Always Online, No Pausing And No Checkpoints Make This The Worst ‘Call Of Duty’ Ever Made

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7

Credit: Activision

Most years, Call Of Duty launches with a few staple modes. At the heart of the popular first-person shooter series is its competitive multiplayer. The Black Ops sub-franchise always includes some form of Zombies mode as well. And then there’s the single-player campaign, which has been in every single Call Of Duty except for Black Ops IV. It may not be as popular as multiplayer, but I’ve always had a soft spot for these bombastic campaigns and I’ve enjoyed even the more lackluster releases like Ghosts and Modern Warfare II.

This year’s game, Black Ops 7, expands the campaign in new and exciting ways. For one thing, it’s a cooperative campaign. That, in and of itself, is nothing new. Black Ops III also had a 4-player co-op campaign back in 2015. But this iteration of co-op is much different and more expansive. It’s also . . . a huge disappointment. I’m still a bit baffled at how many mistakes this campaign makes and how unlike a Call Of Duty campaign it feels in the end.

How Co-Op Works In Black Ops 7

Co-op is now the default setting for the campaign. This means that you load into campaign missions in almost the same exact way you’d load into a multiplayer match. You can join with friends or matchmake with random players. There’s a countdown, much like you’d see in multiplayer, and then you start the mission.

You can also unlock Campaign-specific camos, level your guns, unlock attachments and rank up in the campaign, and all of that will carry over into multiplayer and Warzone, which is honestly awesome, giving you real progression no matter how you play the game. By the time you’re done with the campaign, you’ll have leveled up and unlocked a ton of stuff in multiplayer. This is long overdue, and I’m hopeful it becomes standard in all future CoD releases.

This all sounds like it could be a lot of fun . . . but it comes at a cost. There’s no difficulty setting, for one thing, because difficulty scales based on how many players are in your squad.

Playing solo, meanwhile, is very strange. One of the key staples of every single Call Of Duty campaign, whether we’re talking about Black Ops, Modern Warfare, WWII or any of the other spinoffs, is that you are always part of a team. Maybe not in every mission, but in almost every mission you’re with a squad or a platoon or at least an AI buddy taking down enemies together. Yes, they’re just NPCs but they occupy space in the level and make it feel alive. Imagine playing the excellent, original Modern Warfare campaign with no NPCs by your side.

That’s Black Ops 7. If you play solo, you play utterly alone.

Sure, you’ll still have radio comms with the other characters and their faces will pop up on the screen when they talk, but they aren’t physically in the levels alongside you. There is no AI-controlled friendly watching your six. Maybe that’s why there isn’t a single door breach in the entire campaign. While this is normal in a lot of first-person shooters like DOOM or Halo (though that series does have many missions with NPC allies also), in a Call Of Duty campaign it’s weirdly unsettling. It makes the game feel empty in spite of all the chaos. Maybe you won’t notice if you’re new to the series, but for long-time players it’s really strange.

It’s also incredibly jarring when you get to a cut-scene. When a cut-scene begins, all four characters in Mason’s squad are there. When the action starts up again . . . they vanish. This is a puzzling creative choice, to say the least, and an entirely unnecessary one. Black Ops III’s campaign let you play co-op but if you played solo, you still had your AI companions. This game would be much better if that were the case.

Of course, it gets worse . . . .

The Campaign Is Always-Online And That’s A Huge Problem

Far more troubling than the emptiness of playing alone, however, is the fact that the campaign is now always-online even when you’re playing solo. You simply toggle off matchmaking to play solo, but you’ll still load in and play online with all the downsides of that experience. Internet down? Sorry, no Black Ops 7 campaign for you. Activision servers down? No campaign! Slow internet? Get ready for lag. I thought the gaming industry had learned its lessons with always-online requirements for single-player experiences. I was mistaken.

But it gets worse. Since the campaign is always-online, there is no option to pause. Is the FedEx guy at the door? Do you need to take a phone call or put out a fire? Too bad! You cannot pause this game.

During the final mission, I had to go take care of some other business (including, but not limited to, using the bathroom) so I found a safe spot on the map and ducked out for a bit. I grabbed some snacks and a bubbly drink. I chatted briefly with my daughter. I think that all of this took roughly fifteen minutes. I wasn’t taking my time but I wasn’t in a hurry, either. I was in a safe spot.

Safe from enemies, maybe, but not the game designers. When I returned to my PC I’d been kicked for inactivity. Playing solo. In the campaign.

There Are No Checkpoints In Missions Now

Unfortunately, this is not where my list of gripes ends. It gets worse. You see, on top of being always online with no pause option, there are also no checkpoints in missions. If you need to take a break, you’re out of luck. You can’t pause. If you walk away, you’ll get kicked. And if you quit the mission, you’ll have to start over at the beginning. I wasn’t aware of this, of course, having been conditioned to use checkpoints by years and years of playing Call Of Duty campaigns.

When I got kicked for inactivity, I was halfway through the final mission and had to start over from the very beginning. If I’d backed out of the mission, I would have had to start over from the beginning. It’s a truly egregious change to the format we’ve come to expect from Call Of Duty, and I am genuinely baffled by Treyarch’s thinking here. I simply cannot believe that at no time did anyone at Treyarch or Activision stop and say “Wait, this is a terrible idea, let’s not do this!”

And so we come to the peak of the mountain, or perhaps the deepest, darkest point in the valley because, at least for me, this confluence of bizarre and terrible game design choices resulted in one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had in a Call Of Duty campaign. During the final boss fight, at the end the final mission – which I had already started over once after being kicked for inactivity – my game crashed.

My game crashed and instead of loading up the checkpoint before the boss . . . I just quit. I was done. It was insult to injury. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. It’s a long mission and while it’s fun the first time, I have no interest in playing it a third time in a row. I’ll play a hard boss over and over and over again if I die. But not the entire mission over and over and over again because the devs didn’t include checkpoints.

Okay, But What About The Campaign Itself?

Black Ops campaigns almost always get weird in the third Act. At some point in a Black Ops game, the FPS stuff and the spy-thriller stuff morphs into some kind of funky hallucinatory experience involving dreams (or nightmares), psychedelic sequences, mind control, weird flashbacks to WWII and zombies . . . this has been the standard for Black Ops for many years now and it’s usually something I enjoy.

Treyarch decided to take this concept and apply it to the entirety of the Black Ops 7 campaign.

I’ll compare it to frosting on a cake. I love the frosting, especially if it’s chocolate. In a typical Black Ops game, the weird stuff at the end – that’s the frosting, and the earlier, more grounded levels are the cake. They work well together. Like cake and frosting.

Black Ops 7 is entirely frosting. There is no cake. The weird, trippy, mind-bending, psychedelic stuff is the whole story (though, to be fair, I did not finish that final boss fight yet and I haven’t made up my mind yet if I will).

The story follows David Mason (now played by Milo Ventimiglia) and his team, including Michael Rooker’s lovable Mike Harper, both characters from Black Ops II. It is, in a very big way, a pretty direct sequel to Black Ops II, with tons of references to the events of that game and even some sections taken directly from the game (but given a hallucinatory makeover). If you haven’t played Black Ops II’s campaign (you should, it’s great) much of Black Ops 7’s story will make no sense. The terrorist leader Raul Menendez is also back, but also not really. It’s all in your head.

There are many characters from previous games and Black Ops II, in particular, including David Mason’s father, Alex Mason, and the foul-mouthed Frank Woods (both men are dead at this point, but anything is possible in dreamland).

The Guild Vs The Good Guys

The story centers around a corporation called The Guild which makes, among other weapons, super-powered killer robots. The Evil Corporation™ is led by its Evil CEO™, Emma Kagan (Kiernan Shipka). The Guild also produces a substance called the Crucible, the ubiquitous red gas responsible for sending Mason and his team into shared hallucination levels filled with Guild soldiers, Guild robots and an abundance of monsters.

It’s all wildly over-the-top and honestly, the game is at its best when it just allows itself to occupy that space and really lean into the absurd, even if that’s not what I would personally choose for the entire campaign. When it tries to hit emotional beats, flashbacks with David and his father or other sentimental segments, it falls very, very flat. When you’re fighting giant, three-headed alien plant monsters or massive red-eyed, red-gas breathing giants, or when you’re dodging massive machetes falling from the sky while mariachi music is playing, that’s when Black Ops 7’s campaign feels exciting and fun.

But it doesn’t ever really feel like Call Of Duty. At times it felt more like Zombies mode, though without all the Easter Eggs and clever stuff that Zombies mode entails. There are some very fun missions, and I genuinely enjoyed the boss fights, which were much bigger and more interesting than anything this franchise has had on offer before. I enjoyed seeing some classic and newer maps from previous Black Ops games in the missions themselves, including the classic boat-map, Hijacked. And exploring the open-ish-world Avalon missions was entertaining thanks to little Blackout callbacks like the trusty squirrel suit. Locations and mission design are quite varied, at least, and the special powers – including killstreaks and weirder powers like black holes that suck enemies into the void – are a blast.

But the story is ridiculous even by Call Of Duty standards and the lack of many basic and fundamental components of Call Of Duty campaigns – AI squadmates, some kind of at least slightly plausible military thriller story (I know, I know) and, well, the ability to pause the game and save at checkpoints – makes this a strange and unsatisfying experience.

It looks great, the music is often quite good, the voice-actors mostly do a solid job, the guns handle well and gunplay is responsive and as polished as you’d expect. The sound effects are fantastic and getting kills feels and sounds super satisfying, and I do love that you can level weapons and unlock camos in the campaign now . . . but the deep-rooted problems with this campaign are pretty egregious just in terms of basic levels of functionality and there’s really no getting past that in the end.

In The End, There’s The End-Game

Finally, we come to the end-game. I have not explored the end-game nearly enough yet – it would take far more time than I’ve had with my review code – but it’s basically an open-world extraction-esque shooter where you can explore Avalon, increase your Power Level, find increasingly good loot and slowly work your way into deadlier zones for even better loot and tougher challenges. It reminds me of Modern Warfare Zombies, which had increasingly difficult zones as you ventured deeper into the map, but there’s a lot more going on here. You’ll complete missions and fight hordes of enemies and try to fight your way to an exit point where you’ll face one last battle against a mob and an elite enemy before getting picked up by a VTOL.

It’s enjoyable enough, but it has three big problems:

• First, it’s locked behind the campaign. You unlock it after completing the first 11 (of 12) missions. If you want to play with your buddies, they’ll have to play the campaign also and that’s not always in the cards. This should be a separate mode that shares camo progression with the campaign rather than a locked away mode.
• Second, it’s only PvE. You’ll fight lots of enemies and they get very tough the further you go in (I accidentally tried out Zone 2 when I first entered the end-game, playing solo, and while I did hold my own and survive it was super challenging) but you won’t ever face off against enemy players. Other players will be in the end-game with you, but they’ll just be doing their own thing. This is another really weird design choice shared with MWZ. It takes so much of the tension and unpredictability out of an extraction shooter to only have AI enemies. If the end-game mirrored the now-defunct DMZ that Activision (tragically) abandoned a few years ago, giving us both bots and enemy players to contend with, it would be wildly more entertaining. Which brings me to . . .
• ARC Raiders. It’s bad timing for this game to launch right after ARC Raiders, one of the most exciting extraction shooters in years, and certainly the most fun I’ve had in the genre. There’s a reason it’s blown up in popularity. Lots of reasons, actually. One is the fact that the robots in Arc Raiders behave so much more realistically than most games. They don’t just sort of walk or float toward you shooting, they zip and dodge and dive and stumble through the air, or roll at you before exploding in flame. Playing against ARC Raiders bots is almost revelatory, and going into Black Ops 7’s end-game directly afterward makes enemies feel so stale and . . . mechanical.

But ARC Raiders is also a PvPvE game, and that makes every trip to the surface suspenseful and dramatic in ways that a purely PvE extraction shooter simply cannot match.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to more time in the end-game. At least Black Ops 7 lets you play solo, in duos, trios or quads (ARC Raiders is more limited here, much to its detriment). And I’m excited to see how far into the Avalon map I can get and how power scales. But the design principles here already feel dated. At least we get a preview of the Avalon experience coming to Warzone, which will hopefully include the squirrel suits and other fun gameplay elements we find here.

Verdict

Clearly a great deal of hard work went into this game. There’s promise in the end-game, but I’m still not sold on a PvE extraction shooter experience. If Treyarch wants to up the ante, adding a PvPvE mode would be a great first step.

But overall the campaign is a massive letdown. It still manages to include some fun boss fights and cool level design in an undoubtedly pretty package. The bones of a good game are here, and it makes me wish Treyarch had gone an entirely different direction, while still keeping cool ideas like crossover progression with multiplayer.

I wish this had been a proper sequel to Black Ops II, for one thing, instead of just a bunch of callbacks pasted haphazardly into a plot that’s mostly just a giant hallucination. David Mason could have had his own story set in 2035 that tied back to the events of Black Ops II without leaning so heavily on them. There’s a “Somehow Menendez returned” joke to be made, and it’s fitting enough.

I wish the co-op functioned like Black Ops III with the ability to pause and save progress during missions. But wishes are worthless, and this might be the most disappointed I’ve ever been with a Call Of Duty campaign, including the lackluster Modern Warfare III campaign – though like MWIII, multiplayer more than makes up for the disappointing Black Ops 7 campaign.

Black Ops 7’s multiplayer is excellent, though my review for that will come later after I’ve spent more time with the game post-launch. Multiplayer has a ton of maps, a great arsenal of really unique weapons and some of the best movement – including wall-jumping – that this series has ever had. It’s fast and fun and has a ton of variety. It almost makes me wish they’d just ditched the campaign altogether and put all their resources into multiplayer, Zombies and a fully-realized extraction shooter. (Oh, and there’s also a massive Dead Ops Arcade mode which I’ll discuss separately as well).

I’m still bullish on Black Ops 7 as a whole, but that’s almost entirely thanks to multiplayer and the exciting post-launch roadmap with heaps more maps and modes and guns releasing in Season 1.

But without an offline mode for the campaign, there’s not really a true “single-player” campaign to discuss in the first place, and whatever fun we’ll get from the co-op gameplay, it isn’t worth the cost. It’s ironic. The first co-op campaign in years and it’s the loneliest I’ve ever felt playing Call Of Duty campaign.

I’ll post more thoughts on Multiplayer, Zombies, Dead Ops Arcade and the upcoming Season 1 content – including a new Warzone map – here on this blog in the coming days including my final review. Let me know what you think of Black Ops 7 and the co-op campaign on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.