Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Review:
The Call of Duty franchise has continually steamrolled the competition, and as Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 releases this holiday season, it enters a field crowded with competition. Just the past few weeks alone have brought us Borderlands 2, Halo 4 and Medal of Honor: Warfighter, with two of those games dominating our free time, and the other one… not. And that’s just the recent FPS lineup. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of games to divert your attention right now.
But Activision’s powerhouse title wants all eyes trained on it at launch as it tries to beat the massive “biggest entertainment launch ever” already set by its predecessor, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So how does it stack up?
There’s a 2 on the Box For A Reason!
Black Ops 2 is a sequel in both title and story, although it does not pick up immediately where the first game left off. Instead, we’re years in the future, where the present time is now 2025. You’re still playing as Mason, although this time it’s David Mason, son of Alex Mason from the original Black Ops. He’s visiting Frank Woods, his father’s old (literally) partner who has information about Raul Menendez, and possibly a terrorist attack on the United States.
That’s where the train begins to pull out of the station in Black Ops 2, and it will take you on a wild ride around the world, and jump through multiple points in time. You’ll be back in the boots of Alex Mason, running missions again alongside Woods, and you’ll encounter historical figures in the game, like Oliver North and Manuel Noriega, who they casually nickname “Pineapple Face.”
You’ll see the bond between Woods and the elder Mason deepen, based on missions they carried out post Black Ops, and you’ll also find out just who Raul Menendez is, and why Treyarch considers him to be “the most dangerous terrorist since Bin Laden.” Although you’ve played through the campaign at least once, you’ll probably conclude that Menendez is much, much worse.But for the majority of the game, you’ll be doing duty as David Mason and often following directly in your father’s footsteps as you trail Menendez and try to stop a global terrorist event by his hands. During your time as David, you’ll be partnered up with fellow soldier Harper, voiced by and modeled after Michael Rooker who does a fantastic job throughout this game. We’re just glad he never went full Merle Dixon on us.
The team was extremely proud to be able to bring screenwriter David S. Goyer in as a story consultant on this title, and it shows in the plot. This is a massive story with some truly horrific moments embedded in it. It entwines a fantastic story into the plotlines of Black Ops, and does a commendable job of pushing us 13 years into the future. While the Rare Earth Elements storyline might seem farfetched at first, if you do a little digging into the science behind it, you’ll find that it is eerily on target.
Little things like the fact that some of the missions (and a multiplayer map) take place aboard an aircraft carrier named the USS Obama, and the usage of biometric identity bracelets that insert your image into advertisements aboard a luxurious floating city seem grounded in the reality of today. Then there’s all of the future tech you’ll get to play with, like wing suits and flechette guns with exploding rounds. Most of the really nifty toys aren’t available in multiplayer, giving the campaign another notch in its replayability belt.
Replay’s The Thing
Speaking of replay, while the game has a fairly epic campaign that should take about eight hours to complete in full, for the first time in a Call of Duty game, there are finally reasons to replay the campaign besides just upping the difficulty level. There are branching decisions throughout that will affect your story, and ultimately the ending of the game.
Some of these decisions will also trigger Strike Force levels, which are optional levels that will appear from time to time within the game. While you don’t have to take part in these at all, your decisions here will also affect the endgame. Plus, you can also fail these levels, although you can try to replay them if you have the resources. But they will only be available for a limited time, and once the window closes, they are gone forever.
The branching events in the campaign are where the story treads into the “interactive storytelling” realm. Sometimes these can be somewhat trivial and cosmetic, and at other times they can have a bearing on future campaign events and on Strike Force levels. You can easily identify these moments as they happen in the campaign with certain achievements, or you can
see them in the level menus where your progress is marked.
Case in point on the trivial side: During a later mission to a luxurious floating city, Harper remarks that if he was on his own time, he would get some “hot chick” action. When I replayed the game, in an earlier mission, where we were fleeing the wrath of Menendez, I accidentally steered our car under a jet of flame, badly burning half of Harper’s face. When made our way to the floating city, and Harper makes his “hot chick” remark, one of the other characters quips, “Not with that face.” Ouch!
With these decisions and levels boil down to is a first for the franchise: multiple endings. While it isn’t a new idea in the video game industry, it’s a novel approach for Call of Duty, and it will make you want to replay the campaign more than once.
A Strike Against Strike Force
While we fully support branching storylines and welcome decisions that have a direct affect on the outcome of your game, unfortunately these Strike Force levels are a bit of a misstep. First of all, they are meant to be strategic. Offering the player a satellite level top-down view of the battlefield, you can issue rudimentary commands to your units like move and attack.
Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence in these units just isn’t enough to get the job done, and after much frustration you’ll find that it is often much easier to jump down into a single soldier unit to get the job done. A good example of this was in a level where we had to plant three beacons at different locations on at a cargo ship port. After issuing movie commands to our units, they would frequently get pinned down by enemy fire, or easily taken out by gunfire.
While part many Call of Duty multiplayer matches involves you lone-wolfing it, we didn’t expect to be leaving squads and units behind in the campaign in order to secure or complete objectives. Thankfully you can gain the ability to continue trying Strike Force levels as you complete campaign missions, but they vanish after you progress past a certain point so if you’re a completist you’ll have to act fast or forego that level forever.
Our advice: after beginning a Strike Force level, figure out the objective, and then issue rough move commands to your units before jumping into a single soldier and then go Rambo on the situation.
Loading Out
Another first for the Call of Duty series is the ability to change up your loadouts before missions, giving you variety to how you play the single player missions. You’ll encounter challenges in each mission that will require certain weapons, and besides just completing a missions, you can now stat-track each one as well to see what your “score” was. While this doesn’t create a massive different, it is nice to see some variety here, and to select your preferred weapon set before launching a mission.
The loadout changes carry over into multiplayer as well, where the biggest change to that mode comes in the form of the new “Pick 10” system. Now you can pick only ten different items: weapons, perks, attachments, wildcards, etc. to outfit yourself with before a match begins. As you progress through multiplayer, you can gain wildcards that allow you to carry two primary weapons, or have more than one Perk 1 and so one, but you continually have to juggle your ten so you don’t go over.
| CPU: | Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66 GHz or AMD Phenom X3 8750 2.4 GHz |
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| CPU Speed: | Info |
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| RAM: | 2GB for 32-bit OS or 4GB for 64-bit OS |
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| OS: | Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 |
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| Video Card: | Nvidia GeForce 8800GT 512 MB or ATI Radeon HD 3870 512 MB |
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Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Trailer:
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