Review:
Call of Duty: Black Ops

With Infinity Ward’s outstanding Modern Warfare games kicking the snot out of Treyarch’s horrendous World War Two shooter World at War, the ball is back in the latter’s court for the rematch. Modern Warfare 2 raised the stakes for both multiplayer depth and ridiculous action scenes, so it would seem from the title of this latest entry in the long-running franchise that Treyarch are going to do the sensible thing and go in the opposite direction, turning explosions into stealth and creating the best sneak-‘em-up in gaming history. At least, that’s what anybody with half a brain would think. And they’d be wrong.

Black Ops, or ‘Blops’ for short, puts the player behind the grizzled chin and furrowed brow of Alex Mason, a member of an elite task force who specialise in doing covert assassinations and secret missions on open battlefields. To be fair, this is a tad misleading – Mason carries out assassinations by kicking open the target’s front doors and shooting anything that moves with the loudest gun possible, while those battlefield missions are more like winning the war single-handedly. The game jumps back and forth in time during the early sixties as an interrogator drugs Mason and attempts to extract vital information from him that he unknowingly picked up at some point during his career. None of this matters, however, because almost all of the game is padding.

It’s a horrendously flimsy plot, even more so when you consider that maybe – just maybe – the game doesn’t actually need one. Surely a game based around a series of covert (emphasis on ‘covert’) missions against the many various targets around the world set against the rich tapestry of the Cold War would be twice as good as another generic action game? Nope, instead we’re given a game that’s a bland knock-off of its own franchise.

There are remarkably few sections in the game where you’ll actually feel like a member of an elite, clandestine unit of hardcore killers. The first mission asks you to break into Fidel Castro’s compound in Cuba and assassinate him, which involves, um, running from shotgun-toting cops, driving through barricades and murdering every single human inside the leader’s building. Another mission tasks you with sneaking into a secret Soviet space centre and taking out their rocket. This is carried out by four loudmouth Yanks who turn up in Russia IN AMERICAN MILITARY UNIFORMS. The leader of the group even wears a ridiculous bandana throughout the mission for Christ’s sake!