It is strange to imagine – I thought as I battled a giant vomit-spewing plant monster in a hallucination induced by a biological weapon – that Call of Duty was once, at least notionally, about the human cost of war. That was a long time ago, admittedly. There are full grown adults who have never experienced CoD’s original idea that you played an ordinary soldier snarled up in a terrifying post-industrial war machine. But I don’t think the series has ever been further away from that concept than in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s hideous mess of a campaign.
In fact, part of me wonders whether this latest military misadventure features not-so-optional co-op simply so people like me can’t call it the series’ worst single-player offering yet. As it happens, I wouldn’t be willing to commit to such a statement anyway, but only because there’s some stiff competition within Call of Duty’s back catalogue.
As mentioned, the biggest change to Call of Duty’s campaign this year is that it is fully playable solo or with up to three other players. I’m not against this in principle – Call of Duty has long been a multiplayer-first experience, so bringing this to the campaign is a logical evolution. Unfortunately, in this case it’s an evolution that drags the whole experience down, like a human arm growing out of a fish’s arsehole.
The most obvious problem is a small but significant mechanical change. To compensate for the additional firepower coming their way, all your opponents now have health bars that must be tediously whittled down. This dramatically reduces the sense of your weapons’ lethality – something that’s been central to the series since we first parachuted into Normandy. Now, many enemies require clips upon clips of ammo to take down, particularly the robots, but it’s evident with human enemies too. It makes Call of Duty’s hitherto lithe and snappy gunplay feel mushy and unsatisfying, whether or not you’re rolling with a full squad.
The implementation of coop also leads to a bunch of nuisance issues. Even if you’re playing solo (which I did for about half the campaign), you cannot pause the game, and if you quit during a mission you must restart from the beginning. Moreover, while you can technically play solo, the experience is noticeably diminished when you do, especially in the Avalon levels which I’ll get to in due course.
Meanwhile, the co-op element isn’t substantial enough to compensate for the problems it creates. While there are a few scenarios where actual teamwork is rewarded, such as an objective where you must defend a server bank from an attack at all angles, co-op mainly comes into play when whittling down the enormous health bars of bosses – such as the aforementioned plant monster. Many of its co-op or co-op adjacent systems feel perfunctory, particularly the ARPG-style loot system that features uncommon, rare, epic and legendary guns. Since these tiers are unlocked as hard upgrades through the course of the campaign, it renders finding a rare or legendary weapon pretty much redundant.
Ultimately, the co-op is a net negative for the campaign. But there’s a bigger problem which may or may not be related, which is that the campaign is almost entirely devoid of substance – an impressive feat given Call of Duty has carried all the weight of a bucket of popcorn for at least 15 years.
Canonically, Black Ops 7’s campaign is a sequel to Black Ops 2, with the series resuming its focus on BO2’s near-future co-protagonist David Mason. Since Black Ops 2’s future is now, disconcertingly, the present, Black Ops 7 pushes the timeline ahead another ten years, with Mason on a mission to investigate a group known as The Guild. This leads to the release of man-made toxin called The Cradle into the city of Avalon, which Mason and his team then pivot to stop.
In case that wasn’t enough proper nouns for you, The Cradle interferes with special microchips called C-Links that Mason and his squad are implanted with. These are supposed to be for operational purposes. But they really exist so the squad can suffer collective hallucinations when affected by the Cradle.
Now, I’m aware that Black Ops has always existed on the sillier side of Call of Duty. But the last two Black Ops games were at least sporadically in touch with reality, producing entertaining espionage thrillers from their alt-history shlock. I guess you could argue Black Ops 7’s missions are memorable too, albeit in the way seeing a person get sucked through a jet engine is memorable.
Structurally, the campaign comprises three different mission types. The first, and least common, are a couple of near-traditional Call of Duty missions. These include the opening raid on a secret Guild laboratory and a mid-campaign mission set in Japan, where you play as a completely different set of characters from the rest of the campaign. This latter mission, which sees you darting through subways and across neon-drenched rooftops, is probably the campaign’s highlight, even if it only exists to set up a big plot twist that the game casually reveals over a radio call about two missions later.
The bulk of the campaign is given over to those collective hallucinations, which generally tie back into Mason’s past and the preposterously convoluted lore of the Black Ops series. The giant vomit plant I mentioned, for example, is supposed to represent the guilt of Frank Woods, who killed David Mason’s father by mistake in Black Ops 2. But Frank Woods is canonically dead in 2035 (though he does get resurrected in…actually let’s not get sidetracked) and hence only exists in David’s head.
So in fact, the plant monster represents the guilt of a hallucination of the man who accidentally killed David’s father. I think the sequence is supposed to be more about David forgiving Woods, But David already understands and accepts that his father’s death was an accident, saying as much during the mission. Hence, the only character development that occurs is for a man who is already dead and exists as a figment of your imagination.
Are these playable hallucinations visually interesting, at least? Occasionally. One mission sees you battle through the connected minds of your own team, commencing with a sequence where you fight along a Los Angeles highway that twists and spirals like the Milkman Conspiracy from Psychonauts. It’s a decent mission, even if it does end in a boss fight that is somehow even stupider than the plant monster. But too many of these sequences involve navigating game design’s favourite shorthand for weird environments – floating islands – or callbacks to earlier Black Ops game in the virtual equivalent of a clip show. It doesn’t help that most of the hallucination-induced enemies, which include spider monsters and zombies, are about as tactically engaging to fight as a houseplant.
But I will happily snort any of Black Ops 7’s psychoactive gobbledegook over the missions I haven’t discussed yet, which take place in Avalon itself. This is a large, open map that will eventually serve as the setting for Call of Duty: Warzone’s upcoming Blackout mode, repurposed here to bulk out the campaign like adding sawdust to porridge.
The Avalon missions are downright abysmal, with perfunctory combat encounters that are terribly paced and spread across large, empty expanses of terrain. It plays like you’ve been tasked with putting down feral mobs on an abandoned MMO server, giving you neither the emergent joys offered by a properly designed open world game, nor the tightly choreographed action of a traditional Call of Duty campaign.
Should you make it to the end of this inane fever dream, Avalon returns for Call of Duty’s new Endgame mode, a cooperative hybrid of an extraction shooter and Just Cause without the destruction. With your team, you cavort about Avalon embarking on missions like chasing down convoys, fending off waves of enemies to download data from black boxes, and, er fending off waves of enemies to some crates. It makes better use of Avalon than the campaign does, but I cannot stress enough what a low bar that is to clear.
I wish I could say I was surprised by the sloppiness of Black Ops 7’s campaign, but the sad reality is it’s part of a long-running pattern with Call of Duty’s annualised releases that has only exacerbated in recent years, with direct sequels to the series’ various offshoots feeling like warmed up leftovers from a twelve-month old meal. That said, it is still disappointing considering the comparative quality of the last two Black Ops campaigns, and at a time when old-fashioned linear shooters are extremely scarce, Black Ops 7’s failure to offer up something even modestly enjoyable is keenly felt.