With Black Ops 4 bringing Call of Duty right back into the public eye, we’ve dedicated ourselves to accomplishing the (almost) impossible task of ranking the best Call of Duty maps. With 16 games and plenty of DLC maps to choose from, this was no easy task. While this list represents the best of the best in multiplayer Call of Duty maps, there were plenty that we felt pained to leave out of the running. We’ve tried to gather together a list featuring memorable locations that either bring out the best for particular play-styles, are perfectly balanced for anything, or stick out as particularly fun. From Shipment and Rust, to Castle and Raid, here are the best Call of Duty maps!
Best Call of Duty Maps – Hijacked
The best Call of Duty games have a good mixture of close and long-range combat maps available. Black Ops 2 got the balance just right and featured several of the most memorable maps in the series’ history. Hijacked is a perfect little location. You fight atop a luxury cruiser, with hot tubs, master bedrooms, and even an “underground” system of tight corridors. It’s hectic, sure, but with a touch of class. Best get out those submachine guns and shotguns for this one, because you’ll need them.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Brecourt/Wasteland
Before Modern Warfare made Call of Duty the envy of its peers in online multiplayer, there were online multiplayer modes in the original three games. Call of Duty 2 featured a couple of the very best. Brecourt is one such map. It’s huge and has players fighting in trenches placed around a massive hedgerow, with a farm building to spice things up a little. Dangerous open spaces, cramped trenches, and frantic building fights await. A great battleground for all sorts of weaponry, this. Just trying to reach the farm was fruitless, mind you. Brecourt saw new life in Modern Warfare 2 as Wasteland.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Slums
Slums is so good it has appeared in three Call of Duty games, including the recently released Black Ops 4. Many streets are crammed into a small area here, with a statue dominating the center of the Panamanian streets. There are plenty of sneaky hiding spots for snipers and campers wielding shotguns scattered throughout the area. There is a lot going on with plenty on offer for any type of combat, a perfectly balanced map for the Call of Duty ages. Try hiding on top of a washing machine, or van, for the ultimate camping experience!
Best Call of Duty Maps – Raid
Raid is another returning Black Ops 2 map in Black Ops 4, and with good reason. The luxurious futuristic Hollywood Hills apartments and entertainment options make for an incredible map. Want to hide in a juice bar? Relax in a floating pool? Or do you just want to start relaxing, maxing, and acting all cool, shooting some b-ball outside of school? Whatever you want to do, you can in Raid. As with Hijacked, Raid is great fun for all you close-quarters combat obsessed CoD players out there.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Castle
World at War did something the (at the time) World War II obsessed franchise hadn’t done up to that point: include Japan. We’re very glad it did, because Castle wouldn’t have existed otherwise. This Imperial Japanese beauty is a visually striking setting in a game full of browns, greens, and greys. There are five main areas in the castle to battle across. The Dojo, Supply Area, Main Stairs, Watchtower, and Roof across the Dojo. Honestly, whatever loadout you head into Castle with, you’ll be able to give the enemy a good crack. It offers plenty of opportunity for whatever playstyle you can think of. Want to snipe for example? Head on over to the Watchtower, although there will likely be plenty of enemies attempting the very same thing. Our choice for this map was to throw on an MP40 and a couple of grenades and go gung-ho in the middle, that should stop those pesky snipers ever reaching their beloved Watchtower.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Standoff/Outlaw
Black Ops 2 makes yet another entry into our list. Standoff sees you enter into the fight between China and Kyrgyzstan. It’s a medium-sized map with more sniping spots than you can shake a stick (grenade) at. Dozens of open buildings scatter the landscape, overlooking an open street. There is ample opportunity for frantic close-quarters combat and distance shooting here. You can do very well on this map. Standoff was remade as Outlaw as part of the Black Ops 3 Salvation DLC pack.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Throwback
While Infinite Warfare may have pushed the series’ futuristic elements a little too far, Infinity Ward did a great job with its maps. There were a number of Infinite Warfare maps we could have included, but at the end of the day, one stands above the rest. Throwback, err, throws us into a futuristic vision of what 1950s USA looked like, a neat turnaround of the traditional future-town sci-fi trope. There’s so much going on in Throwback, with plenty of fighting styles and quick-thinking needed to survive and thrive. Just try to avoid the center of the map (enclosed within two open buildings) for crying out loud!
Best Call of Duty Maps – Rust
Rust has been a fan-favorite ever since its introduction back in Modern Warfare 2. Despite its small size, the massive structure in the middle could be manipulated to great effect, especially in custom game modes. Matches on Rust were often dominated by the first player to string a killstreak together, but the best matches happened when nobody managed to do so and the game become all-out-chaos. From AC130s with Danger Close Pro, to 1v1s with the stranger who killed you in Search and Destroy, Rust was the stomping ground of those seeking to prove themselves as the best player around town.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Shipment
Shipment offered players an experience that is unparalleled in first-person-shooters to this day. Debuting in Call of Duty 4, Shipment is not just a small map in terms of its surface area. The shipment containers in the middle of the map create a sort of four-way intersection that invites the most hectic of gunfights in the smallest space possible, as the already tiny map is made even smaller by the unplayable space beneath them. Within ten seconds, you can die five times, or get five kills. It’s down to the luck of the draw really, and that’s half the fun.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Bog
Bog—a map for all kinds of players. Whether you exclusively used the M40A3 or were a run’n’gun time, Bog was a map that all kinds of players could excel on. Perhaps the best game mode on Bog was Domination, as the coveted B flag lighted fools the way to dusty death on both sides. As a linear map with lots of cover, Bog had balanced flank routes that were equally as defensible as they were susceptible to attack. Whichever team managed to get the first Attack Helicopter up always earned an early advantage, but the tide could change in a moment on Bog, making it one of the most dynamic maps in the franchise.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Vacant
Perhaps the best thing about Vacant is how well-suited it was to all manner of game modes. In Domination, the first fight for Vacant’s B flag almost always resulted in the death of an entire team. In Search and Destroy, the open warehouse between both teams often became the arena of a game of wits, as each prone soldier sought to get the jump on the other. Even Free-for-All was fantastic on Vacant, as the many blind corners regularly instigated close-combat encounters between four players at a time. Grenades worked wonders on Vacant, as the best way to get out of an unfavorable position was to bombard the enemy team with ricocheted projectiles. Vacant was dynamic, versatile, and utterly brilliant.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Nuketown
Nuketown from Black Ops is many people’s favorite map of all time, and for good reason. This map has character to burn, as its bright colors and simplistic design are juxtaposed with the absolute chaos imbued in its very core. Players could attempt to take control of one of the buildings on either side, but the spawns on Nuketown were so erratic that players needed to be ready for an attack from any direction at any given time. As a result, Nuketown saw players running around like headless chickens, waving automatic rifles above their heads in a dance of bullets and attack dogs. After every match played on Nuketown, the town really did look as if it had been hit by a nuke.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Terminal
Terminal debuted in Modern Warfare 2 and later reprised its role as one of the greatest maps in the Call of Duty franchise in Infinite Warfare. An iconic map, Terminal’s diverse design made every match on it different from the last. Whereas one game could see a player lock down the plane with an RPD, another could see a ghillie in the mist dominating from behind the metal detectors. In kill-based game modes, even the bookshop in the middle of the map became a modern day Colosseum. Terminal always offered something new without compromising the familiarity imbued in its brilliant design. Also, you could blow up flammable containers to take out people on the high ground who thought they were hard.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Dome
Another teeny-tiny map, Dome was a map built around a dome… of death. Absolute chaos ensued every time Dome was loaded up in World at War, regardless of the game mode. The map was later remade in Modern Warfare 3, perpetuating the hectic cycle of death surrounding it. Despite being small, Dome offered players lots of great cover behind the many burnt out vehicles scattered across the terrain, and was different to other small maps like Rust and Shipment. Unlike these maps, Dome had a relatively large indoor section, safe from the threat of aerial killstreak rewards and filled to the brim with obstacles to hide behind. It was chaotic, but that didn’t mean that you couldn’t strategize.
Best Call of Duty Maps – Crash
Crash had it all. Verticality, cover, tight spaces, sniper spots, flank routes—this could well be the most versatile map in the history of Call of Duty. Known for its infamous “Winter Crash” aesthetic, Crash appeared in Call of Duty 4 and was remastered for Modern Warfare 2. A popular map, players rarely saw the day that Crash was beaten in a pre-game vote—aside from when the elusive Shipment or Rust came up, that is. Crash is widely considered to be the greatest map ever featured in a Call of Duty game, which is a difficult claim to argue against. Similarly to Terminal, playing on Crash three times in a row would yield three entirely different outcomes. That’s the beauty of Crash. Despite its different iterations, the one thing you could always count on was a crazy match like none you had played before.
