By Draven Copeland, Editor-in-Chief
Let me preface this review by saying I have been a fan of the Call of Duty franchise for most of my lifetime. Since I was about eight years old, I’ve been enthralled by the fast-paced gunplay, the variety of game modes, and the generally well-written (or, at least, well-animated) story modes that have been offered over the years in the subseries and stand-alone titles that make up the now 22 games in the overall franchise. I currently own them all; as the franchise drops a new title every year, it’s not a question of “if” I will buy the new Call of Duty, but “when.”
I had planned to write a review for the newest entry in the series, Black Ops 7, since before I pre-ordered it, and had expected that I’d be able to finally publicize my usual talking points on why the game “isn’t that bad” and might be “worth a try, especially if you’ve missed a couple Call of Duty games.” Upon playing all three modes the game has to offer, I realized I really have nothing this year; this may be the worst entry in the series to date.
The Campaign Is Just as Bad as You’ve Heard
Set in the year 2035, the campaign (or story mode) of Black Ops 7 takes place between the events of Black Ops II and Black Ops 4 – if you’re confused, don’t worry, it would actually be more confusing for me to explain further. Suffice it to say, this is the first direct sequel we’ve gotten to Black Ops II since its release, as all other subsequent games in the Black Ops subseries have been set either way after or way before and have never directly referenced its events beyond a name-drop or two. And that’s about all the good I have to say about the campaign for Black Ops 7.
The first major gripe I have with the campaign mode came to me even before I started playing it: it’s made to be a co-op experience and doesn’t hide that fact in the slightest. As someone who primarily enjoys playing alone (especially in story mode), this was an immediate red flag, as the campaign’s menu looks exactly like the multiplayer and zombie modes’ menus.
As soon as the first cutscene ends, playing the campaign solo just feels wrong. There are no difficulty options, so you’re stuck playing at the same difficulty level as those playing with one to three other teammates, meaning that everyone you fight has an unreasonably large healthbar. By the time you reach the end of the game and enemies have grown stronger/have more armor, you’re genuinely spending entire magazines of your weapon on one or two people, making the experience tedious and way more difficult than it should be.
The plotline the campaign levels follow doesn’t help either; it’s more confusing than it is interesting, relies on characters and settings from Black Ops II and Black Ops 6 for no substantial reason, and has boss fights that are, putting it lightly, fucking insane (and not in the good way). The entire story revolves around four American operatives who are gassed with nano-technological fear toxin that infects their futuristic contact-lens screens, so the team must fight not only the real-world threats of an ambiguous human/robot military force but also their fear-induced visions of demons, zombies, ghosts, etc. It’s an interesting idea on paper, and I was excited to see how the developers would incorporate the returning fan-favorite villain from Black Ops II, Raul Menendez – it turns out he wasn’t really incorporated at all, as he is revealed at the end of the first mission to truly be dead after the events of the last game and appears only as a teleporting hallucinatory boss that can call giant machetes down from heaven for some reason.
In terms of minute-to-minute gameplay, it’s just not really very fun and constantly breaks immersion. Playing solo, the other three characters on the team aren’t filled in with non-player characters (NPCs), so every objective and battle in the game just feels weird to be achieving/fighting alone. What makes this even stranger is the fact that the other characters are still speaking to the player over comms, reacting to the things going on around them even though, once again, they aren’t actually there. Then, when a cutscene plays, they are there, before they disappear again as soon as the gameplay starts back up. This could’ve been played into with the trippy/hallucinatory aesthetic of the game, as you could be left wondering if your team is actually real or just in your head… but that’s not explored at all, making every voice line and cutscene break the immersion entirely every time.
I could go into the open-world missions that litter the game and the boss fights that have genuinely been compared to those from LEGO Marvel Superheroes, but I won’t bore you with any more details; just don’t play the story mode unless you have a group of friends to play with… even then, just play a different game.
The Multiplayer Is The Same Shit Over Again
I don’t really have as much to say as I’d hoped in regards to the multiplayer, mainly because it is, with the exception of the new wall-jump mechanic, the exact same thing as last year’s Black Ops 6. Sure, the movement speed is a little slower, the lethal equipment types such as grenades are stronger, and the time-to-kill (TTK) is faster, but those are such minimal changes to the actual feel of the game that I would bet any casual player wouldn’t really even notice.
As far as the wall-jump mechanic goes, it’s fun for about the first three times and, after that, I only use it when I’m required to by the map I’m playing on. For example, most of the new multiplayer maps in the game have sections where there’s a gap in the floor or a ledge high up that are only navigable with a wall-jump. As the game stands now, before any seasonal content has dropped, about half of the maps available are remastered classics from Black Ops II that were not built for wall-jumping, so I have actually forgotten it’s a thing for hours at a time while playing because there’s little to no use for it most of the time. That’s how cool the new movement is.
The earned scorestreaks (specialty weapons that are earned by racking up multiple kills without dying) range from the tried-and-true classics like the UAV, Hellstorm missile, and Watchdog helicopter, to some of the most incredibly frustrating new entries that have almost made me rage-quit lobbies. I’m talking, of course, about the Skewer and Gravemaker scorestreaks, both of which cause instant death and are nearly impossible to avoid.
When earned, the Skewer drops a slab of metal from the stratosphere onto a random player of the other team, while the Gravemaker is a short-use sniper rifle that highlights enemy players through walls and allows the player to shoot and kill them regardless of what is in the way in one shot from any place on the map. Neither of these are any fun at all on the receiving end and are actually triggering to encounter in the game; there’s not really anything you can do about them, as the Skewer is only avoided if you’re under a roof and the Gravemaker lasts until the player who earned it runs out of ammo or is killed.
I won’t harp on it too much, but there’s also a blatant use of AI-generated images being used as Calling Cards and Emblems (customizable tags associated with your gamertag that appear whenever you kill another player, win Play of the Game, etc.), and it’s pretty fucking disgusting. As Activision is now a multi-billion dollar company, especially so after its purchase by Microsoft, they’re just shitting on the work of artists and developers by doing this, all for the designs to look bad. There have been multiple times that I’ve earned a new Calling Card through gameplay and gotten excited, only to look at it in the lobby menu and grow disappointed with the poorly generated image, minimizing any incentive for me to play the game to earn any more.
At the time of writing, Call of Duty’s Fortnite-inspired free-to-play battle royale mode, Warzone, has not been updated with new content specifically for Black Ops 7, otherwise I’d dive into that too. It’s fortunate for me, as I’ve never liked a single rendition of that mode anyway.
The Zombies Mode Would Be the Game’s Only Hope If It Wasn’t Already Doomed
Since Call of Duty’s famous zombie mode has not blown me away much since 2017’s Call of Duty: WWII, I wasn’t expecting much from this year’s incarnation – I have to say, I’m actually having some fun with this one. The only map that has been released thus far, “Ashes of the Damned,” is the largest zombies map to date (not counting the Warzone-type maps in Modern Warfare III’s atrocious “MWZ” mode) and is really fun to explore, as you craft an armored truck named “Ol’ Bessie” in the spawn area and can drive it to different towns/locations separated by drivable dead zones.
It’s very reminiscent in feel and design to the fan-favorite “TranZit” map from Black Ops II, even including renditions of the “Town” and “Diner” locations from that map, as well as a section of the “Ascension” map from the first Black Ops game. The mode is also the only place I’ve truly found usage of the wall-jump mechanic, as you can utilize the walls and floating objects to maneuver around or above the zombie hordes to survive.
Alright, back to complaining. While the map is very fun and the game brings back the separate “Dead Ops Arcade” experience that we haven’t seen since 2020’s Black Ops: Cold War, there are still a few issues I have with “Ashes of the Damned.”
Firstly, the Mystery Box (a cheap random weapon generator that appears in defined locations on the map) only exists in one spot at a time on the enormous map; this means that if you want to buy from it, you must drive to wherever it is at the given moment, taking a lot more time and energy from the player than ever before. Remember, the weapon given from the Box is random, so all of the time spent getting to it might not even be worth it – it could just as well give you something useless as something you actually want/need.
Secondly, Black Ops 7 brings back four zombie mode-specific characters (the Ultimis crew, for those in the know) that the franchise claimed to permanently retire back in 2018’s Black Ops 4, in which they finished the characters’ story that had spanned all games in the series up to that point. While it was certainly a hit of nostalgia to see them on-screen and hear their voices again while playing, their unannounced and unnecessary return felt like a major cop-out, throwing away their hard-earned ending only to drive player interest in the mode. Which brings me to the point I’ve been hinting at this entire review:
At Its Core, The Game is Poorly Executed Nostalgia-Bait At Best
As you may have noticed, much of what I have to say about this game is in reference to content from previous games, primarily Black Ops II. This isn’t just my insight as a longtime fan of the series – this is because the game genuinely relies on the appearances of characters, weapons, settings, and plotlines from that game to carry the crock of absolute shit they released this year.
There is no part of this game that doesn’t feel derivative at best and insultingly underdeveloped at worst. In all three modes of the game, I’m nearly constantly seeing a weapon, character, or venue that is either lifted directly from Black Ops II or purposefully made to resemble it so closely that it may as well be the thing it’s trying to be (a great example of this is the new Coda 9 pistol that looks and feels exactly like the KAP-40 from the previous game).
While re-usage of assets/designs from previous games in the franchise is nothing new for Call of Duty – they’ve been doing this to some extent since Call of Duty 2 released in 2005 – it’s never been this blatant of both an excuse for lack of ideas and a cover for an unfinished product. While the series still maintains a high standard in graphical quality, that seems to be the only place that this game truly succeeds; everywhere else is just an absolute mess and barely any change in minute-to-minute gameplay from last year’s Black Ops 6. All of this for a minimum price of $70 plus tax – not to mention the $90 deluxe edition? Go fuck yourself instead, I promise you’ll have more fun at way less of a cost.
To conclude, let me speak on the elephant in the room for Call of Duty fans around the world: this is what Activision decided to give us instead of remastering or remaking Black Ops II. We’ve been clamoring for such a re-release of our favorite game in the series since the release of Modern Warfare Remastered in 2017, and we still have yet to get it or anything like it for any game in the Black Ops subseries. Instead, the executives in charge of our beloved franchise that we continue dumping nearly a hundred dollars minimum into every year have decided to give us this sequel that we didn’t ask for and, now that it’s released, don’t really want. If that’s not enough to start protesting for change, I don’t know what is.
