It’s been three days since I excitedly purchased my copy of Call Of Duty: Black Ops. I’m following my normal rigorous routine with the Call Of Duty games – single player first, then (and only then) will I get online for the multiplayer version of the game. I know most people jump straight into multiplayer, but actually I buy these games as much for the single player as anything else.
I have to admit my first reaction to the game wasn’t a good one. Why do Treyarch insist on setting their storylines in the past? After the Modern Warfare games, I don’t think any of the COD fans wanted to go back to WWII, Vietnam or the done-to-death Russians vs. Germans. Yet here I find myself again, playing through the jungles of Vietnam and shooting at Germans with a bolt action rifle. I want modern technological warfare; I don’t want to go from a P90 to a 30-year old Skorpion. I don’t want to swap my Barret .50 Cal for a fucking crossbow.
With that said, I’m around 80% of the way through the single player game and so far I’m quite enjoying it. The variety of play – which has become a standard in the Call Of Duty series – is excellent and it’s great to go from sneaking around with silenced weapons to blowing shit up with an Apache helicopter. I was slightly disappointed however to be forced to sit through a cut sequence in which you get into the cockpit of a stealth fighter, only to find you don’t actually fly it or shoot anything from it, you simply point soldiers in the right direction. That’s not even me using journalistic license, you literally just direct them from point to point. Why did this have to be set up in a stealth fighter? It’s a GAME, if you’re going to put me in the cockpit of an extremely cool fighter plane, at least let me shoot something.
Also, I liked the realism of the Modern Warfare storyline (maybe I should say comparative realism) – the storyline in this game isn’t incomprehensible, I just got bored of it quite quickly. I can see the plot twist coming a mile away too. I’m not sure who Treyarch think they’re fooling with this rubbish – I’m starting to think they just can’t come up with any decent storylines themselves, so they constantly bastardise pre-existing stories and events. Honestly, they may as well have added a few levels to World At War and just re-released it.
Everything feels slightly more predictable in this one too – the best example I can think of is where your character repels from a chopper in Vietnam. As soon as you jump out of the plane you’re thinking ‘bet this gets shot down before my feet touch the ground’ … aaaaand there we go.
The game isn’t bad, it’s fun and it’s more or less what you want from a Call Of Duty game, I think I would have just much rather played Modern Warfare 3. I’m sure the multiplayer will be good, but unless Black Ops has an extremely good ending, I would say Modern Warfare 2 was (is) superior.