We’ll get to that in a moment. I first what to tell you something. Something I let every FPS fan know. I’m not a Call of Duty fan. At all. I have played them all, and I have to say the only one I remotely liked was Modern Warfare. I only liked it because it was different from any shooter at the time. Call of Duty just sucks. The story lines are always horrible, the graphics and people look like they were made of plastic, and the online was just bad. Who wants to play a game where you spawn and literally die less then two seconds later? It’s nothing but luck. No skill. Just luck.
According to just about every video game website known to man, Black Ops was supposed to change shooters as we know it. It was supposed to blow our minds with explosions, bullets, and just plain awesome. Have they succeeded? Hell no.
Campaign:
I’m a hardcore fan of Batman, so when I found out that David S. Goyer wrote the script for Black Ops, I actually got excited. The Dark Knight blew my mind, and just about everything else Goyer helped create blew my mind, too. First off, the menu is actually cool. You are strapped to a chair with monitors all around. You are given the chance to get out and walk around the room, finding a few cool Easter eggs if you do. While in the chair, the main menu appears before you and once you select the campaign, the story starts right away. However, this little part is all that I liked throughout the entire game. That and something else.
The campaign is that it starts off in a completely different setting then the other CoD’s. That’s the other part that I liked. For the rest, it just sucks. You are basically given a gun and shoot the hell out of everything. That’s it. I was hoping for a little change, but I was wrong. It’s the same over and over again. The objectives are almost the same for every mission. Go to point A, blow something up, go to point B, shoot some guys. Repeat. The only thing remotely keeping me from throwing the game out the window was the narrative written by Goyer, but that’s it. I, for once in a CoD game, grew an attachment to a character only to be let down by the campaign. However, the story itself was nothing but fail. It jumped around way too much and tried to do too many things. The storyline was mostly in the loading screens.
Suck on that!
The action supporting the story was horrible. The AI was really messy. There were plenty of times where my men got stuck running into a wall, having a checkpoint show up right then, and have to restart the mission in order to proceed. There were also plenty of bugs in the campaign. I can’t tell you how many times I had to kill myself and restart because the enemy’s glitching throughout the air was freezing my Xbox. As interesting as the weapons were, they were wacky. It’s almost like they wanted the storyline to be put in the test so they could add new weapons to the CoD universe. However, I was liking the explosive crossbow.Zombies:
I thought the Nazi Zombies in World at War was interesting. It was flawed, but fun. It was a different take on the zombie horror games, which was great since it was also the time where Left 4 Dead became so popular. Zombies are back in Black Ops. Why? I have no clue. It’s basically the exact same thing from WaW. It only added a little bit of variation, a few new types of zombies, and someone called the “Pentagon Thief”, who would take your weapons if you aren’t careful. That’s all they did to it. It’s like they wanted more features to the game, but didn’t know what to do so they just copied it over. That’s all I’m going to say about it.
Cute, aren’t they?
Online:Ah, the world famous Call of Duty online. To be honest, I was actually excited to try this. I have thought for years that Activision should just make CoD online-only, don’t add anything else to it and add as much support to it as Bungie does with Halo: Reach. I started it up for the first time, taking about 20 seconds to load up the main Live menu, only to have my Xbox crash. I tried again, and was able to start a match. I played for about five seconds before the frame rate dropped. I was so mad at this point. I just wanted to stop trying and only write about this much for the review. I decided to try one last time. I joined the same game and went for it. Thankfully, it was fine at this point but bugs? That many? Especially when it comes to CoD’s strong point. I ended up in second place in the map, by the way.
I give kudos to the customization feature in the game. It was probably the most customization I have ever seen in a video game, in terms of FPS’s. It worked really well.
Now for the bad side to online. There were countless glitches. I played both before and after the latest patch and even then it was bad. It’s true that this can completely change given more time, but why should I wait? It should have been fixed from the beginning. I also doubt they will fix the horrible respawn points. The other team literally spawns behind you, so you do nothing but get raped by bullets. Where’s the fun in that?
This is all I’m going to say about the online. There is much to say about it, but why bother?
Misc.:
I’m not going to lie. The graphics were just bad, especially when put alongside other FPS shooters out there such as Bad Company 2 and Killzone 2. The background in most of the maps looked like it was painted by a three-year old. It was horrible. The blood coming out of my recently killed enemies looked really off. It was like they hid ketchup packets inside their jackets so when I shot at them, they could explode.
The sound effects were really good. The explosions sounded great, and the guns all had their unique sounds to them. The one thing I noticed when it came to audio was that the helicopters flying over had no noise attached to the machine guns, as well as no footsteps being heard from the people sneaking up on you. Hopefully all that can be patched.
I had a huge problem with the music. It was so boring! I literally turned off the music in the game about half way through it to stop from going crazy. There wasn’t much variety in it, and every time I died, it would start it from the very beginning.
Pros:
+Deep narrative.
+Explosions and guns all sound so pretty!
+Customization is very through.
Cons:
-Action supporting story is horrible
-Same zombie mode from World at War. Nothing really added to it.
-Glitchy campaign and online.
-Boring music and some sound effect issues
Overall:
I know as much as you do that this game will continue to sell wonderfully until next year. The quote in the beginning of the review is from a commenter, saying that the CEO of Activision basically bribed major online reviewers to give it good reviews. Lame, right?
Whether that be the case or not, the sad truth is that the gaming demographic is changing. Remember the days of Donkey Kong, Mario, Metroid Prime, and early GTA? There are quite a few that remember those games, but don’t like playing them now. It’s all about shooters, action, and blowing stuff up. The gaming world is changing. Studios need to take the time to make a good product. One with a great campaign, addicting online, and excellent support and patching. Activision should have taken a bit more time with this game. However, despite whether it’s good or bad, CoD’s will continue to sell. I’m saddened that I bought it. I was hoping for so much with Black Ops, only to be let down once again.
Rating
5.0
That rocket carries my hopes for this game.
I changed the way I write reviews. Is this better? It adds a little bit more color and organization to it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment