The hack

First, the cheats

Generally we wouldn’t be concerned with mentioning, never mind reporting on cheats in a guide for a game but they are a very serious issue in Call of Duty. As far as we’re aware, there are only two hacks, one of which is a simple fog removal trick and the other is your standard OpenGL hack. For the purposes of this article, I downloaded the GL hack and took it for a spin on various servers, to test out its capabilities and limitations (also, my sincerest apologies to the people who died many unfair deaths while we tested out the capabilities of the hack).

The hack is relatively standard, with no fog, wallhack, “player ESP” (bright coloring on player models), ballhack (identifying all characters with a ball even across the map, without having to rely on wallhack), negative image, cube hack, sky ESP (replacing the sky with a high-contrast texture) and reticle (making sure you have a reticle of sorts even on servers without them).

Most of these are actually rather useless. The ballhack and cubehack both produce rather large objects which obscure your view – for all you know you may be shooting at a corpse or teammate. They’re also created near lights and certain other objects, so you don’t know if that’s a health pack dropped in team deathmatch, or someone crouching. The wallhack is particularly difficult to use since you it’s difficult to judge if someone is just beyond a wall, behind two, or right in front of you. However, when I had the cheats turned on in spectator mode and flipped through players, it was quite easy to see them reacting to characters they shouldn’t see (either through ball, cube or wall hacks.) It’s surprisingly difficult to tell though, if they’re cheating without having the cheat turned on ourselves.


The most useful cheat is the player ESP, or texture replacement. The texture replacement marks all players a bright, bright red with their weapons turning green. With this enabled, you can snipe from across a map, see someone’s gun poking through a window clearly, or part of their knee through a wall – things you simply couldn’t hope to spot in a normal situation. Worse, anyone using this seems like just a very good player; someone with amazing eyes and reflexes. Obviously if the cheater starts picking people off from all the way across hurtgen or rocket, he’s going to get busted, but in general you simply couldn’t tell who is using the hack and who’s really good - on most servers.