Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review – Hallucinatory fun through dystopia is stupidly fun | games

IIt seems like an anachronism now, in the era of live-service “eternal games,” where the annual release of a new Call of Duty title is still considered a major event. But here is Black Ops 7, a year after its immediate predecessor, and another breathless bombardment of military shootouts. This time, the film is set in the dystopian year 2035 where a global weapons manufacturer called The Guild claims to be the only solution to a horrific new terrorist threat – but are things as straightforward as they seem?

The answer, of course, is to shout loudly, “No!” Black Ops is the paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed cousin of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare game series, a series inspired by 1970s thrillers like The Parallax View and The China Syndrome, and infused with Nam-era fears about rogue CIA agents and bizarre psychological operations. The campaign mode, which represents only a quarter of the offering this year, is a hallucinatory tour through social and political talking points like psychopathic corporations, hybrid warfare, robots and tech oligarchies. The result is a deafening onslaught of massive shootouts in exotic locations, as the four main characters – members of a supercharged special operations group – are exposed to a psychotropic drug that causes them to live out their worst nightmares. Fortunately, they do so using advanced weapons, cool gadgets, and enough buddy banter to destabilize a mid-sized rogue nation. It’s chaotic, relentless, and stupidly fun, especially if you’re playing in co-op with three equally irresponsible friends.

In an interesting move, the campaign concludes with a new mode, Endgame. It’s a cooperative PVE (player versus environment) game inspired by the endgame content of MMO (massively multiplayer online) games like World of Warcraft, where they’re typically designed to keep people playing even after they’ve reached the max. In the Call of Duty version, groups of players land in the fictitious city of Avalon and undertake missions and objectives, such as eliminating high-value enemies or safely escorting expensive military technology, all in a vast open environment. Along the way, you upgrade your characters and weapons, and publisher Activision says new missions and objectives will be added, likely including public events where different teams can combine powers to take on big bosses. Time will tell, but for now, it’s a great way to expand the campaign and prepare us for online play.

Because make no mistake, the heart of the game is traditional multiplayer, which brings new modes, weapons and gadgets to the standard Call of Duty experience: 12 players in a small location crushing each other in auto-slaughter operettas. New maps like those in the Tokyo-inspired shopping district and the deep-sea platform are efficiently designed death chambers, with alleys, high windows, and open courtyards to direct players toward each other with evil style and intent. My favorite is the Alaska Imprint base map, where the moving platform makes picking up objective points in Domination and Hardpoint modes incredibly messy and confusing. The new wall jumping ability has opened up the verticality of the locations, allowing players to find new ways around the complex architecture. If you’ve never been into the brutality of the online Call of Duty experience, this won’t change your mind, but there’s plenty here to enjoy for regular recruits to the carnage.

Then you have Zombies mode, another online co-op offering, set in a vast hellscape of abandoned border towns and irradiated wastelands. Here, players face wave after wave of zombie monsters while upgrading their weapons and abilities in order to survive as long as possible. It’s a return to the circular structure of previous Zombies entries, with plenty of new weapons and features, including the ability to drive from one area to another in a pickup truck while blasting rampaging monsters from the hood. It’s as if you’re taking part in a crazy ride in an amusement park, and again, real fun with a group of like-minded friends.

Additionally, there’s Dead Ops Arcade 4, a top-down twin-stick shooter for up to four players. These add-ons were born as a side project by members of the original Black Ops team, and hidden within the main game. Now it’s back and it’s great in its own right, reminding old-school fans of omnidirectional shooters like Smash TV and Geometry Wars; There are also a few playable mini-games between stages that take on genres like top-down racers and horizontal shootouts – so grandpa can play too!

Add the usual update to the Battle Royale Warzone mode and you have a comprehensive package for Call of Duty fans. Whatever you think of the series and its problematic role in how the mainstream gaming industry works, how it’s perceived and the kinds of societies it breeds, this is great, exciting entertainment. Nowhere else will you be able to blow up a giant robot in a corporate science lab one minute, then play a modern version of Atari’s Super Sprint the next. Value matters now, and in this as in almost everything else, Call of Duty isn’t holding back. It’s an extreme paean to the absolute, unsettling truth of video game design – shooting things on a TV screen is a hell of a lot of fun.