Call of Duty Black Ops 7 is the latest entry into the franchise, and brings the typical fast-paced gameplay that you’ve seen in the previous versions. While there were a lot of expectations from this game at launch, it struggled to reach that mark.
Although it’s your typical run-of-the-mill Call of Duty game, Black Ops 7 banks on a lot of flashy features to try and leave a mark, but it doesn’t go the distance. If you’re still a fan of the franchise, it does have something for you to look forward to.
Like every other entry, it does have the three standard modes, namely Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombies, and it also integrates into Warzone, so you can use a variety of weapons across your different endeavors. The overall idea this year is a seamless integration between all the modes, but the cracks show quite early on.
Gameplay
The storyline for Black Ops 7 revolves around Alex Mason’s son, who’s been injected with the Cradle bio-weapon from the previous entry into the franchise. The premise itself is a bit weird because it’s more of a flashback into the past, but with a futuristic twist to it.
And more than fighting human enemies, you’re busy fighting AI-driven hordes. It deviates heavily from the original Call of Duty formula and borders on something that you’d see in modern-day looter shooters. Although boss fights in campaigns are normal, they’re usually not mechanic-driven, unlike what we saw in this entry.
I mean, if you want to include boss fights in a military shooter, then you need only look at The Division 2. Treyarch tried to copy Ubisoft with this one, but just copied half their homework and forgot to improvise on it. It feels like an unnecessary addition that makes the campaign experience underwhelming.
It also incorporates the standard mechanics that you’ve seen so far in Warzone. The sliding, the armor plates, everything comes from Warzone. But what they forgot to carry forward is the TTK, at least in the campaign. It’s ridiculously slow, and enemies feel like bullet-sponges. This installment just made me yearn for the Call of Duty of old. The franchise hasn’t done well with futuristic titles for the most part, and that could’ve been what held Black Ops 7 back to a great extent.
One of my major gripes with the entire campaign is that it’s always online. So, even if you’re playing solo, you’ll still have to be connected to the internet. While the “always online” part wasn’t the issue, I faced the annoying “packet burst” error, which severely affected my experience. In a single-player environment, I really didn’t expect to be rubberbanding all over the place.
There’s also an endgame section that opens up after you’ve completed the main storyline. It lets you explore a huge open world, but that’s also somewhat disappointing. It builds upon the PvE experience and has you explore Avalon, but it’s unnecessarily tedious. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve invested countless hours in multiple looter shooters, and I love a good challenge, but Black Ops 7’s endgame feels like unnecessary grunt work.
Multiplayer & Zombies
I didn’t face a lot of problems with the Multiplayer segment because it’s the standard PvP experience that Call of Duty offers every year. It’s just fun till it gets boring. Matchmaking times were a bit high, and the packet burst issue was persistent here too, but surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as what I experienced in the campaign.
The movement is definitely fact-paced and the matches feel quick. However, the maps are taken from the previous games in the franchise, and the weapons feel oddly similar to what he had in Black Ops 6. While that’s fine for the most part, I feel Black Ops 7 deserves an identity of its own and shouldn’t feel like a continuation of the previous game, especially in the multiplayer segment.
The Zombies mode continues to be my favorite part of the Call of Duty franchise, because who doesn’t love gunning down through mindless hordes of the undead? It’s a fun experience, and somehow, the solo experience feels better than the campaign because it just lets you pick up from where you left off. Activision should’ve borrowed this feature for their campaign, but here we are.
Storyline, Audio & Visuals
Before we go into the storyline, let’s talk about the audio and visuals first. Since it’s mostly a first-person shooter, you shouldn’t really expect over-the-top audio and visuals. Black Ops 7 provides a decent audio-visual treatment. But here’s the thing, the game does rely on a lot of generative AI to the extent that it gets annoying.
The storyline is also another disappointing part of the game. I’m not really a Call of Duty expert and haven’t been keeping up with the storyline in the recent games. However, the moment I started the first mission, it felt like something that I just wanted to be done with. The story is boring.
It feels like the developers picked up some random story bits and stuck them together with chewing gum. The voice acting, however, was top-notch, which is slightly sad because the game doesn’t do justice to all the efforts that the voice actors put in.
Conclusion
Black Ops 7 is definitely the worst of the franchise to date, and there are a lot of problems that the game has. Although I’d say that the upcoming seasons could save the game, it’s unlikely. I feel that Activision tried to use a looter-shooter formula with Black Ops 7, especially with the Endgame, but the idea failed spectacularly.
At this point, the franchise should look back at its older installments for inspiration, because its current formula isn’t working at all.
Reviewed on: PC
Code Provided By: Activision
