Black Ops 7
Credit: Activision
Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 released this Friday and it’s caused quite a stir. While critics and gamers seem to be enjoying the multiplayer – which is top-notch – the campaign is another matter entirely.
While the end-game (which is bizarrely locked behind finishing the campaign) is certainly a fun co-op experience, the campaign itself is pretty terrible. I called it the worst Call Of Duty campaign ever made in my review. And that does seem to be the consensus.
One of the exciting things about the campaign was the ability to play with friends. The campaign is fully co-op with up to four players online. Another cool feature was the ability to level up guns, unlock camos and level up your rank in the campaign and end-game, giving players who weren’t as big on multiplayer or Zombies mode the ability to still progress. It’s a cool feature for those of us who mostly play multiplayer but always enjoy the campaign also. By the time I was done with the campaign, I was Rank 29 and had leveled up some guns, unlocked some attachments and perks and so forth. I wasn’t starting multiplayer from scratch, in other words.
But these features are also what ultimately made the campaign so bad. Well, not the only thing. The campaign’s story is a hallucinatory disaster and even without the other problems, it would have still been one of the worst in the series. Still, the online features like co-op and cross-progression are what led to the basic functionality of the campaign being so botched. There is no pause, for instance, since it’s online just like multiplayer. There are no checkpoints if you quit the game or it crashes. And you can get kicked for inactivity if you walk away from the unpausable campaign for any length of time.
Activision released the following statement explaining why these basic features, present in every other Call Of Duty campaign, were absent:
“The Black Ops 7 Co-Op Campaign missions and gameplay are hosted on dedicated servers online with other players to facilitate global progression and XP earning, along with saves across multiple devices. This means pausing isn’t possible for the same reason it isn’t in Multiplayer, though there are mission checkpoints if you fail while playing.”
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There are indeed mission checkpoints if you fail, but these do not apply if you quit the mission or get kicked, meaning you’ll have to start over. That’s something that could have been avoided in design. Other games, like Dark Souls, also lack the ability to pause but if you quit the game at any point, you’ll start right where you left off. It’s also a design choice to kick players for inactivity, especially when they’re playing solo. That seems like something Treyarch could easily fix. I’d rather have a ban option that pops up and allows other players to vote on kicking someone that goes AFK. Having different functions for solo players also makes sense, especially allowing solo players to have checkpoints that let them quit a match and start from where they left off.
But even with all these aspects fixed, the game would still have a pretty atrocious story that doesn’t make very much sense. Some fun missions, to be sure, and some very creative boss fights, but still not at all what I’d hoped for in a Black Ops campaign.
Thankfully, the multiplayer is great. I’ll have a full review of all the modes up soon here on this blog, so stay tuned.