It was around the time that I was fighting a giant plant monster in a chemically induced hallucination themed around hate and guilt that I realized this year’s Call of Duty is a strange one. But moments of strangeness, even a few memorable or inspired ones, can’t hide the fact that this latest installment is the digital equivalent of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s co-op campaign is a direct sequel to Black Ops 2, featuring many characters from and references to this fan-favorite entry. Yet in the end, all those nods to BLOPS2 just serve as a reminder of how much better that campaign was than this collection of random ideas that you can play either solo or with up to three other buddies.
And then…and then…and then….
If I were to describe the plot of Black Ops 7 to you out loud, I would sound like a 6-year-old kid who was asked to come up with a big action-packed story on the fly.
“Okay, so some soldiers go to a secret island to fight a bad lady and her evil company, but it’s a trap, and they are drugged with a gas like from the Batman movies that makes you see scary stuff from your memories and past. Oh, and they are all connected via brain chips, so they all see the same things. And then they fight bad soldiers. Oh, and robots! And also zombies. And then a giant plant monster. And then a giant person. And they go to Tokyo. And then fight some spiders. And then they uh, oh, start a prison riot with undead inmates and uh go underwater to fight giant mechs using big missiles before winning and saving the day. The end!”
It’s borderline nonsensical and only barely works as a story at all because of some great voice performances and some incredibly expensive-looking cutscenes. It’s a shame that the entire four- to five-hour campaign feels cobbled together in a short amount of time, but considering Treyarch, which co-developed this game, was also the lead developer on last year’s Black Ops 6, it’s not surprising, either.
At least the guns still feel good, and I wasn’t bored because when you’re dealing with this level of batshit nonsense, it’s at least interesting to see what ludicrous scenario the game is gonna throw you into next. Shooting, sliding, jumping, and now wall-jumping (more on that later) are fun regardless of what I’m killing. Less fun and more annoying is that RPG elements have woven their way into the campaign, so you reach points where enemies take a lot of bullets to kill, and you have to wait for the game to decide to end your pain and give you a damage upgrade. Bleh. No good. Don’t like. Never bring this back, thank you.
Speaking of annoying things I never want to see return, Black Ops 7 introduces an always-online open world to explore between bigger missions. Even though I played solo, sometimes other players would speak during cutscenes when I was teleported back to this part of the campaign, which acts like an always-online pseudo-hub between some missions. And there’s little to do in these moments. It’s weird, adds nothing, and is likely the reason I can’t pause BLOPS7 while playing the campaign, which is yet one more strange choice to add to the pile of odd decisions that make up this year’s Call of Duty.
Okay, whatever, what about multiplayer!?
I’m not stupid. I know that Call of Duty is a multiplayer franchise. Most people are buying these games not for the single-player adventure, but for the months of deathmatch they’ll get to play with friends and randoms. And thankfully, this part of Black Ops 7 is a lot better than the campaign. But if you played last year’s Black Ops 6, you’ll likely feel a big sense of deja vu.
BLOPS 7 multiplayer feels very, very similar to that of the last entry, down to menus, perks, and gunplay. Now, that’s not inherently horrible, and considering how successful BLOPS 6 was, it makes sense to build upon that for the follow-up.
However, I found a lot of the weapons in Black Ops 7 to feel very same-y and not distinct at all. I bounced around a few guns in the dozen hours I spent with multiplayer and never found one I particularly liked or hated. They all just mostly blended together, with the only distinction being “Oh, this one is burst fire” or “This is a sniper.” I remember the guns in BLOPS6 being far more distinct and interesting, and swapping between them was a lot more exciting as a result, as were the firefights against other players.
Maps aren’t a strong element of Black Ops 7, either. Some are genuinely very good, but those are mostly the maps ripped from past Black Ops games, like Hijacked (which also appears as a level in the game’s campaign). The new maps felt too big for the number of players found in most game modes, and none of them have stuck in my brain. Maybe in a few weeks, some of these new maps will join my list of best Call of Duty maps ever made. But at the moment… ehhh.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“War never changes…wait a minute, is that a giant plant monster?”
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Developer
Treyarch / various other Activision Studios
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Type of game:
Near-future military online FPS with zombie survival mode
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Liked
Fantastic cutscenes, snappy and responsive gunplay, and wall-hopping.
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Disliked:
Bad campaign, bland guns and maps, and performance problems.
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Platforms:
Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5 (played), PS4, PC
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Played:
Finished the campaign in about five hours, played 13 hours of multiplayer, and a few hours of zombies.
Perhaps the biggest change found in BLOPS7’s multiplayer is the ability to wall hop. This builds on the fantastic omnimovement that debuted in Black Ops 6, which let players sprint in any direction and made CoD faster than ever.
Wall hops add a new tool to the movement kit, and I love it. Being able to bounce up a wall into a window or over a garage is so much fun. It can also be used to escape an enemy, ambush a group of unsuspecting players, or reach an out-of-the-way spot to do some camping. Shut up, it’s a legitimate strategy.
While my old-man thumbs and fingers sometimes fail to keep up with the youth and their fancy slides, I still mostly had a good time with BLOPS7’s multiplayer, even despite the maps being meh and no one gun calling to me. Wall bounces add just enough extra flavor to fights to shake things up, while not getting in the way of the hyper-responsive FPS action CoD has long been known for.
I do, however, want to flag that on PS5 Pro, I ran into a ton of random performance issues during multiplayer. This really soured my experience. Even a bad Call of Duty typically runs well, so I was surprised to see so many dropped frames and slowdowns happen in BLOPS7. Hopefully, a future patch can improve the situation.
Zombies and the Battlefield-sized elephant in the room
I’m not a CoD Zombies expert, so I can’t speak to specifics about the mode in this year’s entry, but I can say that I enjoyed my time with it. In a lot of ways, Zombies in BLOPS 7 feels like a return to the versions found in older Call of Duty games, and I like that.
You can play a classic rounds-based version of Zombies set in one map. I also appreciate that for the first time ever, when playing solo, you can leave a Zombies match and come back later and pick up where you left off. Fucking wild that Zombies has a pause option, basically, while the campaign doesn’t. Strange!
I would try to explain the story of Zombies, but it is so obtuse and deep at this point, involving multiple dimensions and a dozen characters spread over multiple games and timelines, that I’m just not going to attempt it. There’s a new cowboy-like demon zombie who is really bad, and I think I’m supposed to kill him by completing the main quest found in the primary Zombies mode. To explain more would require a trip to the CoD Zombies wiki, and I’m not interested in falling down that wormhole.
In a vacuum, this year’s Call of Duty is a weird, really big, and mostly bad misfire that I doubt hurts the franchise all that much in the long run. But if we look beyond Black Ops 7 and consider the larger context, this might be the worst version of Call of Duty for Activision to have launched in 2025, as it’s going up against the super popular, grounded, and back-to-basics Battlefield 6.
I bounced between both games over the weekend, and I think that once again, moment-to-moment, Call of Duty looks sharper and plays better than Battlefield. This has long been the case with these two FPS rivals. But when it comes to content and delivering what fans want, I think Battlefield 6 wins hands down.
Make no mistake, both games have flaws. But BF6’s problems can be solved with some patches and a few big maps. Black Ops 7 can’t be fixed because it isn’t broken, it’s just a weird and incoherent mess that feels more like a fan mod or big update for BLOPS6 than a proper sequel. And it certainly doesn’t seem like the game Call of Duty needed in 2025, but rather just the one we got because Activision can’t let the franchise take a break. Ah well, there’s always next year…
