Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Solid"

Let's say it first, this review is solely based on the solo campaign.

You will play the role of few different men in Call Of Duty Black Ops II. You will play as the antagonist, but also the protagonist. You will constantly go back in time (down to 1970's), and come back to the present time (which is 2025). At the beginning, you might be confused on who you play and who is everyone. However, near the half of the game, you will get the whole story. That's where the game starts to be really fun.

You have few choices to make throughout the game. They are mostly kill or not kill a person, but they affect the story. That's a nice addition for a shooter like COD in which we were used to have a really straightforward story. Now there is a replay value to this game. Thumbs up to Treyarch for this. The solo campaign also has a good length (around 10 hours) compared to Medal of Honor: Warfighter which was around 4h-5h long max.

There is also a bit of RTS that they added to the game. You need to control several units and resist from an invasion. As a RTS fan personally, I hated this part a lot. The soldiers that you control are way too stupid. You tell them to go to a specific place, but they block somewhere, or take a ridiculous path to get there. Finally, you find yourself controlling a specific unit in a first person view and kill everything with this one. However, if like me, you don't like this, you can completely skip these missions. For sure, the story gets modified since you do not success to complete the objectives, but I was still able to complete the game on the 2nd hardest difficulty, so that can be done. Maybe at the hardest difficulty you would rush a bit more, but if you do, that's probably because you are a good player who does not mind being killed.

Speaking of that, the difficulty is varying a lot. Sometimes, the enemies are so stupid and some other times you just pop your head off and they shot you to death. For normal players, the 2nd hardest will give you a pretty good challenge.

There are a few missions where you control vehicles. They control so bad with the keyboard and a mouse. Specifically the Jet. I needed to basically throw my mouse away to be able to do a 180 degrees. That was simply painful.

The graphics look ugly at the beginning, but they tend to look better as you progress. The sound from the cinematics and the briefing is a lot softer than in the game. I really had to raise the volume a lot to hear it properly. Then when the gun-firing started, my whole house wanted to explode.

One last thing, I had 2 crashes to my desktop while playing. I had to redo almost the whole mission even if there were few save points that I went through. I don't get the point. Any idea why a save-point would not save the game?

Globally, I think that Call of Duty Black Ops II has one of the best solo campaign from the last 4-5 years. If you want to buy A FPS game and not just rent it, I think that you have a good candidate here.