When a double XP weekend kicked off this time last week in Black Ops 6, there was only one map my friends wanted to play: Stakeout, by far the smallest in BLOPS 6 that’s essentially one apartment. Call of Duty fans love small maps because it shrinks CoD’s already miniscule time-to-action from a couple of seconds to literally zero. Stakeout is sized as a 2v2 map, but it’s also in Face Off, a 6v6 playlist consisting entirely of small maps designed for maximum carnage.
Stakeout is just one of four maps you can get in Face Off, but it’s so popular that players regularly leave lobbies when it doesn’t appear. That dedication is probably why Treyarch created a Stakeout 24/7 playlist, an honor usually only bestowed to fan favorites like Nuketown, which just went live today.
I reckon Stakeout’s biggest appeal is in the brief: as the smallest map in the game, it has the highest XP potential. After just a few hours of (double XP) Face Off with friends last Saturday, I leveled up nine times and unlocked more attachments for guns than I had over days playing standard modes. So yes, if grinding Black Ops 6 mastery camos or leveling weapons is a priority, Stakeout 24/7 is the new best way to do that (though keep in mind there are no killstreaks in Face Off, so tune those classes accordingly).
That’s not all there is to Stakeout though, because I’m usually a small map hater, and even I like it. The map is very similar to Modern Warfare (2007)’s Shipment with its square-shaped footprint and straightaway kill lanes, but while I still maintain that Shipment is a bad map with too many exploitable sightlines, Stakeout takes the same blueprint and makes it way more fair and dynamic.
The first smart move with Stakeout was putting a roof over everyone’s head—this mitigates the effectiveness of grenade spam a lot. Then there’s the division of sightlines. The longest straightaways in Stakeout (the north and south hallways) don’t have a perfect line-of-sight from one end to the other. They can see a lot, but walls, doorways, or entire rooms prevent the common spawn camping you see in Shipment or Rust.
At the same time, there’s not anywhere to hunker down or hide. Every angle is exposed by at least two routes, and the same doorways that block line-of-sight are also lethal bottlenecks that manufacture multi-kills like nothing I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a map where you’ll sometimes respawn and immediately die—chalk that up to a combination of BLOPS 6’s generally poor spawns and small map realities—but it’s remarkably rare for a map that takes maybe three seconds to sprint across.
The single best thing that Stakeout does is give me options. No matter where I go in Shipment, I’m always a part of the central meat grinder. In Stakeout, the loop of hallways is a constant meat grinder, but there are also cool side paths that let me momentarily circumvent the chaos. There’s this really neat open terrace at the center of the map that you’d think would see constant traffic, but you have to shuffle through a bedroom on either side to get to it, and once you’re there, you have to shimmy along roof shingles to avoid a death pit. On the extreme edges of the map are mirrored balconies that form a competitive crossfire, and hidden in the ventricles of the south hall is a crouch-height ventilation shaft that connects two rooms.
This is just really fun, personality-forward map design that’s too easy to overlook. Shipment’s entire schtick is that it’s small and uncomplicated—which is fine if you’re the a Super Smash Bros. player who only accepts Final Destination/No Items—but Stakeout manages to fit in distinct spaces that encourage different playstyles. That’s what memorable map design is all about.
Stakeout 24/7 will be live in BLOPS 6 for at least the next week. Unfortunately there’s no double XP this weekend, but I’ll still be there.
