Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Game Review (PS3)

Call of Duty is one of the most successful (and often most disliked) franchises in gaming; every year it rakes in millions without really making big steps forward with its gameplay and design. Treyarch has aimed to defy this convention with Black Ops 2 and the result is a game that is worth a look, even for naysayers of the series.

The story of Black Ops 2 carries on from the 2010 original and begins in the 1980s; operatives Alex Mason, Frank Woods and Jason Hudson are on the hunt for Raul Menendez across Africa, Afghanistan, and Panama and beyond. But after several critical mistakes and botched operations, the villain escapes, vowing to exact his revenge. Flashing forward to 2025, Mason’s son David (codenamed “Section”) faces the forefront of a new cold war between the USA and China, which is compounded by the re-emergence of Menendez and his plan to use the nation’s high-tech military hardware to throw the world into chaos. Penned by Dark Knight writer David Goyer and flashing between the two time periods, Black Ops 2’s plot is by far the most detailed yet seen in the series, filled with twists, turns and shocking moments. A good majority of the characters go beyond your typical action game clichés and receive a sizeable amount of development throughout the campaign, especially Menendez, who as an antagonist ranks close behind some of the best seen in modern first person shooters. To top it all off, Black Ops 2 is the first game that offers player choice which in turn will impact events at certain points in the game, be it allies that come to your aid or the overall ending. Black Ops 2’s story is both deep and engaging, perfectly complimenting the campaign mode where previous stories were only a box to fill in.

With a brilliant story at its centre the campaign structure also adopts new features; you’ll still get the usual linear levels where you go down a set path to reach your objectives but even these have unique twists that have never been seen in the series. You can crack open certain gates or locks to get access to new weapons and equipment, choose and customise your gear at the start of each mission and in the future portions you can often take command of drones and other technology to mix up the standard gunplay. The newest addition to the campaign though is strike force missions; these missions will pop up for a limited time and challenge you to command a whole unit of forces to complete a set mission, such as defending a base or rescuing an important individual. These are an intriguing new addition and can often get quite intense as the timer ticks down, though they don’t really rise to meet their full potential; the satellite controls for controlling every unit at once are quite fiddly and often times you’ll find yourself switching to a ground soldier and doing most of the work yourself as the friendly AI isn’t up to par. The mega-popular multiplayer has also undergone change, most notably the create-a-class system. Rather than being constrained to choosing weapons and perks, Black Ops 2 introduces the “Pick Ten” system; each item, be it a weapon, perk or piece of equipment carries a point cost, meaning you can completely remove the perks to focus on weapons, or pack in more perks by carrying less equipment; it’s a really flexible system that turns customisation on its head. Even Zombies has received upgrades with the new Tranzit mode (where players hop on and off, building items as they go) serving a bridge between multiple maps in a single game. There are also custom options for matchmaking and a mode where teams of two try to outlast each other against the approaching horde. At almost every turn Black Ops 2 challenges the status quo with its design, bringing new mechanics to each of its game modes to form an excellent package all around.

The design facets of Call of Duty Black Ops 2 form around a tried and true gameplay formula; you’ll still be doing the usual fast paced aim-down-sights combat against enemies and human opponents but this time there’s much more interactivity in both single and multiplayer modes. The drones and other futuristic technology afforded by the futuristic setting are all very intuitive and fun to play around with, whereas in multiplayer, the customisable kill streaks, such the deployable AGR can be set to either follow you or be controlled manually. While the game is still fast, frenetic and easy to get into, some areas haven’t really taken many steps forward; the enemy AI in particular is still quite incompetent, often just standing in one place waiting to be taken out and this problem does impact the strike force missions quite badly. Because the enemies don’t adopt any new tactics, you’ll pretty much know how the missions will play out every time, damaging their replayability. Despite these issues, Blacks Ops 2 sticks to what works, leaving the extensive design improvements to carry the game.

Call of Duty’s IW game engine was starting to show its age with Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 2 doesn’t do too much to alleviate this issue. It’s still a competent looking piece of software; the explosions look fine, the blood and gore effects still look suitably grotesque and the increased emphasis on cut scenes and rendering people has resulted in some acceptable facial animation but all told the series that rakes in the most money of each year hasn’t aged too well over the years. Whilst the technical aspects haven’t moved forward, Black Ops 2 maintains the series blazing fast sixty frames per second performance; the game will never lag (aside from internet connection) or slow down at all during gameplay, be it campaign or online. While the game does run well, it’s a shame that the technical aspects have taken so long to receive proper improvements.

Call of Duty Black Ops pushes the series design forward whilst also setting itself apart from every other game in the series at every turn, making it by far the best game in the series in seven years. My hat goes off to Treyarch for really innovating with this title, a trademark which the other developers of the long running series really need to consider in the future.

Rating: 8.5/10