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    Call of Duty: Black Ops

    Game » consists of 19 releases. Released Nov 09, 2010

    The seventh installment of the long-running action franchise, Call of Duty: Black Ops puts players into the early era of the Cold War (including the Vietnam War) as a member of the United States black operations unit known as the SOG.

    keeng's Call of Duty: Black Ops (PlayStation 3) review

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    Review-Call of Duty: Black Ops

     I understand that the Call of Duty franchise wasn’t made for me. There are certainly a few first person shooters I love, but I’ve never really enjoyed a game in this series. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a fantastic game both as a single player experience and revolutionary online time sink. Its sequel, Modern Warfare 2 is even better at keeping players attached to its online game and features a fantastic co-op addition in Spec-Ops mode, despite the…ridiculous single player campaign. I respect those two games enormously and they deserve their spots among the elite shooters of the world. That said, Call of Duty: Black Ops is a joke.

    On the surface, it’s another CoD game. Black Ops maintains the series’ iconic 60 frames per second, addictive multiplayer, and intense, over-the-top single player story. Developer Treyarch nailed the checklist and even remembered to bring back their Zombies co-op mode, which was easily the most interesting part of Call of Duty: World at War, their last title. They clearly know the formula but their execution is flawed here, to say the least.

    The single player Call of Duty experience is all about the action set pieces. Fans have come to expect every single nuke to detonate, every helicopter to be shot down (especially if you’re in it), and every ally to be brutally murdered at the least-opportune time. The difference is the recent CoD games are absolutely excellent at nailing these moments from a technical perspective. In Black Ops, 99% of the intense scripted scenes just didn’t work. Halfway through the game, I was laughing out loud every time the game instructed me to start a rappelling sequence because my character’s hands and body would clip through just about everything. At one point I was stuck controlling the rope I had just climbed down.

    The issues with set pieces don’t stop at the technical level. Actually, the biggest issue here is how these moments are implemented. Black Ops is disgustingly obvious about its scripted events. From start to finish, the game feels like it’s about running around triggering cutscenes. You’ll deal with enemies that spawn forever until you walk across some invisible line. It’s common for the game to kill you if you stray too far in a certain direction or don’t move forward as fast as it wants you to. It’s as though Treyarch wanted to deliver that “roller coaster” feel from the last few games so badly that they would’ve been better off making a rail-shooter.

    Perhaps that explains why sometimes Black Ops is a rail shooter! There are about five-too-many vehicle segments in the single player campaign and most of them are terrible. The segments want you to move along a very strict path and keep the fire button held down. These sequences are as mindless as possible and they really just get in the way of what players are here for: intense shootouts and a dramatic story.

    Unfortunately, this Call of Duty entry only delivers on the former. This time around, the story is quite ambitious. Black Ops focuses on a man named Alex Mason: a soldier who has seen so much combat, it’s amazing he can still stand up straight. Essentially, he’s being interrogated by a mysterious group about a broadcast of numbers. Needless to say, he has no idea where the numbers are coming from or what they mean so it’s up to the player to go through his various flashbacks of the last few years. It’s an interesting, refreshing storytelling style which could definitely fit well with a Call of Duty game if it’s implemented better than it is here. In Black Ops, it’s just an excuse to throw random combat situations at the player. After about the two-hour mark, the setup for each level is just like this:

    Interrogator: Mason! What do the numbers mean!

    Mason: I don’t know anything about the $%^*@# numbers!

    Interrogator: Think! Remember that time you were in a tank that fell off a bridge into a giant shark’s mouth?!

    Mason: Yeah (sigh)… lost a lot of good men that day…

    *cue flashback*

    Eventually it gets to the point that Mason has a flashback of being lectured by a person who then has his own series of flashbacks which you, of course, get to play. It’s hilarious but it’s also terrible. To top it off, the culmination of the whole numbers story arc is an entirely deflating walking sequence. Afterwards, the game wraps up with what has to be the worst quick time event ever followed by a meaningless final camera cut before the credits roll. When it’s all over, you’ll either be laughing at how terribly the game came together or staring in disbelief that Treyarch thought it was okay for this game to end this way. The last five Call of Duty games have reached silly levels of intensity in single player but they were silly and awesome. This one just feels stupid.

    There’s still multiplayer, though. It’s almost impossible to criticize the award-winning online experience each CoD delivers on. All of the familiar modes are present here and Treyarch even added a few features propelling Black Ops to just below Modern Warfare 2’s level of addictiveness. Among those additions, players should most appreciate the theatre mode. It’s been done before in many other shooters now, but it’s incredibly appropriate for Call of Duty because there are so many insane moments in a multiplayer match. Another significant change is the addition of CoD Points. They’re basically a currency earned in multiplayer games used to buy the things you would previously unlock in other CoD titles by simply leveling up. The positive side here is you don’t have to be too concerned about your preferred attachments or perks being unavailable until you hit a really high level. The downside is most people play Call of Duty in a very specific, unchanging way. Players will most likely buy all the pieces they need to tailor to their play styles early on and ignore the other 7000 things they could be unlocking. It has the potential to kill any sense of reward very early on.

    There’s a lot to complain about with Call of Duty: Black Ops, but there’s really one major point to care about here: Black Ops is the best Call of Duty experience outside of the Modern Warfare series because it nails the multiplayer side and has the most online players. If you’re a die-hard CoD fan, you can’t miss this game. If you’re fortunate enough to be familiar with other shooters on the market (Killzone, Resistance, etc.) understand that you won’t be missing anything if you chose not the settle for this.

    Played the game not as a fan but as an experienced “veteran” of the series and the genre. Completed single player. Played 10+ hours of online multiplayer and four hours of Zombies mode.

    Hubert Davis

    Other reviews for Call of Duty: Black Ops (PlayStation 3)

      A classic formula, done well. 0

      Call of Duty is becoming like a holiday. We've been getting one of these every year around the same time and it's hard to be unique when you're just filling a status-quo that consists of: campaign, multiplayer, and an extra mode.  While Black-Ops does do some new and interesting things with the status-quo, the end result is an entertaining game that's well made, but not very memorable.   Everything you expect from a Call of Duty campaign is here. There's an air vehicle sequence, a land vehicle s...

      12 out of 13 found this review helpful.

      failed game of the year 0

      this game is as ruined as a call of duty can get. it a week of playing it ive smashed 3 controllers and almost thrown my ps3 out the window. the bs in this game reaches massive levels. i hope activision never lets treyarch make a call of duty again because just  like world at war, they screwed up bad. i fail to understand how the graphics got worse from modern warfare 2 to black ops, how the gameplay got worse, how just everything about it got worse. the only reason i bought it was because moder...

      1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

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