Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the seventh installment in the Call of Duty series.  Set this time in the 1960’s, it shows that the only thing with more longevity than the Call of Duty franchise itself is American nostalgia for the Cold War. I’d say things have gotten pretty bad when game developers start to think, “You know what people might enjoy fighting again? The Vietnam War.”

Like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 single-player campaign, you play as a variety of characters, though most of the action centers around Studies and Observation Group (SOG) operator Alex Mason. During the campaign, you attempt to uncover a Russian plot to... ah, who are we kidding? Anyone who plays this game either (1) got it for the multiplayer, or (2) accidentally purchased it because they got it confused with a Splinter Cell game.

Shooting Up

I recently jumped on the Call of Duty: Black Ops bandwagon. (Or maybe just I fell off of the “I’m too cool to play the new CoD game” bandwagon—either way, I’m certain there was a wagon involved.) Regardless, the irony of this choice is threefold, because that’s as many fold as I feel like discussing right now.

I prefer to take the coward's way out, but I usually get executed first.

Irony the First: I typically avoid first-person shooters, largely because I’m not very good at them. I feel like there was some special gym class in high school or something where they taught everyone how to be good at shooters, and I happened to be absent that day. (I was probably pretending to be sick so I could play Final Fantasy II.) Sometimes in multiplayer my opponents don’t even shoot at me; they just point and laugh. In past years, however, games like Half-Life and Bioshock have worked to subvert my disdain by exploiting my love of RPG’s and trying to win me over with their amazing characters, environments, and story arcs. Slowly but surely, these games have paved the way for me toward more typical FPS’s.

Irony the Second: whenever my ego is feeling robust enough that I’m willing to subject myself to an FPS, I usually tend towards ones with more of a sci-fi flare. To me, games like Call of Duty seem like little more than the following: choose one from a collection of nearly identical guns, and then use it to murder a bunch of nearly identical guys in a series of nearly identical environments. I prefer the greater variety offered by games like Halo (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Covenant, which is trying to wipe out all of mankind), or Half-Life (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Combine, which is trying to wipe out all of mankind), or Gears of War (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Locusts... okay, so maybe the variety argument isn’t a good one).

Irony the Third: I only just got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a few weeks ago, despite repeatedly telling my friends I wasn’t really interested. I actually only got the game because a friend of mine saw it in a used games store in Virginia and mailed it to me. Now, instead of not playing MW2 with them because I don’t own it, I’m not playing MW2 with them because I’ve moved on to Black Ops. What an asshole.

Anyways, I have to admit that the Black Ops multiplayer is addictive enough that I foresee myself playing it for quite some time. Maybe with enough practice I can graduate from “guy who gets knifed in the back while running around like a jackass” to “guy who gets knifed in the back while hiding in the corner trying to drive a stupid exploding RC car”.