Call of Duty: Black Ops II review (Xbox 360)

The year is 2025. The United States and China are locked in a Cold War. Something about Frank Woods. A drug dealer and terrorist named Raul Menendez who’s on top of a populist insurgent group, Cordis Die. Alex Mason’s kid, David AKA Section. The CIA. Wingsuits. Ponies.

Honestly, the game’s story is so convoluted, it’s more like a series of big explosions from one totally inscrutable plot point to the next than anything remotely resembling a meaningful narrative, but whatever – you go from A to B, and kill everybody on the way over, and eventually Team America saves the world until the inevitable sequel. That’s pretty much how every Call of Duty game ever is, and everything else is just irrelevant comms-chatter and loading screen text, anyway.

Quite in spite of the incomprehensible story, the game’s 8-10 hour campaign is top-tier stuff. While it remains – much like previous games – a linear corridor shooter, those walls are a lot wider this time around. Levels sprawl every which way, offering multiple routes through the action and cater to both run ‘n’ gun and paced, long-range tactical engagement styles, along with everything in between. Strictly in terms of level design and scope, it’s probably the best game in the series – it’s brutal, it’s relentless, and it’s completely absurd. I didn’t know what was going on, but I loved every moment of it.

Point and shoot. The answers to your questions are above your pay grade.

On harder difficulties, the enemy grenade spam is kept to a minimum, and without resorting to cheap and instantly infuriating AI manoeuvring, the gameplay feels much more skill-oriented than before. As a result, competent marksmanship is really all you need to finish the game on Hardened or Veteran, rather than dogged persistence, a slow temper, and an indestructible controller.

Unlike previous games, however, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the first to feature several possible endings, depending on a number of in-game actions (or inactions, for that matter) and the outcome of the optional Strike Force missions. It all might’ve made more sense if the story made more sense, but instead, these don’t add much to the game because the consequences seem so, well, inconsequential, and the Strike Force missions feel like a muddled mess of badly fitted concepts.

Part real-time strategy, part regular FPS, the objective-based Strike Force missions put you in command of a bunch of war assets, including squads of soldiers, remote-controlled turrets and robots, with orders to escort troops or protect or capture points on a map, or to eliminate enemy targets. These missions are also only available for a limited period of time, according to campaign progress, and choosing to play one mission can lock out others.

Succeeding or failing to accomplish your objective apparently has permanent ramifications in the ongoing campaign, and can impact the game’s conclusion, although I’m not convinced they’re really all that fun. The control system is straightforward enough, but swapping quickly between units and effectively managing the rapidly unfolding chaos around you is a daunting task that might be somewhat bigger than the control system can adequately support. I reached a point in one of the first Strike Force missions where I was simply switching to the next unit on the queue, shooting some bad guys, dying, and repeating the whole thing over again. I failed the mission in the closing moments, and decided I’d had quite enough of that pretty much forever.

Alongside the returning co-op Zombies Survival mode, Black Ops II also introduces a new mini-campaign mode, Tranzit.

In Tranzit, a bus moves between the same locations featured discretely in the Survival mode, making it a slightly more interesting and continual fight for survival. There are also some gadgets you can build by collecting parts around the area, and even the bus can be reinforced with bolt-on gear, but it’s a bit of a pixel hunt because the objects aren’t marked in any way, and you have no idea what you’re supposed to be looking for in the first place. It’s all rather confusing, and maybe that’s supposed to be part of the game, but just a little more exposition might have been nice. I mean, it took us three games before we even realised that the bus returns to locations so we could choose to stay behind when it leaves – that sort of information would have been much more useful upfront.

Honestly, I don’t know quite what to make of it. It’s something a bit different to the standard wave-based mode that’s become such a ubiquitous feature in games these days, so that’s a plus, but there’s no compelling reason to keep playing it unless you want to get a better score. And yet, I’ve kept playing it… to get a better score. So that works out, I suppose.

Onto multiplayer then, and there’s nothing unexpected here – this is a franchise that banks on the same players buying the game every year, and the big idea is to give those same players exactly the same thing every year, with just enough shiny new packaging to cover it up. The only significant change, as such, is that when you rank up, you earn tokens to unlock a limited number of additional guns, perks, and whatever else. This does partly mitigate the problem of higher ranking players dominating matches with ultra-powered sniper rifles and gunship batteries picked from an arsenal of everything, but there’s still that unavoidable barrier to entry for beginners. For everybody else, it’s conveniently and comfortably familiar enough to get stuck into.

Love it or hate it, the Call of Duty series continues to occupy a very specific (and very substantial) space in multiplayer gaming because it does what it does with tremendous class and production value, and an inimitable sense of style. That’s definitely not about to change with Call of Duty: Black Ops II.