Yes, yes, we all knew it was coming. I am going to talk about Call Of Duty: Black Ops. As I am sure you are going to guess, I like this game. This is a fine first person shooter…multiplayer wise at least. Single player-wise, it’s a different story. Let me explain, whenever, and I do mean whenever, I get a shiny new FPS game, I play through the Campaign mode first on Normal Difficulty. Why Normal you ask? Because I hate begin frustrated and modes above NORMAL are meant to be frustrating, and sure you could argue that they are meant to “test your skills”, but really all modes above NORMAL are just enemies with ludicrous health, your health being severely reduced in the process, and the AI have super-human accuracy with any and all weapons. Besides, we all know everybody bought this game for the Multiplayer anyways, so I figured why suffer any more through the Campaign than I have to?
The key word to that last statement is “suffer”, and gives away how I think of the Campaign. It was, in many ways, kind of painful to play. Here you have a tied down Special Ops guy named Mason getting interrogated and you have no idea why. So, the game starts flashing at you and hitting you with random memory events here Mason goes into a violent linguistically rage dropping F-Bombs like he is overstocked with them (please make a note of this). The game starts telling you the story of why Mason is tied down, except it doesn’t. One moment you are in Cuba, the next you are in Russia, then, Vietnam, Then you’re playing as a different person in a different time frame, then Russia, then Nam’…you get to briefly make commands in an SR-71 Blackbird…very, very briefly, almost forgettable briefly…. And all this time you, the player, are still trying to figure out why Mason is being interrogated and why numbers keep flashing in his head. The story actually makes little to no sense. I was trying to stay with the story until at the very LAST MISSION, when it all, and I mean ALL, just gets explained and falls apart. By falls apart, I mean Treyarch (the developer, they also did World At War and some Spiderman games) obviously has a “hard on” for the convoluted storylines of the Metal Gear Solid series, because it becomes just as ridiculous.
You know, Doug will probably ridicule me for this, but at least the Modern Warfare stories made some DAMN SENSE! You are soldier; go kill third-world terrorists and their collaborators armed with WMDs to save to world, credits.
This game has a similar, and yet oh so difficult to explain version of this terrorist killing story. Its contrived and over-done, and sometimes I can get behind it because there is a definite enemy and I don’t mind killing the lot of them. Speaking of lot’s of them, the campaign does something I had hoped modern FPS games had sworn off, and it’s that this game has a TON of enemy spawn gates, you know the ones, the ones were you will be overwhelmed by enemies until you cross an invisible scripted barrier. Not only does Black Ops bring those back, it abuses the HELL out of them. Three-quarters of the campaign is built around scripted events, and after the third level I was basically playing the game just to beat it, aka, was not having fun anymore. This is not something to brag about, Treyarch. Lay off the scripted events a little, it is not as innovative as you may have believe, since EVERY CALL OF DUTY DOES THEM. There is a fine line between handholding a player through the game, and just letting them play the game. This game holds your hand, calmly hiding the story from you as you go. Then it’s over.
Please don’t buy this game for the Campaign (who really did?).
I mean, if you want an action-paced shooter, buy Vanquish. If you want an awesome story, play Fallout 3 or Half-Life, maybe even rent MOH just for its Campaign. This Campaign, though, feels like it was tacked on to it’s robust multiplayer.
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