To me it's as good as it gets. It was originally supposed to be in World at War, but it was cut due to time constraints. Thankfully, Treyarch was able to finish it up – polish it up – and release it with Black Ops, because it was good… really good. So many iconic weapons, the layout is a perfect blend of simple and complex, and the enemies were all unique and fun to fight. Plus Kino had some of the best music in any zombies map ever which made it even more addicting to play through and grind over and over. Call me old school, but I think Kino is the absolute best zombies map ever released and I could play it a million times without ever getting bored.
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It’s IX for me. It’s perfectly set up for just basic survival.
I feel like the only thing Kino does right is be very simple and easy to onboard players with, which is a great thing since it was the big on disc launch map for BO1 that effectively built the community (I mean it was my first map, well technically second as I did beat the BO1 campaign and play 5 first but didn’t get very into the map as it was extremely difficult, which had me turn to Kino to build up my skills before moving on to other maps), but outside of that it doesn’t really do much to put itself above a lot of other maps. As a basic survival experience I feel like Der Riese is better with more iconic weapons (you can’t forget the PPSH, Thompson, MG42, Wonderwaffe, Browning, Flamethrower, Double Barrel, etc which were all great weapons and even in BO1 Der Riese has all the same great weapons of Kino plus some more), both great camping and training strats, an admittedly simple but actually relevant EE and story, and just way more innovation for its time. As anything but a basic survival experience Kino simply doesn’t participate or attempt. And as far as challenge or interesting mechanics go Kino is one of the easiest and simplest maps in the history of the mode meaning it basically isn’t in the conversation for these things.
To me, removing all my nostalgia from the experience, all of my memories of effectively discovering Cod zombies on this map, and just looking at it from the perspective of someone who was onboarded somewhere else in the mode with any other game I just can’t see how someone would put this as their best map of all time. Not that I’m judging you for this take, it just feels very unobjective and heavily biased by personal experience as opposed to actually looking at what this map has to offer compared to others and putting it on top still.