It’s strange to imagine, I thought, as I fought a giant, vomiting plant monster in bioweapon-induced hallucinations, that Call of Duty was once, at least theoretically, about the human cost of war. It was a long time ago, admittedly. There are adults who have never encountered the original CoD idea of you playing an ordinary soldier snarling in a terrifying post-industrial war machine. But I don’t think the series has ever been further from this concept than it was in the monstrous mess of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s campaign.
In fact, part of me wonders if this latest military adventure doesn’t include an optional co-op mode so that people like me can’t call it the worst single-player offering in the series. As it happens, I wouldn’t be inclined to agree with that statement anyway, but only because there’s stiff competition in the Call of Duty back catalog.
As mentioned, the biggest change to the Call of Duty campaign this year is that it can be fully played solo or with up to three other players. I don’t actually mind it – Call of Duty has long been a multiplayer game, so introducing it to the campaign is a logical evolution. Unfortunately, in this case it is evolution that drags the entire experience down, like a human arm growing out of a fish’s anus.
The most obvious problem is a miniature but significant mechanical change. To compensate for the extra firepower coming your way, all your opponents now have health bars that need to be painstakingly whittled down. This dramatically reduces the sense of lethal weaponry – something that has been a focal point of the series since we first parachuted into Normandy. Currently, ammo clips are required to destroy many enemies, especially robots, but this is also seen in the case of human enemies. This makes Call of Duty’s existing lithe and snappy gunplay feel mushy and unsatisfying, whether you’re playing with a full squad or not.
Implementing a collaborative mode also leads to a number of annoying problems. Even if you play solo (which I did for about half the campaign), you can’t pause the game, and if you leave mid-mission, you have to start over. Furthermore, while you can technically play solo, the experience is noticeably diminished when you do, especially in the Avalon levels, which I’ll get to in due course.
Meanwhile, the cooperation element is not significant enough to compensate for the problems it creates. While there are a few scenarios where actual teamwork is rewarded, such as an objective where you have to defend a bank of servers from attack from all sides, cooperation mainly comes into play when you’re whittling down the massive health bars of bosses – like the plant monster mentioned above. Many of the cooperative or adjoining systems feel superficial, especially the ARPG-style loot system that includes uncommon, scarce, epic, and legendary weapons. Since these tiers are unlocked as strenuous upgrades throughout the campaign, finding a scarce or legendary weapon becomes essentially redundant.
Ultimately, cooperation is a negative effect on the campaign. There’s a bigger problem, though, which may or may not be related, and that’s that the campaign is almost completely devoid of content – which is an impressive feat considering Call of Duty has been carrying the weight of a bucket of popcorn for at least 15 years.
Canonically, Black Ops 7’s campaign is a sequel to Black Ops 2, with the series once again focusing on the near future of BO2’s co-hero, David Mason. With the future of Black Ops 2 now, surprisingly, the present, Black Ops 7 moves the timeline forward another ten years, with Mason on a mission to investigate a group known as the Guild. This leads to the release of a man-made toxin called the Cradle into the city of Avalon, which Mason and his team then try to stop.
If that wasn’t enough, The Cradle interferes with special microchips called C-Links that have been implanted in Mason and his squad. They are intended to serve operational purposes. But they are real, so the party may suffer from collective hallucinations under the influence of the Cradle.
I now realize that Black Ops has always existed on the sillier side of Call of Duty. However, the last two Black Ops games have at least occasionally touched on reality, creating entertaining spy thrillers based on an alternate history. I guess you could argue that the missions in Black Ops 7 are also memorable, although the sight of a person getting sucked into a jet engine is memorable.
Structurally, the campaign consists of three different types of missions. The first and least popular are several almost classic Call of Duty missions. These include an opening raid on the Guild’s secret laboratory and a mid-campaign mission set in Japan where you play with a completely different set of characters than the rest of the campaign. This final mission, which has you running through subways and across neon-drenched rooftops, is probably the highlight of the campaign, even if it’s just to set up gigantic twist which the game accidentally reveals during a radio conversation about two missions later.
Most of the campaign is devoted to collective hallucinations, which usually refer to Mason’s past and the absurdly convoluted plot of the Black Ops series. For example, the giant vomit plant I mentioned is supposed to represent Frank Woods’ guilt in mistakenly killing David Mason’s father in Black Ops 2. However, Frank Woods is canonically dead in 2035 (though he is indeed resurrected in… actually, let’s not be fooled) and therefore only exists in David’s head.
In fact, the plant monster represents the blame for the hallucinations of the man who accidentally killed David’s father. I think the sequence should be more about David forgiving Woods, but David already understands and accepts that his father’s death was an accident, saying the same during the mission. So the only character development comes from a man who is no longer alive and exists as a figment of your imagination.
Are these playable hallucinations at least visually fascinating? Occasionally. In one mission, you fight through the combined minds of your own team, starting with a sequence where you fight along a Los Angeles highway that twists and turns like the Milkman’s Plot from Psychonauts. It’s a decent mission, even if it ends in a boss fight that’s even dumber than the plant monster. However, too many of these sequences involve navigating the game designers’ favorite shorthand for strange environments – floating islands – or callbacks to an earlier Black Ops game in the virtual equivalent of a clip show. It doesn’t assist that most hallucinatory enemies, which include spiders and zombies, are tactically engaged in combat like a potted plant.
But I’ll happily inhale any psychoactive Black Ops 7 glutton on the missions I do NO discussed yet, and which take place in Avalon itself. It’s a gigantic, open map that will eventually serve as the setting for Call of Duty: Warzone’s upcoming Blackout mode, which has been repurposed here to add variety to the campaign, such as adding sawdust to your porridge.
Avalon’s missions are downright hopeless, with superficial combat encounters that move at a terrible pace and stretch across gigantic, empty swaths of terrain. It plays as if you were tasked with eliminating wild mobs on an abandoned MMO server, giving you neither the fun of a properly designed open-world game nor the tightly choreographed action of a classic Call of Duty campaign.
If you can make it to the end of this fever dream, Avalon will return with Call of Duty’s fresh Endgame mode, a cooperative hybrid of extraction shooter and non-destructive Just Cause. You and your team babble about how Avalon goes on missions such as chasing down convoys, fending off waves of enemies to retrieve data from black boxes, and fending off waves of enemies to certain crates. It makes better operate of Avalon than the campaign, but I can’t emphasize enough how low a bar that is to clear.
I wish I could say I was surprised by the sloppiness of Black Ops 7’s campaign, but the melancholy reality is part of a long-running pattern with Call of Duty’s annual releases that has only intensified in recent years, with direct sequels to the series’ various offshoots feeling like the reheated leftovers of a twelve-year-old meal. That said, it’s still disappointing considering the comparable quality of the last two Black Ops campaigns, and in an age where old-fashioned linear shooters are extremely scarce, Black Ops 7 fails to offer anything even modestly enjoyable.
