Black Ops 7's finest "sickos" dreamed up a truly terrifying new Zombies enemy, but things will get even "crazier" in Season 1

Black Ops 7's Zombies offering is Call of Duty's most tantalizing in years. Its debut round-based map, Ashes of the Damned, is an homage to Tranzit, which is firmly in my top three CoD Zombies experiences of all time. It's also the biggest round-based map ever made, and it reunites the main characters from Black Ops 6 Zombies with Dark Aether versions of the beloved quartet of Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo, and Richtofen. There are four ways to play in Zombies this year, with Standard and Directed modes being joined by Survival and Cursed, the latter of which throws things back to the feeling of earlier Black Ops games. Dead Ops Arcade also returns, bringing a top-down, fever-dream twist on proceedings. There's a lot on players' plates already, but Treyarch's creative director, Miles Leslie, tells me that it's just the beginning - "If you thought launch was crazy, it gets even crazier."

I went hands-on with Ashes of the Damned's Standard mode, played the first Survival map, and gave Dead Ops Arcade a spin too at a pre-launch event in London. When my Black Ops 7 review drops in the coming days, you'll get my full thoughts on how the new FPS game's entire Zombies package lands. For now, I'll summarize by saying that it isn't radically different from Black Ops 6 in terms of gameplay, but there are plenty of fun surprises thrown in.

In Ashes of the Damned and its mini Survival gauntlets, one such surprise is the Zursa. One of the freakiest Zombies foes I've seen in ages, it's a welcome shift away from the progressively more mutated, bipedal enemies we've come to know. This zombified bear is an aggressive, spongy swiper with beehive-like growths that deploy swarms of Zombees that chase you around the map and chip away at your health.

"You're in this sort of wilderness and Dark Aether smashed together, so what the hell would be chasing you?" says Leslie when I ask him where the inspiration for the Zursa came from. "And that's when the team goes off, and they're like, 'Well, what if it was a crazy ass bear?' […] The Zombies team is insane, a bunch of sickos. We love them, and they have amazing ideas about enemies, quests, and different ways to explore the environment."

A similar line of outside-the-box questioning resulted in one of the core mechanics of Ashes of the Damned - "'What happens if you could drive the bus'" in Tranzit? Leslie explains how the idea of controlling the bus spiraled into giving players Ol' Tessie, an upgradable pickup truck that Treyarch describes as a "Wonder Vehicle," making it as important and potent as Wonder Weapons. "It almost feels like another character," Leslie says. But if you're giving players such a powerful navigational tool, it only makes sense to give them a large space to explore. "That's how we get to the biggest map we've ever told," he explains. It's interesting that, according to Leslie, a domino effect of ideas resulted in the largest Zombies map ever, rather than that being the initial goal.

Cursed mode is also a big new addition to this year's Zombies offering. I say 'new,' but it is essentially a throwback to the more streamlined Zombies experience of past games that doubles up as a bigger challenge for hardcore fans. It's also joined by three other variations: Survival, a returning mode tasking you with surviving as long as you can in a small, cordoned off area of Ashes before giving you opportunities to extract every few rounds; Standard, which is the modern, round-based Zombies experience you've come to know; and Directed, which lends a larger hand in guiding players through the story beats, objectives, and secrets.

Leslie says that while this four-way approach allows Treyarch to "satisfy" players of all skill levels and experience, he also wants it to become something of a training scheme where you can use each mode to hone your skills and eventually "graduate" all the way to Cursed. "If Standard has been too much, I actually think Survival is a good way [to practise] because it simplifies things down. Yes, it gets hard, but it's a nice way to go [and learn]," he explains.

While Ashes of the Damned is a huge, striking map with some great new mechanics, I can't help but look ahead to the next big round-based map. Treyarch has dropped just one small look at the map coming in Black Ops 7 Season 1 - a screenshot of some elaborate machine in the centre of a star-lit observatory, and a developer comment saying that it's "out of this world." I push Leslie to see if there's anything else he can tease about it.

"If you thought launch was crazy, it gets even crazier," he says with a huge grin. "That is the only thing I can tell you. But Zombies fans, I will say you are going to be eating. We have heard you, and you're getting extra scoops of ice cream - all the toppings. There's some cherries on there. You're actually going to be full, and we're going to tell you to finish your dessert. Yeah, you better finish your plate."

So, big things are coming in Season 1, which is expected to begin in early December, but that gives you a few weeks to master Ashes of the Damned and have some laughs in Dead Ops Arcade (it's a hoot). Black Ops 6 had some highs and lows with its generous offering of Zombies content, and with BO7 promising even more, the real challenge will be consistency. Ashes seems like a strong starting point, but let's see if Treyarch can sustain that throughout the coming months.