Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s multiplayer is better than its awful, terrible, abominable, ghastly, hideous, not very good campaign. But ‘better’ in this case does not necessarily mean ‘good’. This year’s anxious flurry of maps, modes and zombies achieves the base requirement for a satisfactory shooting experience, and there are a couple of ideas that are interesting if inconsistently successful. But the overall quality is wildly incoherent, while the whole package is overshadowed by the spectre of generative AI.
The biggest change to this year’s multiplayer is also the least interesting to discuss, its approach to skill-based matchmaking. Call of Duty’s habit of matching you with players allegedly on your ability level has come under fire in recent years for flattening the experience. So this year, Treyarch offers you a choice, letting you play with ‘standard’ SBMM, or in a pool where SBMM is ‘minimally considered’.
And I think affording this choice is entirely the right call on Treyarch’s part. As a medium-level CoD player, it really highlighted the difference SBMM makes. With it enabled, I’d have a consistently decent, occasionally exceptional performance. With ‘minimal’ SSBM, my experience varied wildly between enjoyable matches and having the worst time of my life getting hosed by human dervishes armed with SMGs and the gift of foresight.
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As a player in the sunset of youth, the choice made me appreciate the reduced chance of bursting a blood vessel SBMM offers, though I’d still occasionally jump into the other pool to test my mettle against more capable players.
On the subject of jumping, Treyarch also makes a couple of tweaks to the omni-movement system introduced in Black Ops 6. The “big” addition is wall-jumping which lets you use walls to bounce over chasms or clamber up to higher ledges. It’s a sensible expansion of the system, though opportunities to use it are less common than I would like.
My favourite addition to Black Ops 7, however, is its new smaller-scale mode Overload. This charges teams with grabbing and carrying an EMP device to a circular goal that randomly appears on the map—with the team who scores the most claiming victory. Reminiscent of the underrated Obliteration mode from Battlefield 4, it’s kinda like Rugby with guns, even featuring a half-time where both teams switch ends on the map.
Since Call of Duty is more of a sport than ever, Overload works well with the general pace and timbre of the game—using the omni-movement system to leap into a goal seconds before you get slaughtered is undeniably fun. It would be even more interesting if players were able to pass the device to one another, facilitating more sophisticated teamplay. Nonetheless, the constantly moving objective means the full range of maps gets used, producing more interesting combat encounters than, say, Hardpoint, where everyone just gets fed into the same revolving loop of meat-grinders.
While Overload represents a victory for Black Ops 7’s new modes, Skirmish is a complete dud. Call of Duty’s larger scale modes tend to suffer when exposed to Battlefield’s incendiary light, but the comparison is particularly unflattering this year. Skirmish’s 20v20 maps feel totally void of the atmosphere generated by Battlefield 6’s smoky, rubble-strewn 64-player warzones, while the Conquest-style objectives produce none of the ad-hoc camaraderie or player-created drama Battlefield is so adept at creating.
There is a slight irony here, though, which is that in its core modes, Black Ops 7 generally plays best on the larger of the available maps. Outside of Overload, the most fun I had in Black Ops 7 was playing Kill Confirmed on returning map Express. Not only is Black Ops 7’s overhaul of the series’ railway-themed map a winner—swapping the location to a gleaming Japanese subway station glowing with animated billboards—the mix of good sightlines and weaving diagonal corridors makes collecting dogtags from downed foes a thrill.
In contrast, Black Ops 7’s smaller maps squeeze the action far too tightly, resulting in a cacophonous death-scrum that collapses into incoherence all too quickly. Black Ops 7 definitely exists on the sweatier side of multiplayer shooters, but the midsize maps give players some room to breathe, and those who shoot first do not necessarily laugh last. But on maps like Hijacked, Flagship and, yes, Nuketown, you’re just throwing yourself into the thresher over and over, often spawning to be almost instantly murked by a Scorestreak.
On the subject of Scorestreaks, these aren’t as egregious as they have been in some years. But I’m taking a paragraph to express my raw, unmitigated hatred for the D.A.W.G. These canine-shaped robots, which appear in the campaign as regular enemies and in multiplayer as a deployable Scorestreak, are quite possibly the most annoying thing Call of Duty has ever added. I hate their name. I hate the obnoxious, blaring horn noise they constantly make when deployed. Most of all, I hate how they completely throw off the balance of a match, able to kill players so easily and absorb so much damage that they just collapse the flow of a match whenever they appear.
Almost by default, Zombies is the most dependable of Call of Duty’s offerings this year, if only because it does almost nothing to shake up the formula. If you’ve played any Zombies offering before, you’ll know what to expect here. Wave-based survival where you upgrade your equipment as you’re pulled across the map by objectives, and a story that disappeared up its own lore-hole so long ago that it’s utterly baffling to anybody who hasn’t played it for a few years. The sole notable change is that you get to drive one of Call of Duty’s Tomy-quality vehicles around the map between objectives.
To be totally honest, I’ve never understood the appeal of Zombies. Well, that’s not quite true, I understand the appeal of the concept. Blasting hordes of undead into viscous red goo can be one of gaming’s great pleasures, as Left 4 Dead so brilliantly demonstrated. But I don’t think CoD’s zombies have ever felt as fun to ballistically ventilate as they are in Valve’s shooter, even seventeen years on.
To me, shooting a CoD zombie has always felt like shooting a cardboard box, a hollow, unsatisfying action. There’s an odd weightlessness to them. And, while the damage model is grisly, they don’t react to your attacks in a gratifying manner. It’s especially noticeable when compared to games like Dying Light: The Beast. Techland’s latest is hardly a masterpiece, but it really understands the importance of physicality in depicting combat against the undead. The dropkick alone has enough tangible feedback to support 30 hours of play. If it wasn’t for the constant drip-feed of upgrades, I think most people would grow weary of fighting CoD’s zombies within a couple of hours.
The last addition worth mentioning is cross-mode progression. Whether you play Black Ops 7’s campaign, multiplayer, or zombies, you earn XP to unlock weapons to use in all the modes. Initially, I thought this was a good idea. Hopping into multiplayer with a brace of guns to choose from made for a refreshing change from being stuck with the same starting assault rifle. But the more I played, the more incongruous it felt. Hearing that screeching guitar riff during a (supposedly) dramatic campaign moment or being chewed on by a horde of zeds pulls you out of the moment, which is impressive considering how preposterous and un-immersive Black Ops 7 often is.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised this feature is indicative of a broader issue in Black Ops 7. As I mentioned in the campaign review, the series has long since lost any sense of thematic or artistic identity. But between multiplayer filtering into the campaign, progression spreading between all modes, Warzone’s map being repurposed as a post-campaign open world , the structural integrity of Call of Duty has begun to erode too. Everything feeds into everything else in a way that violates the series’ historic boundaries, resulting in this amorphous experience where nothing stands out as distinctive or having any clear design philosophy.
Combined with the fact that the game is riddled with generative AI, plainly evident in its calling cards and quite possibly present elsewhere too, the result is an experience that doesn’t seem like it’s been put together with much care or consideration at all. Black Ops 7 is truly Call of Duty for the slop generation, a rushed, inconsistent and soulless experience.