After over a decade and a half, Call of Duty Zombies is still going strong. There’s a massive library of Zombies maps, which are playable across several games. Whether you’re looking to brush up before CoD 2024, play the mode for the first time, or get friends and family hooked, here are the best Call of Duty Zombies maps for beginners.
Best Beginner Call of Duty Zombies Maps
Die Maschine
As the launch map for Black Ops Cold War, Die Maschine is designed to onboard beginners. Die Maschine serves as a perfect introduction to modern Zombies. This is the first map in the current Dark Aether storyline, so there isn’t the baggage of lore to get in players’ way.
All the fundamentals of Zombies are present here. Perks, Pack-a-Punch, and Wonder Weapons are all present and easily accessible. Turning on the power for the map and building the Pack-a-Punch machine are a fairly straight forward process. Better yet, the HUD guides you toward these objectives. Players can get set up to buy perks, armor, and weapon upgrades fast. The Mystery Box spawns in one of two open areas in each match and is full of weapons of various rarity. The best are the ever-elusive Ray Gun and D.I.E. Shockwave Wonder Weapons.
Die Maschine’s design is simple, which makes it a great entry point for beginner players. The map is small but varied, with areas that serve every play style. There are great defensible positions, including the roof of the main building. The wing of the crashed plane is the perfect ramp to hold out on top of if you prefer to let enemies come to you. There are also some fairly open areas, which are great for running in circles and training the Zombies behind you. Forgivingly, this includes the spawn area. If you are looking for Easter Eggs, this map also has a straight-forward main quest which is a great place for beginners to start hunting for secrets.
The Giant
This remake of Der Reise is far more forgiving in Black Ops 3 than in any of its previous appearances. In Black Ops 3, zombies need three successive hits on a player to down them, rather than two like in World at War and Black Ops. This version of the map also includes the Double Tap 2.0 perk, which doubles the damage of all bullet weapons. The rest of what made this map so accessible in prior entries still stands.
The Giant has everything players need to survive, and nothing they don’t. The map is centered around a mainframe where players spawn. Two paths branch out of the area and lead to a courtyard with the map’s power switch. The main goal players will have in The Giant is to link three Teleporter machines to the mainframe, which will then open up the Pack-a-Punch machine.
One of the things that makes The Giant so friendly to new players is the abundance of holdout spots. At the top of a large staircase, there is a catwalk where players can stay put and have a good chance to defend themselves. Here, zombies only come at you from the front. This is my all-time favorite strategy to reach high rounds in Call of Duty Zombies. T
here are also electric traps around the map which instantly kill zombies who walk through them. The map’s wonder weapon, the Wunderwaffe DG-2, is also electricity-based. This gun fires a lightning bolt that will chain to a group of zombies. It is always lethal, regardless of enemy health. This weapon has saved me and my squad from hordes hundreds of times over the years.
Kino Der Toten
Kino der Toten was many players’ intro to Zombies since it came packaged with the original Black Ops. Over a decade later, this is still one of the best places to hone your skills in the whole franchise.
Where The Giant is about holding down an area, Kino der Toten is a map focused on movement. Set in a long-abandoned theater, the stage is where folks want to be. Granted, there are useful weapons and Perks between there and spawn. However, it is once you get to the stage the gameplay loop truly begins.
Once you turn on the power at the stage, the curtains will lift. This reveals a Teleporter, linkable to a mainframe in the starting room. Once active, it can take players to the safety of the projection room which houses Pack-a-Punch. We recommend buying and upgrading the weapon on the wall next to the power switch. This is a decent rifle with readily available ammo.
The stage is a massive open area. It’s here that the popular strategy of “training” was born. The strategy is to run around in circles until a massive horde of zombies gathers behind you and kill them all at once with the weapon of your choice. Of course, the Thunder Gun – this map’s Wonder Weapon – is the best option. This strategy can take players into high rounds and helped me build confidence in moving through a map with zombies on my tail. There’s no better way to learn the behavior of the AI in Call of Duty Zombies than to have them chase you around Kino der Toten’s stage.
Nacht Der Untoten
Debuting in 2008’s Call of Duty: World at War, Nacht Der Untoten is the most basic Zombies map ever. As the first map to ever release for the mode, this is a great entry point for beginner players. This map, set in a small bunker with three rooms, is as barebones as you can get. Players only have to worry about defending against zombies and getting better guns to do so. That is it. There are no Perks, Pack-a-Punch, or Easter Egg quests. The progression of this map is simply to gamble on the Mystery Box for better weapons.
Nacht Der Untoten’s pacing is perfect for beginners. Zombies spawn far from the bunker, so the first few rounds are very slow. Zombies will take a while before they reach the barricaded windows they tear down to enter the map. This gives players a chance to familiarize themselves with the map, and purchase a better weapon from the chalk drawings on the wall. Around the fifth or sixth wave, zombies get faster and will run after players. The action gets a lot faster and more frenetic here. By this point, players should have opened the door to find the Mystery Box, full of better weapons for increasingly difficult waves.
While Nacht’s barebones design doesn’t enable players to reach high rounds, it enables players to get a sense of the mode’s fundamental basics. On this map, there’s nothing distracting them from defending against hordes of Nazi Zombies.
