Season 6 of Warzone includes Call of Duty’s annual The Haunting event, and the spooky theme brings one of the battle royale’s most interesting limited-time modes. Purgatory isn’t your typical Warzone experience, but it’s a fun sandbox-style mode that feels like the perfect send-off for this final season of Modern Warfare 3. It’s also a refreshingly chill mode that should stick around long-term.
Purgatory is played with 10 squads of four battling on Season 6’s Hellspawn variant of Rebirth Island. The map’s hellish makeover includes an eerie sky, blood-red water, zombified NPC creatures, and flesh-covered walls, providing enough atmospheric changes here to get you in the Halloween spirit.
At first glance, it’s unclear what you’re supposed to do with your time in Purgatory. This is a sandbox mode with custom loadouts and infinite respawns, so there’s no real objective dictating how you play. This makes the mode great to play with friends while just chatting and completing challenges. Purgatory is perfect for finishing up your camo grind, completing daily or weekly challenges, or knocking out the seasonal Warzone Rewards objectives.
Purgatory also introduces some weird mechanics to Warzone that sound completely outlandish, but they all add to the unique character of the mode. There are mystical ball-shaped portals that you can use to teleport around the map, and giant killer balls called “Terriballs” that bounce around and you can shoot at enemies, causing the ball to smash into opponents and down them.
The Shipment multiplayer map floats as an island above Purgatory, and you can not only land on the island and fight opponents, but you can also drive the island. Yes, you literally pilot the Shipment map around the sky like a helicopter. This is as silly as it sounds, but it’s a lot of fun to take control of the island and cruise around looking for fights. Plus, it’s hilarious to see someone making Shipment do loop-de-loops in the sky.
This mishmash of new mechanics makes for a lot of quirky fun , like the awkward moment when you realize both you and an enemy are chasing after the same Terriball. It becomes a panicked scramble to make sure you’re not the one knocked out by the bouncing Terriball. Of course, some matches of Purgatory are still sweaty, with a lobby of players just hunting you down for kills, but others feature welcomed comradery as some players use the in-game chat feature to team up and help each other complete challenges. You can quietly and casually play much of a match without too much heat on you, but you also have the option to play more aggressively and build up a high Torment level.
The Torment level is shown below the minimap as a meter with five skulls, and the more kills you rack up, the higher the meter goes with a rating of 1-5 skulls. You earn more XP as your Torment level increases, but it also elevates the match difficulty. For example, reaching Torment Level 5 marks you on the map for all your opponents, and it sends an attack chopper to hunt you down. You can also lose your entire Torment level by dying or entering a safe zone, so this can be an intentional or unintentional loss of heat on the map. Again, just another welcomed mechanic that can shake things up and allow you to go for extra XP, but there’s no pressure to do so.
The hardest part of Purgatory might just be convincing your friends to play a full match. One of my biggest gripes about the mode is Purgatory’s two-hour match timer. This makes it longer than a Zombies or DMZ match, yet you don’t have a way to exfil and bow out early. On the positive side, leaving early doesn’t seem to tax you with any penalties. There’s usually a warning for attempting to leave a standard Call of Duty match early, reminding you that you’ll sacrifice the match XP if you exit early. I didn’t get that warning when I needed to leave a match of Purgatory, which is nice because two hours is a lot of time to commit to one match of Call of Duty.
The mode would feel more satisfying if you could exfil early or have an optional game-ending objective. If you stay the full time, the map just gets nuked and there are no winners declared or additional rewards offered. It just ends.
Of course, it’s worth noting that players are reporting some games are ending with a nuke animation before the match timer ends. I’ve not experienced this in any of my matches, and there doesn’t seem to be any hidden nuke challenge discovered.
Another minor complaint is that all of the contracts on the map are just the standard Warzone variety. It would’ve been nice to see something Halloween-themed or outside of the normal contracts added in like zombie-killing contracts or something of a spooky nature. Even a special bounty contract similar to the HVT contracts in Zombies mode, which require you to take out a special zombie type. It feels like a missed opportunity not to have Mangler, Mimics, and Disciple enemies from Zombies appear in Warzone. Even Zombies’ giant Abomination enemy would be cool to see lurking around on Rebirth Island.
Regardless of the flaws, I’ve spent a great deal of time racking up XP in Purgatory since Season 6 launched, and it makes me think a sandbox mode would be great to stick around, or at the very least, exist as a recurring mode. Call of Duty features an abundance of events and challenges that aren’t always easy to grind in Warzone, especially in the normal sweaty playlists with limited respawns, and this would serve as a great option for those who don’t own the yearly Call of Duty releases. It doesn’t even have to remain on the spooky Hellspawn variant of Rebirth Island–Warzone’s larger Urzikstan map would also be great to host a larger sandbox-style experience and seasonal events.
The Haunting event runs until October 16, and I highly recommend this mode for anyone looking for a spooky, fun way to level up and finish up any challenges before Season 6 ends. And while there’s no real winning in Purgatory, you do have several Purgatory Island event themed rewards to earn in the process, including some really sweet-looking animated weapon camos.
This is the final season of Modern Warfare 3 as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 arrives on October 25 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.
