hacker, which requires you to abandon the P.E.S, so not only am I gradually losing oxygen and dying, I'm trying to dodge hordes or zombies with zero gravity movement as well as an NPC astronaut attempting to grab me. The further you get into the game with duplication of areas, the tougher it'll get, but even if you're lucky, you're probably looking towards the late teen rounds at the very minimum, so skill does play a fairly large part in obtaining these trophies because you'll need to prove you can advance this game mode.

I did thankfully have 2 very good players to help me through, and whilst you can do this trophy solo, I would recommend some competent players to help out if you can find them. It will significantly increase your chances of success if you're running these latter rounds with a good team by your side who can focus on clearing the hordes whilst you look after the excavation process whenever required to. It is possible solo, but I just don't think I'm at that level of being good enough to reach round 24 on my own.

This is the toughest trophy within the entire Blacks Ops DLC set, which subsequently makes this the toughest pack. I have no idea how many attempts this took me, due to the fact I've dipped in and out of Black Ops over the years so often, and it is incredibly demotivating to get close, battle so hard through so many rounds, and yet still fail - Which is mostly the reason I've always been in and out with this game, and that goes for ventures within some of the other DLC packs here too.

This is ultimately a strong 100% completion to have as part of the collection. Not only a challenging set of DLC lists, courtesy of a change in direction to the zombies mode trophies in comparison to their debut in World at War, but it's important to acknowledge the challenge that zombies also bought to this games main list before we got even more of it here for Blacks Op 1. More to follow for Blacks Ops 2...