Call of Duty is undeniably the biggest franchise of the current generation, both in sales and sheer amount of entries. With Black Ops 2 we are now on the eighth game of the generation (nine if you count the digital download version of the original), and quite honestly by this point brand fatigue is a real issue. That isn’t to say the game is bad, however. Not only is Black Ops 2 the game to revitalise the series, it may very well revitalise the entire vista of modern military shooters.
Let me explain. Little has changed since Call of Duty 2. Yes the setting updated to Modern Warfare by entry four, and the original Black Ops visited the cold war and experimented with a more engaging and thoughtful story, but in the end they always all boiled down to a linear set of pathways to shoot your way through before winning the game and moving onto the multiplayer. This became a recipe for success that many other titles started to emulate to the point where whenever you now see the word “generic” you think modern military shooter on reflex.
There’s a reason why these games became generic though; they work as pieces of entertainment. There is also no denying that in this sub-genre Call of Duty is the king. Despite the now aging engine powering it all, the series still experiences a constantly blistering 60 FPS, leading to the most responsive and fluid shooting mechanics on a console (you’re never going to get mouse quality control with a stick, let’s face it). With experience in building level design meant to shepherd you along without actively forcing your hand, the two teams behind the franchise always managed to build a game that at the end of the day was exciting, never over-controlling, and was the perfect gaming equivalent of sitting down on a Saturday night with the Die Hard trilogy.
This isn’t enough for some people, however. Though while many of the naysayers will undoubtedly hate the series because its popular, some have valid concerns that the brand is suffering from overexposure. A new entry every year should be a bad thing, but with games so consistently entertaining those who are up for something that gives you some high calibre hardware and sets you loose it’s a formulae that needs no alteration, so of course Treyarch altered the formulae and proved us all wrong. Even if Black Ops 2 doesn’t end up bringing the naysayers round to acceptance, it has shown us all that Call of Duty could indeed benefit from alteration, because frankly the changes instituted here have made for an even more superior form of entertainment – handing players high calibre hardware, setting them loose then giving them story-altering consequences of their actions.
Yes, Call of Duty now has a branching story line, and it is fantastic. Taking place across two time periods, the latter years of the cold war and the near-future 2025, the story concerns itself with the life and times of Raul Menendez, a man who for various reasons holds a degree of animosity towards America, and in particular original Black Ops major players Alex Mason and Frank Woods. For reason’s I won’t spoil, Menendez holds this grudge well into the future where he becomes leader of an extremist group Cordis Die, who wish to ignite a war between the worlds superpowers.
While simple on the surface, it’s a story full of grey areas. The shifting time periods, as well as sections playable as Menendez, allow the game to portray its villain not so much as evil incarnate, but as a man that is genuinely relatable, and while his methods can often venture into the extreme, the shift in perspective shows that if the game was set entirely from this point of view then things could be drastically different. The terrorists here are easy to see as freedom fighters, and the “good guys” we play as are often shown to be just as drastic and malicious as the enemies were supposed to combat. It’s a fascinating take on the usually gung-ho attitude military shooters take, though it never truly manages to reach the highs that Spec Ops The Line did earlier this year.
The choices you make are often grey as well, not that the ambiguity will be immediately obvious. It will take multiple playthroughs (or perhaps just a keen analytical mind to weigh potential outcomes) to see just how bad both consequences will be with the binary choices. It isn’t these choices that are the most interesting though; oftentimes you’ll find yourself making choices you don’t even know exist. At several points in the game you will have complete control over a section of gameplay, and which path you take, or how quickly you take it, or who you shoot while taking it or even where you shoot them can all have consequences on the rest of the game. Some only change minor aesthetics or dialogue, while others can kill major characters or bring up new strike force missions or even alter the entire outcome of the ending.
These on the fly choices are a magnificent addition to a genre that isn’t known for its choice and non-linearity, and to be quite honest are the kind of choices that open-ended RPGs don’t even often have. Not only do these choices also allow a sense of intimate connection with the story (this can really become a war that resides on what kind of person you are, though some of them may be made simply because the difficulty you’re playing on makes some of the paths nigh-impossible to achieve for certain reasons), but also adds a new length to the campaign in replayabilty. Older Call of Duty entries relied on the action film defence that if you want to watch things blow up for 90 minutes then you’ll come back, but Black Ops 2 takes it a step further and introduces alternate and deleted scenes with the other pathways and endings.
This isn’t to say it’s all without fault on the story front though. The timeline switching can often lead to some confusion, especially when certain scenes are a flashback being told during a flashback set in the future. Not to mention those not familiar with military jargon may be lost with some of the conversations and plot points. Some confusion can come from the near-future setting as well, taking people out of the comfort zone of known technology. While this will be explored with the design later on, it can often cause plot confusion when characters are talking about things with prefixes like “nano”, or equipment such as “Claws” or “ASDs”.
As I said, the design can be a sore point as well. I spoke to a friend who was turned off from the game because some of the technology (specifically the four legged walking battle unit – the CLAW) where a little too sci-fi for a mere thirteen years in the future, despite the fact it’s a current prototype technology. Even those who can accept the advance in hardware, however, can often find themselves lost in all the new weaponry and attachments. Just what exactly is a Kap40, what kind of optic is a millimetre scanner, and what is this strange weapon that’s simultaneously a three round burst and pump action? Its gun porn at its greatest level yet, but it’s also an area of unfamiliar technology that creates an obstacle in coming to grips with the new equipment. There’s a lot more trial and error in class creation just to find a setup that suits your playstyle due to the simple fact that we can’t easily associate with the weapons we already know and love.
This is really a negligible point though as all this new hardware is immense fun to play with. While all the genre mainstays are here on a base level (weapons such as assault rifles, sniper rifles and LMGs) it’s the near-future twist that makes them feel brand new. The ‘curves’ of the new weapons have a certain aesthetic that modern shooters lack with all the hard lines and edges. This is obvious again in the optics, which rather than now being your standard glass and dots send out sonar like pulses to illuminate the environment (and any enemies in range, even behind cover), while others highlight enemies with a red diamond, not unlike Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter did way back when. Couple this with Call of Duty’s not too strict adherence to physics and you’ll be dual-wielding suppressed revolvers that fire shotgun rounds in no time.
At least until the enemy come to grips with the new side equipment. Grenades have been futurised as well, with EMPs being one of the more effective introductions. Killstreaks return in multiplayer as well; now dubbed Scorestreaks they act as a further refined iteration of the system introduced in Modern Warfare 3, where rather than solely relying on kills every point you get counts. This means that kills while defending or attacking objectives are worth more, and even the objectives themselves contribute to your three selected abilities, and what abilities they are. Obviously they aren’t much different when you really get down to it, but the new polish they all show, such as predator missiles now being hellfire missiles that you split into multiple warheads before impact for a greater field of effect, really makes them feel fresh again.
So why did I pick specify that killstreaks return in multiplayer? The campaign also now allows you set up your loadout before every mission, that’s why. While you start with only a handful of weapons to choose from, completing missions and optional objectives within said missions quickly starts to unlock new weapons, attachments, grenades, and perks for you to drop into the campaign missions with, once again adding a layer of personalisation and non-linearity to a previous strictly linear experience. This does of course mean that eventually you’ll be allowed to take a sniper rifle that shoots through walls back to 1980s Afghanistan, which quite frankly is more fun than it should be allowed to be to have such an unfair advantage.
How does it all play though? At the aforementioned constant 60 frames per second it plays as well as it ever has. Once again it is undeniable that Call of Duty has managed to refine first person shooting controls to a point of near perfection; they’re smooth, responsive, and once you get your sensitivity set to your comfort zone will never cause a problem. Better yet the weaponry your aiming with always has a satisfying kick to it that, while not quite on the scarily joyful highs Resident Evil 4 managed with its weapons, makes shooting an utter delight, helped along by the fact that your rounds actually feel like they’re doing damage by being able to drop enemies in a single well aimed burst (counter to the almost unfair amount of ammo Halo expects you pump into things on higher difficulties, an arguably archaic mechanic).
As mentioned above, the branching paths and player choice are also great improvements on the formulae, making for an infinitely more playable game than its predecessors – now not only to we get the action film explosions and set pieces that put whole other game campaigns to shame, but we get to choose what causes the explosions and what outcomes change because of it.
As an added bonus an entirely new concept makes it into the campaign that alters the gamestyle as well. Dubbed Strike Force missions, these optional excursions are paramount in the outcome of the war. While mostly just taking place on a multiplayer map, these missions give you objectives to attack, defend or rescue key objectives, and some will only appear if you chose certain outcomes to main missions, for example allowing a High Value Individual to be kidnapped in mission X leads to Strike Force Y becoming available for you to rescue them, giving you a second chance at certain pathways.
All of this is running on an updated IW engine, the same engine that has powered the Call of Duty franchise for many years now, and while it has come under fire recently for essentially being old technology, it’s still a fantastic piece of kit. The graphics aren’t going to be winning any awards, but (coming to this point yet again) they’re being pushed out at a constant sixty frames per second, making the entire thing crisp, clear and beautiful in motion. This isn’t to say the graphics are bad though, quite the contrary, they are very nice to look at, with light and shadows effects being of particular highlight, and the water effects being worth a mention. Certain scenes are visually stunning to look at, if more for design and frame rate reasons than sheer horsepower.
Speaking of the design, the near-future technology is designed to a very good degree. The weapons feel familiar while also being extraordinary thanks to the near-future tweaks, and the levels (and situations that occur in them) have a natural progression, with combat areas being designed to have multiple points of attack and defence, as well as the progression paths doing nigh-invisible work to funnel you in the right direction without dragging you by the hand. After fighting your way through rain soaked ruins from your wingsuit landing point and eventually discovering a state-of-the-art facility buried deep beneath them you never once question the natural feel of everything that happened, at no point will you stop and notice that you’re lost or unable to go where you think you can or contemplate the sudden change from rock to metal. It’s a marvellous feat of level and weapon design to blend the old and the new, an apt statement for every part of this entire package to be honest.
Sound design is again a high point, with weapons having real weight to their reports and the battle chatter throwing around the acronyms, expletives and jargon that you expect from action of this calibre. The voice acting deserves a mention as well, with some Hollywood heavyweights throwing their grunts around, though the real stars are the unknowns who have even more believability in their roles. There is no weak link in the voices on show (on hear?) in this game, and as a special bonus there’s even a small cameo by Mr “Brade Runna” himself – the legendary James Hong.
Of course this is a Treyarch entry, so there’s not just the campaign and multiplayer to take a bit out of, there’s the now obligatory zombies mode to sink your teeth into. Just like the other two modes, this mode has been vastly updated as well, and now instead of only having singular solitary survival maps, the new “Tranzit” mode connects them all in an open world with an upgradeable bus to make safe journeys between them (though you are free to go in-between on foot to find some extra areas that, as is zombies tradition, hold some pretty convoluted easter eggs.)
With four friends this mode is as enjoyable as ever, if not more so thanks to the expanded world to explore. Though there is still no option to enter a zombie game with a custom loadout, which could have added an extra dimension to proceedings.
All told each of the modes in Black Ops 2 is worthy of being released solo (though Zombies may have to make do with an arcade release if this were the case), but is here being presented as a single package that, even with the £40 price tag, is extreme value for money. It’s exciting, it’s fun, and it’s consistently entertaining and mechanically sound (give or take a couple of non-game breaking glitches, but let’s be honest, dancing corpses just add to the entertainment value sometimes), and with the best shooting controls this side of having a mouse anyone who likes to handle some high-calibre hardware owes it to themselves to [answer the Call/ get Back in Black/ go Black to the Future]*#
*Delete as appropriate
#Apologies for the puns, they’re just so obvious we had to get them out of the way
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