Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Great multiplayer"

The Call of Duty memo is getting longer, and starting to have less bite each iteration. Black Ops continues the traditional formula mixing little up after previous successful Call of Duty games, but as the saying goes, don't fix what ain't broke. Unfortunately, the been there and done that saying starts becoming ever so frequent.

The campaign clocked in for me at around seven hours on Hardened. I wouldn't recommend starting on hardened due to issues I'll levy at later on but the campaign still offers your typical high adrenaline Call of Duty material. It starts off with you being interrogated by unknown figures, and each missions that gets played out is a memory of the main character who's being tortured in order to get information to the shady characters.

The missions have varied landscapes, but the formula that we know of Call of Duty has been shot up through steroids for Black Ops. There is very little downtime in between action sequences, in fact, I would go as far to say that 95% of the campaign will be you and firing your weapon. It gets to be too much at times, as the game needs to cool down and relax at times and the constant actions just breeds the repetitiveness of the firefights. The AI doesn't do the game any justice since it's mind-numbingly stupid, I happened to watch a guy on multiple occasions run into a wall and shoot at the wall. My own fellow AI was shooting behind me at a barrel for 20 seconds. It's like most of the enemies is this game are cannnon-fodder.

Luckily, there's more than just run and gun. Fighting in helicopters is a nice mix, but they're shallow experiences -- fire a minigun, missiles, and only move around. It's no Battlefield helicopter, that's for sure. Another nice mix is a Blackbird sequence issuing orders to a group of folks down on the ground, which is a nice concept in of itself but it was executed poorly. Makes you walk away feeling it was just made with the idea of flashyness in mind, and not substance.

The plot is like Manchurian Candidate meets Rambo Part 2. It's engrossing, and at least it's not filled with glaring plot holes like Modern Warfare 2. Nevertheless, the storytelling and the action substance of the story itself isn't up to par as say Call of Duty 4. Nevertheless, you should still enjoy it for what its worth. The sound design is one of the better parts of Call of Duty, the nice mix of music and rock esque material is nice to listen too -- weapons sound lovely, and the voice acting is pretty solid.

The graphics are disappointing considering the previous iteration of Call of Duty was pretty solid, so Black Ops is underpar in this sense. Some textures don't load until many seconds later, and the overall visual fidelity of the game felt like it wasn't there. Some sequences look good but even games in its genre like Bad Company 2, and Halo Reach put Black Ops underpar.

The multiplayer is just like Call of Duty 4 and MW2, but with a different take on weapons and perks. You unlock new perks and weapons, and attachments, ect at higher levels -- but you have to *buy* them with credits. Its Call of Duty with Halo Reach credit system. It's a nice mix of things, and you can place bets on challenges and get credits in return if you complete the challenge. Or you can go into a wager match, and place bets and hope to win. All in all, if you k now Call of Duty, you should for the most part know what t expect in its multiplayer.

Call of Duty is getting stale now, and I feel the franchise has run its course. The campaign, while still solid, is nothing to write home about. The multiplayer is the best part of the game, but it's using a formula that's been in use for many years now. For a yearly iteration of Call of Duty, I can't really recommend Black Ops for anyone other than Call of Duty fans.