A Futuristic Failure or a Step in the Right Direction?

Every time I think about Call of Duty, my head goes back to those clickbait headlines that read “you won’t recognize these child stars today.”

From the very first trailer, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 made it clear that it wanted to try something different. This was a futuristic game that seemed committed to picking up where the wildly successful Black Ops 2 had left off, with a side of Nine Inch Nails.

I don’t envy the team at Treyarch, but I respect the boldness. Black Ops 7 was going to fight the triumphant ghosts of the past, while also being the follow-up to the most successful Call of Duty ever. Alas, what could have been the consolidation of a return to form has instead become an all-out nightmare.

Around this time last year, I was dreading starting a playthrough of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. This franchise was a formative part of my youth, and I still have fond memories of holding St. Mère-Eglise with Captain Foley and Sergeant Moody in the first game.

That innocent love affair of the early 2000s was progressively eroded with the years, however, and after two decades, the Call of Duty I knew had been replaced by a glorified Counter-Strike competitor with little care for the grounded stories that made the franchise great in the first place.

While Modern Warfare largely represents how the original Call of Duty lost its way after the first two games in the new series, Black Ops was a whole other story. Rather than reform the aura of yore, Treyarch went all out to build one of the most iconic spy thriller series in gaming history, shining the spotlight into the dirty work of intelligence field agents who helped shape the world as we know it.

The execution was far from perfect or even consistent, but there’s an argument to be made that Cold War and especially Black Ops 6 were good games. Until this year, the quality had been going up, so you’d think Black Ops 7 would at least try to keep up.

The Setting, Mason, What Does It Mean?

Black Ops 2 takes place in what is now the present day. Black Ops 7 moves the timeline ten years into the future, and while that opens a host of possibilities, the game doesn’t hold onto any of them.

Rather than take the creative license to innovate, the gun designs are festering with nonsense, if to paraphrase the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in the UK, which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history.

From the character perspective, you get a slightly played-up HUD under the guise of C-Link implants, but it doesn’t add much functionality beyond what you were used to in two decades of Call of Duty games.

Perhaps the biggest sin with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is that it fails to answer one critical question: what’s the point? The whole premise of the game hinges on a bizarre replay of cinema’s most infamous setups and it’s hard to look past that.

Call of Duty, Episode VII

There will be no spoilers for the campaign here in case you feel inclined to see for yourself, but the opening cutscene essentially boils down to ‘somehow, Menendez returned’. We even got the boss of Big Bad Evil Corp to confirm it, so it must be true.

Battlefield 6 may have fumbled a strong campaign concept through lazy execution, but Black Ops 7 never stood a chance. In trying to pick up where the series left off in 2012, the writers forgot that Call of Duty today is not the kind of game that can be carried by nostalgia alone.

The way we get back on the Menendez chase train feels cheap, rather than bombastic. The big bad is back, except we know he isn’t, but what if he is? Therefore, we do a Fortnite-style wingsuit insertion and work it out from there.

It’s not the absolute worst thing in existence, but without a strong justification, the player has no reason to find this wild goose chase exciting.

Compounding these issues is the ‘Zombiesfication’ of the campaign. You play in teams of up to four, there are caches everywhere and the enemies spawn in waves with dainty little health bars above them.

Unlike your team, most of the enemy design is either wholly futuristic or fairly grounded. The standard Guild goons are reminiscent of the Bolton Security dweebs from Ready Or Not’s Mindjot raid, but you also end up fighting a variety of humanoid robot enforcers.

The co-op campaign concept is nothing revolutionary, and games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands have executed it to perfection. Black Ops 7 stays on track in this regard, but it does a disservice to solo players by not allowing them to pause even when playing alone, and without AI teammates. A trio of teammates, even if just as boss bait, would have been nice.

Not For Thee, And Not For Me Either

Fighting the AI exposes one of the main problems with Black Ops 7, which is the long time-to-kill. Most enemies have some degree of armor, forcing you into judicious mag-dumps to bring them down.

Tanky enemies can be fun when sprinkled in as a periodic challenge, but when everything needs multiple shots to take down, fights get tedious. Here, you get to choose between light, medium and heavy flavors of bullet sponge.

Once you take things online, the TTK issues persist, though there are flashes of brilliance.

Last year, the bizarre collection of operator skins was bad, but the main issue with Black Ops 6 was the movement and gunplay. Although you could partially ignore that in the campaign, going online was a frustrating mess of sliding and jumping bozos that made the experience miserable for anyone wanting slightly more tactical gameplay.

Treyarch took that feedback to heart with Black Ops 7, and although the enhanced movement mechanics are still there, they are much more nuanced. Players move at a normal pace, sliding does not magically accelerate you to bullet speed, and the guns have a satisfying punch that comes through in both visual and audio feedback.

Although Battlefield 6 is a brilliant game, its overly twitchy movement and gunnery fall short of Black Ops 7, and it makes me pine for an update that brings it closer to the latter.

Outside of that, what you get is bog-standard modern Call of Duty. Even the maps for 20v20 battles are fairly small, which creates a problem for the ‘Fortnite glider’ respawn mechanic since everyone can see you coming, and you very often get mowed down within five seconds of landing.

I was pleased to see there was no egregious meta in terms of loadouts, and even the often-sidelined light machine guns were fairly viable weapons. Sniper headshots are the only way to reliably score one-hit kills, which has become an annoying industry standard that I cannot fault Treyarch for following. I’ll die a ‘headshot means instant kill’ apologist.

The ability to pick between first and third person views is nice, though I found the over-the-shoulder camera a little obtuse and stuck to the more familiar first-person perspective instead.

In Your Head, Zombie

For all the struggles with other modes, this year’s version of Zombies is better than both Killing Floor 3 and Painkiller, so if you like co-op horde shooters, you’ll probably dig this more.

Few games get strangers to work together as well as Call of Duty Zombies. In my very first match, our group stuck together through hell before getting separated around wave 18 or so. For the next long minutes, I joined forces with a friendly Italian stranger and fought back to back until the horde eventually consumed us.

We thought we were done for as we lay down incapacitated with only pistols, but then the rest of the group found us and started things up again. It was only when the giant zombie bear came into play that our team fell.

The difficulty in zombies scales up nicely, and unlike regular modes, enemies don’t feel nearly as spongy. This is the perfect playground to enjoy everything that Black Ops 7 does well, without having to suffer through its more half-baked features.

Is a fun zombie game worth the $69.99 price tag, though? That’s a different story.

A Swing, and a Miss

This January, I wrote an opinion piece on how this year was the last real chance for Battlefield to beat Call of Duty. One of the reasons for that was that Black Ops 6 proved, or so I thought, that Treyarch had remembered how to make good games again. Well, I’d like to issue a retraction here.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a stark reminder that having talented people working on the technical aspects of a game cannot salvage poor writing and creative direction. Yes, the game looks beautiful, Zombies is a good time, the guns are fun to use, and movement is not nearly as repulsive as last year, but why should you care?

All of the redeeming qualities of the game are buried deep beneath a setting and story that fail to compel the player, and some of the game’s cards feature the kind of lazy, AI-generated cartoon images that are more appropriate to blue check Twitter reply-guys.

Rather than accept criticism for it, however, Activision has said this usage of generative AI was meant to ’empower and support our teams.’ It’s hard to find the empowerment and support when the team in question used a quick chat prompt to create generic visuals instead of handing it off to an artist who would certainly do a better job. Activision, of all companies, can afford it.

Mechanically, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a good game, and I’d even risk calling it one of the best multiplayer shooters to come out this year in that regard. The problem is that mechanics are tools, and the game they are subordinate to is a poor artisan. Between the uninspired futuristic aesthetics and the nonsensical campaign, it’s upsetting to see that this is what Call of Duty could come up with after the strongest release in over a decade. All the fun of Zombies is not enough to spare Black Ops 7 from being the worst game in the franchise, and the only saving grace is that it might serve as a cautionary tale about complacency when managing popular franchises.