February, 1968. Military Assisstance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG to his buddies) covert operative Alex Mason is strapped to a chair in a room somewhere, as faceless interrogators punctuate bewildering and unanswerable questions with discharges of electricity. One thing leads to another, and as Mason is pushed back into the murky past, a… a completely absurd, extraordinarily stupid, and totally epic story emerges.
I won’t spoil anything, but any game that has you sabotaging the entire Soviet space program with – well, actually, I won’t spoil that either – but you have to respect its outrageous disregard for anything even remotely resembling reality. The plot just sort of explodes from one grossly implausible point to the next, until it all comes to the sort of stunningly, breathtakingly preposterous conclusion that you’d expect to discover in the prize-winning entry of a bad fiction contest. You know, when it’s so unremittingly terrible, that it’s awesome. It’s like they had Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich as a consultant or something. Just about the only thing missing was an asteroid almost colliding with the planet and prompting an instant ice age, although there is a barely averted – wait, I won’t spoil it, but they’ve almost managed to work the zombie mode into the narrative. Suffice it to say the game is political disaster porn on a stereoscopic-3D-at-IMAX blockbuster scale.
Actually, its Hollywood stylings don’t end there – the game pays unabashed tribute to conspiracy shows like Lost and 24 as well as pretty much every significant Vietnam movie ever made, most memorably in a gritty, if somewhat predictable, dedication to The Deer Hunter. Needless to say, perhaps, but this isn’t a game for the squeamish or easily offended, and definitely not for kids – there are scenes of torture and casual brutality easily exceeding most of the other stuff out there.
And it’s not exactly original. Call of Duty has a kind of feature checklist for all its most recent iterations, and they’re all accounted for here. Timed evacuation sequence? Check. Something analogous to Call of Duty 4’s iconic AC-130 sequence? Check. A desperate scramble to prevent something catastrophic from happening in the very final seconds, probably involving a secret communist agenda and an incipient planetary holocaust? Check. And while there’s nobody quite so authentically indestructible as Captain Price this time around, the cast of characters is every bit as hardboiled badass as you’d expect. It’s formidable testament to the series’ mastery of the genre and almost faultless execution that they can keep recycling the same stuff every year, and still entertain players.
Because you will be entertained. With huge set pieces and unrelenting violence, the game’s gasping pace dials exhilaration up to 11 with no time to stop and wonder if you’ve done any of this before.
Much like the two Modern Warfare games and Treyarch’s own World at War entry, Black Ops runs on a modified version of Call of Duty 4’s engine, apparently featuring some sort of enhanced texture streaming tech that makes space for some sprawling levels. On console, it’s pushing 60fps, mostly consistently although on two or three occasions during the campaign there was noticeable frame drop and lag lasting several seconds at a time. Aside from some blurry textures here and there, it’s a very good looking game on Xbox 360 (and, presumably, PS3). The AI appears to have been improved somewhat, with enemies behaving a little more unpredictably than in previous games, and teamies actually sometimes hitting targets.
In terms of difficulty, Modern Warfare 2’s holiday is over – Veteran is back with a vengeance, albeit without the grenade spam and infinite spawns. Except for that one bit. The Prismatic Grenade Spam and Infinite Spawn Corridor of Death and Reloading and Death and Reloading + 25. You’ll know it when you see it. And you’ll cry.
Elsewhere, of course, there’s mostly just loads of shooting bad guys with guns, occasionally interspersed with shooting bad guys with crossbows, or flamethrowers, or – my personal favourite – a SPAS-12 shotgun packing incendiary rounds. I shuddered a bit every time I fired that thing, but in a good way.
I’ve not much liked previous Treyarch-developed Call of Duty titles, but Black Ops is a triumph in the series, and by its own right, with a single player campaign that’s almost on par with Call of Duty 4’s. It doesn’t really innovate much or step out of its franchise paradigm in any way, but maybe its risk-free adherence to a tried and tested winning formula is the real reason it all works as well as it does. As someone who seldom replays games, it’s perhaps the highest compliment I could pay it to say I can’t wait to play it over again.
Reviewed on Xbox 360
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