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Review - Call Of Duty Black Ops: Escalation
Shoot to kill
Written by Jon Denton, 03 May 2011
It's telling that at 11am in the UK, a few short minutes after Treyarch dropped the Escalation map pack on Live, some 200,000 people were online. Bear in mind that it was 6am on New York and 3am in LA. That's some following.
A following that's rabid for more content, too. Escalation, the second Black Ops map pack, contains four new combat arenas and star-studded zombie story Call Of The Dead. It's the latter that's the start of the show, featuring Danny Trejo, Robert Englund (Freddie Krueger) and Sarah Michelle Gellar as well as an unkillable giant George A Romero zombie.
360Zine Issue 49
For our latest Call of Duty Black Ops coverage, click here to download 360Zine Issue 49 for free.It's slightly more freeform and open the previous zombie maps, but it's still an ultimately futile 'holding back the tides' battle of attrition. Still, the attention to detail and amusing one-liners warrant a fair few play throughs. Good stuff.
The maps themselves, Hotel, Convoy, Stockpile and Zoo initially come across as standard COD fare, with tight intertwining buildings, multiple levels and an asymmetry for objective based games, but unfortunately soon reveal themselves to be rather camp-happy. Hotel, in particular, seems set up just to have people shoot down from high windows, while Stockpile features enough dark corners that knee-huggers will be in heaven.
The other two maps are slightly better. Convoy, which looks remarkably like something straight out of THQ's Homefront, features a long straight road in the center where mayhem inevitably takes place, and winding paths around the outside for close-quarters combat. The pick of the bunch so far is Zoo, whose combination of map-covering monorail, killboxes and tunnels lends itself best to all game types.
As it stands, Escalation is neither as inventive nor as welcome as First Strike, pandering to the new camp-happy style of play. At 1200 MSP, it's still not going to break the bank, and COD devotees will likely lap it up, but these aren't the slickest maps Treyarch has ever made, and no amount of Romero can make up for it.
Call of Duty Black Ops coverage available in 360Zine Issue 49 - click here to download it for free!
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