Full disclosure -- I don't play much online multiplayer, and I don't like playing FPS games with a controller, so that basically rules me out of Call of Duty's target audience.
That said, I still love playing the single-player campaigns in all major shooters. While Black Ops rings in on the short side (5-6 hours?), this is still an action-packed, creatively told story that gradually unwraps a mystery centered on your main character. The lavish setpieces are always fun to see in Call of Duty games. This is one of the rare franchises where the developer has the resoures to create a full-on airfield outside the Pentagon with a fully detailed environment, just for a 15-second cutscene that shows you getting off a plane. The attention to detail throughout all the levels -- spanning jungles, tunnels, government offices, factories, mine shafts, seafaring freighters -- is pretty stunning. It's a shame, then, that the graphics can look so good for faces or landscapes, but individual textures can look so god-awful with blocky lo-res detail on objects. I'm assuming the PC version of Black Ops doesn't suffer from this with beefed-up hardware, but on PS3, the cruddy texture fidelity is noticeable often.
In terms of the storyline, this is actually much stronger than I ever expected from Treyarch. The conceit of playing a soldier reliving his memories, trying to figure out what exactly happened to him and how it affects the near future is actually really interesting. Great voice acting amplifies the tension. While the story definitely drifts into comic book territory, it always has an air of plausability to it and feels like something that could actually happen, more or less, which adds to the drama.
So far, so good -- so looking back on Black Ops, why did this epic game feel so boring? It's because of the Call of Duty design template. CoD SP campaigns are all about scripted events and linear battlefields, and with Black Ops, it feels more scripted than ever. You're constantly following an NPC, constantly funneling forward on a narrow, pre-described path, constantly waiting for the next scripted event to occur. The entire thing -- while visually impressive -- comes off so tightly on the rails, like you're just whacking moles at a carnival game. It doesn't help matters that the CoD formula has been repeated over and over and over now, and copied by so many other games, that simply substituting the setting and adding a new presentation layer doesn't change the fact that you feel like you've played this experience already, many times over. While the story and levels are good, they're not so good that they make up for lack of control and boredom that sets in as you chase after NPCs as scripted events unfold over and over.
Here's hoping the franchise creators who moved over to EA and Respawn can inject some fresh ideas into this series, as I expect Activision and Treyarch will bleed this current franchise dry creatively, if they haven't already.
