The greatest thing about E3 is getting to play unreleased games, or in this case, watch someone else play unreleased games. Today I was given a behind closed doors look at Treyarch’s upcoming Call of Duty title; Call of Duty: Black Ops.
An Activision representative ushered around 20 journalists into a small room kitted out with a 60” HD TV and wall to wall surround sound. The next 30 minutes were spent listening to him talk about the game, and then play through two of its missions.
We were only shown single player gameplay, but what I saw looked pretty exciting. At first glance, Black Ops looks a lot like Modern Warfare 2, which is to be expected.
We were told that Treyarch’s primary focus with Black Ops is “variety of gameplay”. This simply means that they want to vary the gameplay as much as possible, and judging from the single player gameplay we were shown, this is exactly what they have done.
The first mission, entitled “WMD” starts off with the player kitted out in astronaut-type gear. He then climbs into the cockpit of some sort of Stealth Fighter jet and blasts off into the skies. A few moments later, following a cinematic time lapse, the player is flying somewhere over snow covered Russian mountains.
A holographic scope pops up on screen and the viewpoint zooms down to earth. Through the holographic image the player spots 4 prone figures, apparently hiding amidst some trees from an enemy patrol. My first reaction was to think we were going to bomb the hiding soldiers, but that wasn’t how it played out. In a truly inspired piece of gameplay innovation, the player was given the ability to command the prone soldiers, instantly reminding me of the early Commandos games.
Navigating your men past enemy patrols by clicking on the ground RTS style, and directing them from the comfort of a Stealth Fighter has its appeal. But it gets better. After a few minutes of this, the action zooms into the ground where the player becomes one of the soldiers in a typically CoD stealth mission through snow and trees. From there the mission plays out similar to stealth missions from Modern Warfare 2. The player grapples down mountainsides, hides from enemies, and attacks from cover – in this case, with a crossbow. This demonstration was intended to show off the game’s stealth component, and it did so magnificently.
The next mission to be demonstrated was opposite in all respects to the first one. No mountains or snow, players begin in a sweltering tropical Vietnamese jungle. After having your platoon wiped out, your last surviving ally decides in a rage to hijack a nearby parked Hind attack helicopter and use it to exact vicious revenge. Getting to the chopper is a little tricky as it is pretty well defended, but once in the air, players are taken on a 15 minute rollercoaster, blowing up everything that moves as they follow a winding river. The helicopter is controlled completely by the player and they are given free reign to fly around destroying enemy encampments at will. The mission is intended to be straight forward fun, and give players something extremely powerful to go crazy with, and that is exactly what it does.
I came away impressed. Black Ops still needs to be polished obviously, but from what I saw, the single player component is looking like one of the best ever delivered by a Call of Duty title.
Sadly, no photos or video were aloud to be captured.
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