It’s weird to think of Call of Duty as an underdog. It was once the world’s biggest entertainment franchise, earning billions of dollars every year for its publisher Activision. But in recent times the military shooter has fallen out of favour, usurped by the bright, glossy thrills of Overwatch and Destiny and the more family-friendly multiplayer charms of Minecraft and Fortnite.

At first glance, Black Ops 4 looks like a sad anachronism, desperate for relevance. The single-player campaign has been jettisoned, leaving us with just the multiplayer experience. Or, more accurately, three experiences: the traditional CoD array of deathmatches and domination matches; Zombie mode, in which four players attempt to survive as long as possible against ultimately insurmountable undead hordes; and the new Blackout mode, a variation on the battle royale genre explored so successfully by Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).

We get the incredible speed, fluidity and weapons diversity of the CoD lineage grafted brilliantly on to the battle royale template, where 100 players parachute into an enclosed environment and keep on killing each other until only one survives. The map is tight but scenically varied, taking in construction sites, railway stations and beautiful modernist mansions, and, unlike Fortnite’s theme-park world, it all feels naturalistic. This adds a tension that is reminiscent of PUBG, but Blackout mode adds Call of Duty perks such as silent movement, increased health and the ability to spot loot through walls. This adds tactical depth to the battles, especially as the map reduces in size, forcing players into desperate last-second engagements.

The multiplayer maps are tight but scenically varied. Photograph: Activision

It is frantic, exhilarating and enormous fun with friends. Creeping through deserted buildings and along quiet highways, trying to cover every angle while spotting untouched buildings to scavenge from, is deliciously tense. The gunfights, powered by a huge range of guns and grenades, have the traditional turbo-lethality of the CoD series – one second you and your teammates are healthy and relaxed, the next, two of you are down and the others are desperately searching for where the machine gun fire is coming from. Add in the pilotable helicopters and you have a game that truly blasts its own stamp on the battle royale playing field. I can count the number of times I’ve helplessly cried with laughter while playing a video game, and attempting to hide in a tiny bathroom with three friends to avoid much more skilled players in Blackout was definitely one of them.

Meanwhile, Zombies provides a selection of short narrative challenges to get involved with. My favourite is Voyage of Despair, a steampunk-infused gallop around a sinking ocean liner, where the undead surge from cabins while you desperately search for better weapons. The maps are riddled with secrets, traps and easter eggs, and part of the fun is exploring and working out new ways to evade your stumbling, rotting enemies. The visual design is lovely, the environments are labyrinthine and interesting, and there are some decent quips from the cabal of weird characters. When playing with friends, there is a brilliant interplay of camaraderie and selfish panic.

The traditional multiplayer mode offers Team Deathmatch, Control (which sees teams taking it in terms to protect two key points on each map), a selection of capture-the-flag derivatives and newcomer Heist, a taut, round-based, no-respawn challenge where teams compete to grab and extract a bag of cash. This is the raw, unreconstructed CoD experience: super-fast-paced online shooter action, where most players will move through the spawn-die-respawn cycle at hypnotic speed, as though trapped in an internal combustion engine of military horror. The maps are decent, ranging from the souks and crumbling courtyards of Morocco to the pulverised Japanese cityscape of Gridlock, and the slick 60 frames-per-second animation never falters. But there is nothing astounding here, and public servers always have been and always will be dominated by blank-eyed 14-year-olds with snake-like reaction speeds. The experience is a bit like gambling in a sleazy casino – fun and exciting, as long as you know you’re gonna lose.

Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII is a strange game, at once harking back to its past, tampering with the present and thinking about the future. Its merging of narrative, co-op and competitive multiplayer experiences tells us where big-budget games are invariably heading – toward vast, streamed, super-monetised entertainment platforms. Activision is yet to add any sort of loot system or in-game store to Black Ops 4, but you can bet it’s coming. While it definitely takes ideas from PUBG, Fortnite and Overwatch in its “specialist” characters with unique skills, this is very much the familiar CoD experience: responsive controls, incredible speed, varied and well-balanced weapons, frenetic yet nuanced engagements.

It’s like when Porsche started making SUVs: they kind of work like other successful offroad vehicles but they are unmistakably Porsche in the way they look, feel and handle. It may not tear anyone completely away from Overwatch or Fortnite, but it offers a tactically rich alternative for players who want something with more grit, naturalism and sweaty peril. It is perhaps strange, perhaps even guilt-inducing, to take such pleasure from a game that wears its gung-ho military fetishism as a badge of honour, but as it stands this is the most enjoyable Call of Duty game for several years.