Format: 360 (version tested), PC, PS3
Release: Out now
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Treyarch
Screenshot gallery

Playing a new Call Of Duty can feel a little like Groundhog Day. Activision banks on it. The increasingly familiar hype campaign is launched, record pre-orders follow, and this year’s update waltzes to the top of the Christmas charts. But Black Ops has an extra importance as the first Treyarch game since the Infinity Ward unpleasantness, and the narrative arc fed to the press is simple: this is going to be the B-team stepping up and knocking it for six. Like all action blockbusters, Black Ops should be a feel-good story.

The ambitious campaign focuses largely on a special forces operative named Alex Mason, an unlucky soul whose life consists of being shot at, being tortured or breaking down. One rare cutscene combines all three. It’s a setup for short and snappy singleplayer missions, a connecting thread that Treyarch uses to flit between time periods and perspectives on what’s going on.


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It’s a neat idea, shuttling you between humid jungles, Arctic bunkers and vehicle sections. Unfortunately, the mission design fails to do it justice. Black Ops takes the ‘action blockbuster’ label literally: Mason is frequently led through ‘stealth’ sections by an unyielding (though beautifully animated) NPC, and deviating from The Path That Is Decreed means instant mission failure. It’s cinematic, and you’re ostensibly in control, but it’s not much of a game. There are many firstperson interludes that build anticipation but lead nowhere. At one point you climb into the cockpit of what looks like a stealth bomber and simply have to hold the trigger to take off, an experience that inevitably leaves you feeling a bit empty.

The enemies are the same mob of dummies seen in many CODs before. The environments have changed but the furniture remains present, and battles are still a matter of shooting and then moving across the invisible line to trigger the next scripted sequence. On Veteran difficulty, it’s the same old tin-can shoot, a process of learning positions as you die, over and over.


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As ever, it’s the spectacle that makes it worthwhile. Black Ops is beautiful at times, and transtitions from painstaking detail to breathtaking vista within the same level, often riffing on familiar depictions of war to great effect. In one standout sequence, driving a gunboat down a river in a certain place to a certain song, Black Ops channels a cinematic moment to create an interactive one, something so obvious it has to be surrendered to with a big smile. The boat’s handling is lousy, and shooting the respawning enemies soon palls, but just for a moment it’s a brilliant pop-culture fusion.

That aside, this is no Modern Warfare experience. The narrative hammers home its ripped-off twist clumsily, Mason feels like a nonentity, and certain sequences wouldn’t look out of place in Ghost Squad. This is also the most gratuitously violent COD yet, and often ludicrous – one mission begins with a man being force-fed glass before being punched repeatedly on the jaw, after which the victim leads the player through the level while shouting. Such absurdity is Black Ops in a nutshell.