Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s multiplayer is better than its terrible, terrible, disgusting, ghastly, hideous and not-so-good campaign. However, “better” in this case does not necessarily mean “good”. This year’s fitful avalanche of maps, modes, and zombies meets the basic requirement for a satisfying shooting experience, and there are a few ideas that are compelling, if not always effective. However, the overall quality is wildly inconsistent, and the overall package is overshadowed by the specter of generative AI.
The biggest change to this year’s multiplayer is also the least compelling to discuss: the skill-based approach to matchmaking. Call of Duty’s habit of matching you with players supposedly at your skill level has come under fire in recent years for flattening the experience. So this year, Treyarch is giving you a choice, allowing you to play either “standard” SBMM or in a pool where SBMM is “minimally included.”
I think allowing this choice is absolutely the right decision on Treyarch’s part. As an intermediate CoD player, it really highlighted the difference SBMM makes. With this option enabled, I would have consistently decent, sometimes exceptional performance. In the case of “minimal” SSBM, my experiences varied greatly, from enjoyable matches to the worst time of my life when I was doused by human dervishes armed with submachine guns and the gift of foresight.
As a player in the twilight of my youth, this choice made me appreciate the reduced risk of bursting a blood vessel that SBMM offered, although I did occasionally jump into the second pool to test my mettle against more skillful players.
When it comes to jumping, Treyarch is also making some tweaks to the omni-move system introduced in Black Ops 6. The “big” addition is wall jumping, which allows you to employ walls to bounce off cliffs or climb to higher ledges. This is a reasonable extension of the system, although the opportunities to employ it are rarer than I would like.
However, my favorite addition to Black Ops 7 is the recent, smaller Overload mode. This requires teams to capture and move an EMP device to a circular target that randomly appears on the map – with the team with the most wins. Reminiscent of Battlefield 4’s underrated Obliteration mode, it’s a bit like gun rugby, although it has a break where both teams swap places on the map.
With Call of Duty being more of a sport than ever, Overload works well with the overall pace and tone of the game – using the omni-move system to jump into the gate seconds before you get slaughtered is undeniably fun. It would be even more compelling if players could pass the device around, which would facilitate more sophisticated team play. Nevertheless, the constantly moving target means that the full scope of the map is used, leading to more compelling combat encounters than, say, Hardpoint, where everyone is simply dragged into the same meat grinder loop.
While Overload marks a victory for Black Ops 7’s recent modes, Skirmish is a complete dud. Call of Duty’s larger modes usually suffer under Battlefield’s incendiary spotlight, but this year the comparison is particularly unflattering. Skirmish’s 20v20 maps are completely devoid of the atmosphere generated by Battlefield 6’s smoky, rubble-strewn 64-player war zones, while Conquest-style objectives provide none of the ad hoc camaraderie or player-generated drama that Battlefield is so adept at creating.
There’s a bit of irony here, though, because in Black Ops 7’s core modes, it generally does best with the larger maps available. Outside of Overload, the most fun I had in Black Ops 7 was playing Kill Confirmed on the returning Express map. It’s not just Black Ops 7’s train-themed map remake that’s a winner – swapping the location for a shiny Japanese subway station lit up with animated billboards – the combination of high visibility and woven diagonal corridors make collecting the dog tags of downed enemies a thrill.
By contrast, Black Ops 7’s smaller maps squeeze the action too tightly, resulting in cacophonous deaths that descend into incoherence too quickly. Black Ops 7 is definitely one of the sweatier multiplayer shooters, but the medium-sized maps give players some room to breathe, and those who shoot first don’t necessarily have the last laugh. But on maps like Hijacked, Flagship and, yes, Nuketown, you’re basically threshered over and over again, often spawning only to be bricked almost immediately by a burst of scoring.
As for the performance streaks, they are not as glaring as they have been for several years. But let me take a paragraph to express my raw, unbridled hatred of DAWGs. These dog robots, which appear in the campaign as regular enemies and in multiplayer as a staggered scoreline, are probably the most annoying thing ever added to Call of Duty. I hate their name. I hate the horrible blaring horn sound they constantly make when deployed. Most of all, I hate how they completely unbalance the match, being able to kill players so easily and absorb so much damage that they just disrupt the flow of the match whenever they appear.
Almost by default, Zombies are Call of Duty’s most reliable offering this year, if only because they do almost nothing to disrupt the formula. If you’ve played any Zombie game before, you’ll know what to expect. Wave-based survival where you upgrade your equipment by being dragged around the map for the sake of objectives, and a story that disappeared down its own hole so long ago that it’s completely baffling to anyone who hasn’t played it in a few years. The only notable change is that you can drive one of Call of Duty’s Tomy-quality vehicles between objectives.
Honestly, I never understood the appeal of Zombies. Well, that’s not entirely true, I understand the appeal of the so-called concept. Blowing hordes of the undead into sticky red goo can be one of the greatest joys in gaming, as Left 4 Dead brilliantly demonstrated. But I don’t think CoD zombies would do that whenever I enjoyed ballistic ventilation as much as I did in Valve’s shooter, even seventeen years later.
For me, shooting CoD zombies has always felt like shooting cardboard – empty, unsatisfying action. There is a strange weightlessness about them. And while the damage model is gruesome, it doesn’t respond to your attacks in a satisfying way. This is especially noticeable when compared to games like Dying Light: The Beast. Techland’s latest game isn’t a masterpiece, but it really understands the importance of physicality in depicting combat against the undead. The dropkick alone provides enough real feedback to provide 30 hours of play. If it weren’t for the constant stream of updates, I think most people would get bored of fighting CoD zombies within a few hours.
One final addition worth mentioning is progression between modes. Whether you’re playing the Black Ops 7 campaign, multiplayer, or zombies, you earn XP to unlock weapons you can employ in all modes. At first I thought it was a good idea. Jumping into multiplayer with a wide range of weapons to choose from was a refreshing change after being stuck with the same starting assault rifle. But the more I played, the more inappropriate it seemed. Hearing that screaming guitar riff during a (supposedly) dramatic moment in the campaign or being chewed out by a horde of zeds takes you out of the moment, which is impressive considering how ridiculous and immersive Black Ops 7 often is.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this feature was indicative of a broader problem in Black Ops 7. As I mentioned in my campaign review, the series has long since lost any sense of thematic and artistic identity. However, between the inclusion of multiplayer in the campaign, progress across all modes, and the repurposing of the Warzone map to open world post-campaign, Call of Duty’s structural integrity also began to erode. Everything permeates everything else in a way that violates the historical boundaries of the series, resulting in an amorphous experience where nothing stands out in particular or has a clear design philosophy.
Combined with the fact that the game is filled with generative AI, which is clearly evident in its showcase and quite possibly present elsewhere, the result is an experience that doesn’t feel like it was crafted with much care and consideration. Black Ops 7 is true Call of Duty for the sloop generation, a rushed, incoherent and soulless experience.
