Call of Duty, Black OPS 2
Producer: Activision
Release Date: November 13, 2012
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC
Rating: Mature
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Heart of Darkness
Written by Jesse Seilhan
Call of Duty has become the biggest juggernaut in gaming history, year after year, by providing red-blooded Americans the power fantasy they so deeply crave. You often take over the role of some elite military personality in a struggle to save the world from nuclear bombs, bio-terrorism, or some other semi-Bond villain plot. With Black Ops II, players enter a world with two time-lines: one with the first game’s hero during the 1980’s Cold War struggle and then you get to take over as his son for the neo-futuristic cyber-warfare plot that takes place in 2025. This leads to player choice, something unique to this episode of Call of Duty, as players get branching paths and multiple endings depending on how they chose to play the game. Throw in an impressive soundtrack (with a theme song composed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) and top-of-the-line graphics, and you have the making of what should be the final Black Ops game of this generation.
As impressive as the freedom of choice is, if shooting people in the face didn’t feel correct, then all that creativity would be for naught. Luckily, the guns feel great and even better than Treyarch’s prior output. The variety of weapons gets a nice boost with the futuristic storyline, so newer weapons have the ability to see through walls or fire more laser-esque ammunition. Players also get to play with some new toys, such as unmanned drones, hacked turrets, and the CLAW: a large dog-like robot equipped with flamethrowers, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. These new units mostly get used in the all-new Strike Force missions: objective-based missions that let the player control multiple units, bouncing back and forth between them to either hold chokepoints, escort important targets, or take over enemy strongholds. These missions break up the main game quite nicely and also factor into the multiple endings, if players choose to complete them or not.
As a game, Black Ops II is probably the most efficient entry produced yet. However, as far as gameplay is concerned, two big things keep this from being a classic. The first is agency. There are dozens of sections in the game where you are not in control of your character. The game pushes you along, doing complex moves for you that you’d rather perform, but instead the game does everything for you, sets you up in front of a target, and only asks you to hit one single button. Secondly, this an extremely violent game, beyond what any first-person shooter has done so gratuitously since Soldier of Fortune. There is a level where you take over the main enemy, wielding a machete, and simply hack your way through 100 people as the screen gets covered in blood and guts and you see every gory detail in high-definition. The Call of Duty franchise has gone from being about the horrors of war to the glory of war. Violence is a want, not a need, but luckily the zombies and multiplayer mode offers a more toned-down version of these massacres. Also, while I appreciate the variety of gameplay experiences, this game attempts to do a ton of cool stuff: surveillance, driving missions, drone control, time-traveling. The problem is that none of those things are fleshed out enough to make them memorable.