Call of Duty: Black Ops

I should have known from the start that buying Call of Duty: Black Ops was a mistake. I remember being all excited about World at War, then playing it and realising that whilst the story was ok, it was badly let down by shit AI, poor level design and weapons that only seemed to get worse the more you played it. 
 
To be honest, Black Ops is hardly any different. As with World at War, the story is linear, albeit fairly well thought out and entertaining, the weapons are varied but pointless, and the enemy and friendly AI is still as poor as Lionel Richie must be to have contemplated doing those Walkers ads.  
 
So, the story. I liked it. I felt like it was well written and acted for the most part, although I'm not sure if Mason was supposed to be English, Australian, South American or just plain retarded. I was engaged nearly all the way through, and the twists were well spaced and varied enough to keep it entertaining. Unfortunately that's where the good ends for the single player. 
  
Black Ops gives you a wide variety of weapons to pick up and use, should you want to. But why would you want to? For the most part, I found the weapon given to you at the beginning of each mission to be the best one to use for the given scenario you were put into, and I rarely switched out except to get the weapons the game forces you to pick up before it will let you out of a certain arena. In addition, the fast weapon-switch feature now only works if your second weapon is a pistol. This is a new addition for Black Ops, and differs from other COD games. This makes it nigh-on useless to be carrying a secondary that ISN'T a pistol, because on any difficulty setting higher than normal you'll probably be dead before you manage to get a round off. All this meant I only used about five guns all game.
 
As with other COD games, there are also a lot of attachments you could use, if you wanted. I used the GL, the flamethower and the ACOG. That's about it. The others all seemed superfluous, and if anything made me less adept at killing. I suppose it's nice to have them there, but I'd prefer if you actually saw a real benefit from using them.  
 
The gameplay tries to be varied as well, but for the most part fails at this. For example, there are times when your team (using the word loosely) circles wagons and you have to fight off infinite enemies for a while, and there's a few vehicle sections thrown in to break up all the first-person shooting. To be honest, I found these more tedious than the actual shooting itself as you're usually just using a ridiculous amount of firepower against people living in mud huts and using AKs. As with the weapon mods, I guess it's nice that they're in there, and that Treyarch are at least trying, but I thought they fell a bit flat.  
 
The best variation had to be the RTS-style guiding of a squad from a spy-plane. But sadly this was curtailed by the fact that Treyarch basically spoon-fed this entire section to you, leaving me feeling as if so much more could have been done.  
 
The AI gets a special mention, both friendly and enemy. Treyarch have obviously listened to feedback for World at War and tried to make the enemies much less grenade-happy on the higher difficulty settings, but when they've also given them the ability to shoot your cock off from 200 yards using a Makarov that change hardly seems worth the bother.  
 
There are a fair few infinite-enemy situations in Black Ops, and I for one hate these. If the only way to make a section difficult is to force the player to move forward into cripplingly accurate enemy fire, from enemies who are unlimited, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. I can't help but think Treyarch could have written the AI to use squad tactics - covering fire, flanking, etc - but they just could not be arsed, and knocked off early on a Friday instead.  
  
The friendly AI is equally useless. Honestly, what is the purpose of these goons? I'd rather the game just didn't bother, and made me some sort of superhero who saves the world all by himself. They constantly get in your way, always take the best spots of cover, don't move up until you trigger it by advancing yourself, utterly fail to give you any sort of covering fire whatsoever and run straight past enemies that are about to gun you in the head as you're trying frantically to reload. Also, if I hear Woods shout "You're getting gunned up!" one more time, I might track down the voice actor and throttle him personally. If you can see that I'm getting shot up, why not do something about it, you fucktard? Do you think I don't know that? That the ridiculous head-snap and the jam covering my screen didn't give it away? Shut up, you moron. 
 
Ahem. Rant over.
 
Overall I just felt as if the game was almost artificially hard - the situations weren't challenging, they were just unfair. Giving me teammates who actually do more harm that good is basically unforgivable, especially when the enemies I'm up against all appear to be descended from Vasily Zaitzev himself.  
 
So the singleplayer pretty much sucked, especially on the harder difficulty settings. I was glad I played it through to the end, because the story was worth it, just about. Just do yourself a favour and don't bother trying it on Veteran.  
 
The COD multiplayer is all there as you'd expect - ranks, weapon unlocks, attachments, blah blah blah. Although this time Treyarch have given you the option to only unlock stuff you actually want, with the result that I just made a class that I liked and then stuck with it, accumulating a stupid amount of COD points (currency) as I went. Some new game modes also make an appearance in the 'Wager Matches' section, which I actually really liked. In these matches you ante some of your COD points into a pot, and the top three players in the following game make a return. This makes for really well-balanced tension, and gives a sense of personal achievement when you win, especially as you have to join all of these matches solo. 
 
There are a lot of cool featurettes in Black Ops - the computer terminal in the corner is a tight little concept, but as for playing Zork on it? Amazing. I went out and bought a chatpad just so I could play it properly. Dead Ops Arcade is also worth a play, especially co-op. Finally, the Nazi Zombies make an appearance, giving more longevity for those people like me who eventually get bored of getting my ass handed to me by rank 70 fifteen-year old Korean girls. 
 
These easter eggs, and the multiplayer save this game, as it seems to with most COD games of recent times. For me though, a game should stand up by itself, and not because I'm drinking beer and screaming down a headset to a mate. If I have to make a game fun by playing it in a certain way, there is something fundamentally wrong with it. It's a shame, because I felt like Black Ops was rushed, and had so much more to give.