CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS:
POSTED BY ANTHONY OSULLIVAN
DATE : 13.11.2010.
INTRODUCTION
Another year another Call of Duty game, surrounded by all the usual hype and expectations Black ops is the 7th in the series and this year it comes from Treyarch the
guys behind World at War rather than Infinity Ward the guys behind the far superior Modern Warfare titles.
CAMPAIGN
Black Ops is set in the Cold War time period from just after the Second World War and on into the 60’s. The story features a Black Ops soldier trying to piece together flash backs while under interrogation from some mysterious dark figures.
With each different flash back you are thrust into an increasingly impossible situation, that you seem to be able to get out of quite easily, fighting off hundreds of highly trained soldiers that offer you little resistance other than to offer themselves up as cannon fodder in sequences that would make the worst James Bond film writers blush.
Because the story is so poor you find silly things like high tech equipment suddenly appearing before your eyes in the most unlikely of places. For example one sequence you have to shoot down a rocket that has just been launched and magically a highly volatile, remote guided surface to air missile launcher just magically appears right before your eyes, and where is this high tech expensive piece of equipment stored? In an old power generator at the back of the enemies base? Bizarre
Fans of the series may point that Call of Duty is never based in reality that’s more Medal of Honor’s style but at the same time it just shows such lack of imagination on the part of the writers. They even stole a section from Modern Warfare 2 replacing an escape on snow mobiles with an escape on motor bikes! It really isn’t good enough for a game with such a high price tag.
Large portions of the game are cut scenes or almost an “on rail shooter”. Where you have little or no control over the character other than maybe aiming the cross hairs. This makes a very short unimpressive single player mode even less enjoyable.
The single player mode is also littered with glitches, we often let glitches slide in huge games as in Fable 3 or Fallout 3 where the sheer scale of the game prevents the developers from ironing out everything. But when it comes to a game with only one path to take and little or no options for the player to change the story line it is inexcusable. It is made even worse when you consider they have worked on the game for 2 years and that this game was sold at a premium costing €10 euro more than a standard new release you would expect it to work.
MULTIPLAYER
The multiplayer and Zombies modes are a lot better though which is the games only saving grace. That is of course when you are able to get into a working online game. You only need to check out the forums to see that the community is having a lot of trouble with the online aspect of the game. Over the last 5 days I’ve have been able to fully complete only one game without having some sort of trouble with either joining games, migrating hosts, loosing connections or total disconnects. This is really inexcusable yes it can be patched but this is what Beta testing is about, working out all these issues and its not like this is something new to them this is the 7th title in the series for goodness sake. As you can see the online side of the review has been limited, as I along with many others have simply not been able to get enough game time with it.
Again this year the game is littered with glitchers and cheaters. I’ve seen comments from the developers condemning these cheaters and while I don’t like the cheating it has to be said that if the developers built a game that worked they couldn’t cheat. It’s that simple.