Our First Look At Call Of Duty: Black Ops’ Escalation Map Pack

Here’s our first look at Call of Duty: Black Ops’ Escalation map pack, due out next month for the Xbox 360 and some later time for the PC and PS3.

The map pack will run you 1200 Microsoft points like the first map pack.

This video walks us through what to expect from this latest downloadable content for the game. Here’s a quick rundown:

“With every map pack that we add to the game it is very important to us that we provide a lot of variety to players,” said Dan Bunting, Online Director at Treyarch

Zoo takes place in an abandoned Soviet zoo. The map includes a monorail track that you can get up onto and use to walk most of map. The rail also sounds like a great sniping position.

Hotel was inspired by the vistas of Havana. There are a lot of flank paths and places to hide, the Treyarch folks say. A second floor can be accessed only by a set of elevators which sounds like a neat chokepoint to the sniping positions.

Convoy is retro America. The map is built around the premise that a United States convoy was hit by a Soviet ambush. Part of the level includes a damaged road that gives you access to a bit of underground.

Stockpile takes place in a suburban village in Russia that is also home to a stockpile of weapons. The middle of the village has an operational garage which Treyarch says is the key to the map. You can open and close the doors and then use the position to hold the entire map.

While it looks like these maps offer a nice range of settings and close combat and sniping positions, I’m a little bummed that they’re not providing as many twists as the First Strike map pack.

Treyarch is also keeping the details of the single zombie map addition hush hush. We know the new map will be called Call of the Dead and the quick glimpse you catch of it in the opening of the video seems to show a lighthouse and perhaps a frozen ship.

More details are bound to drop as we approach the May 3 launch of this latest expansion pack.