Black Ops starts with CIA special forces fumbling the Bay of Pigs invasion. The level isn’t fun as it is interesting. Fighting in narrow streets with scripted road blocks, following a hud marked NPC, with scoped weapons was a frustrating start with what is expected to be the tutorial level. But despite the frustration I was really excited to play the rest of the game. It set up the expectation of this being a Forest Gump-ian stroll through the famous moments of the Cold War.
The game isn’t a boots on the ground stroll through history, as it is a Manchurian Candidate twist on a lame episode of 24 with the Cold War as a backdrop. (Every episode of 24 is lame and cliche, it’s only made interesting by the conceit of it’s time limitations.)
The flashback narration seems an unnecessary crutch, and more an excuse to design levels without limitations of the story. I only speculate on design decisions because the game doesn’t want me to look at it. The scope of a lot of moments in the game were masked by shit constantly blowing up in my face. The “more-explosions-the-cooler-it-is” method of entertainment is still neat, but when a level is reduced to a never ending loop of gun fire and someone hosing your face with shrapnel, dirt, and fire, it’s hard to take in the breadth of a daring escape. The space launch is the one time in the game you’re giving a moment to take in the scenery, they do so by putting a camera on a missile. It was the moment they managed to blow things up with your face, rather than in it.
The game does a good job of adding flare to your arsenal. Almost ever level starts you with a weapon that is customized and personal. Even weapons you pick up off of enemies have their own flare to them. There are various incarnation of the M-16 that have their own personality, there are a ton of experimental weapons to use in the game. Once I was using a German machine gun that uses caseless ammunition. I was very happy to have my casual interest in weaponry be placated.
Black Ops can be confusing. There’s a weird mix of how objective information is given. Rather than a mission objective headline, they have characters yell at you and gesture. One mission literally has hundreds of people yelling the mission objectives out loud, it’s an interesting bit but also kind of embarrassing. A Vietnam mission has people yelling at you while every thing is exploding. It’s hard to pick out that you need to kick over a series of barrels to advance. And near the end of the game I failed a bunch of times on a sneaking mission because you have to stand behind a NPC and wait for him to give an order to kill people. First he tells you to kill a guy then I had to watch him give the slightest hand gesture the next time I was to kill a guard. I didn’t even know the guy was gesturing until the seventh time restarting the mission. I had to rethink what I was doing and what the game wanted me to do so much that it gave away the twist.
I don’t mean to shit all over the game but so much of the game is familiar Call of Duty that the positives don’t stand out as much. You want you’re AC-130 gunship level, it’s here in a unnecessary RTS format or you can have it as a helicopter mission with very forgiving flight control. You want a shit exploding and falling from the sky moment it’s here too. You want an against all odds surrounded by the enemy you’re going to die moment. It’s all here and it’s still cool, it’s just familiar.
The game ends in 1968 which leaves plenty of room for more Cold War stories to be told. Despite my indifference with this game I will be excited to see what they do next time around. The Cold War is full of crazy submarine espionage, nuclear mishaps, CIA backed military coups, and proxy wars. There’s also enough redacted from the official record that Treyarch can get pretty crazy with their own fiction and have it be reasonably plausible.
Once you beat the game you’ll be thrown into the zombies mode. You can play the zombies mode at any time but I hadn’t so I thought the opening movie was some sort of after credit lead in to the next game then the zombies showed up. It’s hilarious to run around shooting zombies while spouting one-liners from JFK, Nixon, Castro, and Robert McNamara. That novelty runs out but the core game is still fun which is telling of Black Ops in general.
As for the multiplayer it’s a slight update to Modern Warfare 2’s, which is great, so enjoy.