The Call of Duty Series is one of the double-edged swords of the gaming world; it is both wildly entertaining and murderously frustrating. This new edition proves to be no less entertaining and frustrating than its predecessors. Here's the breakdown:
The Campaign
The story for Black Ops is one of the best of any Call of Duty in the series. It keeps you guessing and was well developed. Without the storyline they chose, the campaign's game play flaws would be too much to overlook. Being the type of gamer that needs to play through the entire campaign before venturing into multiplayer, I would have quit the campaign after the second mission because of the glitches, had it not been for the story.
The AI characters are flawed in the worst way possible; they become stuck on or behind objects and in many cases the AI's progression through the map is needed to further you to the next checkpoint. I was forced to restart missions three times during my first play through because the AI became lodged on something and I couldn't progress to the next checkpoint. To add to this problem, the enemies constantly respawn so if the AI is stuck and you aren't aware, you could end up fighting wave after wave of enemies while waiting for a checkpoint that will never come.
The enemy respawn rate is another annoying problem. In many of the Call of Duty campaigns your character is able to shoot an enemy, move forward, take cover, and shoot some more. This campaign, however, has an enemy respawn time that is so rapid, regular difficulty feels like veteran. It's almost a penalty to take cover and regain health because if you do there are twenty more enemies in front of you. It just becomes frustrating and tedious.
The Mutilplayer
Most people who buy Black Ops do so for the multiplayer aspect alone. This mode offers endless hours of replay and is really what the game is all about. The different modes for multiplayer are like any other Call of Duty but Treyarch decided to do some tinkering and added Wager Matches as well as special lobbies for people who have entered Prestige Mode to the mix.
The Wager Matches offer new ways to earn and lose COD Points, which act as money, and offer new ways to brag to your friends. The Prestige lobbies are also a nice addition because they help weed out some of the more irritating players that believe "Prestiging" make you better than everyone else, when mostly it means you've been playing longer. These lobbies allow "Prestiger" to play together instead of with low level players.
The customization of guns and player cards are also great new features. The guns customizations are purchased through COD Points which allows you to get gun attachments that you prefer early in the game. While you do have to unlock some of gun additions by leveling up, many attachments and guns are available early in the game.
The maps in multiplayer lose their charm quite fast once you realize that every room you enter has three other entrances, making it difficult to safely hole up to snipe or use killstreak rewards. The maps are also nearly all medium size, making sniping obsolete. The Zombie Mode also suffers from this map flaw. There are far too many points of entry in all of the maps and the fact that you get one claymore per life to protect yourself makes the maps that much more frustrating. I assume, however, that in a few months there will be an overpriced map pack released that will have better maps.
Two other added features to mutiplayer are theater mode and split screen multiplayer. Theater Mode allows you to watch your previous matches from the perspective of any player in the game and take screenshots. It's a nice feature, I admittedly don't use it much, but I can see how one might like it. The split screen multiplayer on the other hand was, I feel, not well thought out. The feature allows for a guest to log in and play online with you like Halo and Left 4 Dead. It's a nice idea but it doesn't work for this game. I found that when playing with a guest online your view is vastly limited and it caused the graphics to lag to the point of unplayability.
The Graphics
I am not a graphics expert, nor do I pretend to be but I can tell when something looks good and when it doesn't and the graphics in Black Ops are mediocre. It seems as if they just recycled all of the graphics from Call of Duty: World at War. The textures of the ground look as if the designers didn't even try and the leaves and trees look bulky and clumped together. The multiplayer graphics look like a standard Call of Duty game but the campaign graphics just look old to me.
Overall
Despite the bad aspects of the game, I do enjoy playing it and I think Treyarch achieved what they were going for, for the most part. This game is ultimately a mutiplayer game, it is meant for online play and if you liked the past Call of Duty games this one will not disappoint.
Jessica Matheny - I am a Fiction and Non-Fiction writer. One day I will live in California and work for a game production company. One day you will ...
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