Treayarch's Finest
Call of Duty: Black Ops
What if every single story about secret happenings in the Cold War were true...and you actually did them yourself?
You play Alex Mason, preternatural badass as you traipse all over the hot spots of the Cold War, from Cuba to a Soviet prison camp all the way to Vietnam. Which makes this the first good game involving Vietnam in history, which is nice.
It's really difficult to discuss any aspects of the story without spoiling everything, but I will say that it is probably the best story of any of the CoD titles, which is probably damning with faint praise. The story starts off extremely haphazardly with plots unfolding and unwinding, but they do a solid job of managing to tie it all together nicely at the conclusion. And given how weird the story is, that the conclusion has any semblance of logic is no small feat.
The controls are, as usual, spot on. The AI's usefulness fluctuates widely from near-omnipotent to near-incompetent which gets annoying (in stealth missions, they set off alarms themselves half of the time). The guns are solid and the enemies...well, they become bullet sponges at higher difficulty levels. You get the usual CoD weapon set with lots of weapons with added features. But, the best addition, by a good margin, is the Dragon Fire shotgun, which is the strongest weapon I can remember in these games. An amazing weapon. You also get more of Treyarch's beloved flamethrower, but as usual, the flamethrower worked terribly. Enemies took an awful lot of FLAMES to die, which seems to defy any semblance of logic.
The online play is, well, classic CoD. It is what it is. I am definitely not saying that this game is bad. It is one of the great MP experiences out there. Quite possibly the best on the market. The money games in MP for CoD are an amazing
Treayarch added other features. The Zombie mode returns, but I am markedly less fond of it than I have been in the past. It just doesn't seem nearly as enjoyable as it was in World at War. They also include DOA Arcade, which is, basically, Smash TV with zombies. There is also Zork, which is just way the heck out of left field in this title.
CoD: Black Ops is a top tier CoD title. It probably is better than Modern Warfare, but I feel Treyarch tends to be a very iterative company. They seldom seem to innovate but rather just improve on what others have done. That is the case here. It is a better gaming experience than Modern Warfare 2 but I'm not feeling the same level of overall "Wow!" as I felt with Modern Warfare 2. This is, easily, the best game Treyarch has been involved with. And it's the best shooter of the year.
But the game of the year? Not so much.
