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617 of 801 found the following review helpful:
 COD Must Evolve Nov 10, 2010
By 3V0LVE
Great production value does not make a great game.
I'll start with the good things. COD:Black Ops graphics are on-par with any top-shelf title and it has an incredibly smooth feel. The game is reported to run at 60 frames per second and it feels very high def. The voice acting is good, and clearly the production value and marketing budgets are both very high. However, graphics, and hype do not make a good game. Gameplay and immersion do. Here's why COD:Black Ops Fails utterly.
1 AI is stupid. These shortcomings remind you constantly that your playing a game, and a poorly scripted one at that.
- Enemy recognition: I've seen the AI sit 2 feet away from an enemy and not shoot at them. When they finally do, they shoot it out for 10-15 seconds to score a kill on the enemy. This is ridiculous. Your allies in the field are supposed to be top-notch soldiers just like you. Why can't they do some of the heavy lifting? Why can't they do ANY lifting?
- AI Movement: Once again you are expected to lead the way no matter what. AI will lead you from one battle to another with annoying "follow me you jackass" type comments (I mean you're supposedly the "very best" soldier in the US's arsenal and your squad pampers you along like you're the greenest rookie in the armed forces, but I'll hit on this later) but once you get from one battle sequence to the next, they sit and shoot in the general direction of the enemy, but do nothing, generally, to progress the situation.
I want to ask the developers, "Have you played ANY other modern games with AI in them?" Because they do have a worthwhile influence on the outcome. Try playing Halo:Reach on legendary without the help of your squad mates you are FAR worse off. In that game, your squad shoots and accurately, and infinitely and eliminates enemies... For the really tough enemies you can time your shots with your AI squad mates to take down difficult targets with efficacy. This is entirely missing in BO.
2. Scripted non-sense battles: Once again the feel of a real battle is completely removed here. You can not move naturally through a level, but instead must figure out through countless, monotonous trial and error sessions what the best, and arguable only, (especially when playing on hardened/veteran difficulty) way through a section is. The fact that the story won't proceed to the next sequence until you trip the magic tripwire in the game is on par with 10-15yr old video games. Have the developers played anything but their own garbage in the last decade? I'm guessing no.
- Nothing is worse in battles than seeing your buddies standing in the open taking zero fire, while you are ducked behind cover, and somehow getting magically lit up by enemies invisible to you. While I understand that perhaps some finger or toe might be sticking out of cover, why in all reasonableness would the enemy concentrate the entirety of their base of fire on such an impossible target when there are readily available targets standing entirely in the open? The fact that every enemy on the field seems to ignore all targets but you is very hard to get over. It's counter intuitive. If you see your friends moving with impunity, its natural to think, "I can go with them and NOT get shot at by multiple enemies, since they are in the open and not getting shot at by multiple enemies." Treyarch rewards this logic with untimely, inexplicable death, over and over again. = totally annoying
3. Infinitely spawning enemies
- There are times when this is sensible, and there are times when it isn't. The fact that Treyarch rewards you for getting into a tactically superior position and eliminating enemies with unending waves of reinforcements is ridiculous. It's once again, counter-intuitive. While I understand the need to move, you are murdered over and over for sticking a toe out of cover, yet you are rewarded for being in cover with unending oppression. There needs to be a balance struck here where, IF you decide to take cover and use tactics to weaken the enemy force, you will get your chance to move. Maybe its simply the timing of the waves of enemies, but its seems that once you eliminate one enemy they are immediately replaced. This makes it pointless to eliminate enemies, and turns the game into a measured, Run-from-cover-to-cover type of battle where you simply hope to survive the onslaught and recover while in safety, only to do it again. Smoke grenades are the great balancer here, but they are in limited supply and that doesn't excuse how counter-intuitive it is to play a battle game without actually rewarding the player's skill and use of tactics with the ability to advance and succeed in a battlefield environment.
Awful
Game mechanics that are 10 - 15 yrs old, completely stale, and showing a complete inability to evolve
Completely lackluster AI
No rewards for player skill in a combat game
Good
Smooth, good-looking graphics
Talented voice acting
NOTE: Multiplayer is what it is, you either hate it or love it. I think its quick and addictive fun but I also greatly prefer the realism of other recent releases (MOH)
Zombies is great fun, but hardly worth a 60 pricetag.
129 of 170 found the following review helpful:
 An Unfortunate Step Back Nov 11, 2010
By reedissleeping
I had never been a fan of the franchise, preferring to do my shooting in the more Arcady Half-Life engine, Halo, Fear etc...
Then I played Modern Warfare, and loved it. You felt free to act. On veteran, the game was challenging. The worlds were large, and the enemies didn't re-spawn to infinity. This allowed you to actually be creative in your strategy, instead of tunneling. You could fall back, flank, snipe, or rush. Level design facilitated all strategies and the AI responded. Some levels set up better for different strategies, but the important thing is that it felt organic. When players died, they felt they could do something different--that they had control.
A majority of the positive reviews for this game focus on its numerous improvements over other Treyarch offerings, and hey are right to do so. The graphics, story, voice acting, and music are a step up (from COD:WaW), as well as the addition of some "cool moments," and extras like Zombies. However, there are serious problems that get brushed over. I feel like multi-player issues have been covered. So this review will tackle single player.
While game-play seems fluid on easier difficulties,fundamental problems express themselves at the more difficult settings. My play through on Veteran got boring fast largely due to the fact that Treyarch uses infinite enemy spawns to compensate for poor, predictable level design and unacceptably bad AI. Eventually you realize that besides a few "cool" roller-coaster moments type moments--fun but there's only one track, most of the game consists of a long corridor or an enclosed "box" with predictably placed pieces of cover. Even though there are things going on outside the "box" and the graphics seemingly connect them (see the trenches in the Vietnam level), you cannot interact with them. Visually its a large world; in practice it's claustrophobic. Enemies advance mindlessly in single file from the most distant cover to your position, eventually charging recklessly from the last piece of cover. To "kill" them you need to toss smoke grenades, sprint past some imaginary line, and hunker down. If you get unlucky and the RNG pops off a couple head shots, prepare to live the last 5 minutes of your life over and over again.
Lets be frank--in the early versions of COD, this was a necessity because of inherent technical limitations. The "box" existed because large interactive environments weren't possible. The endless spawns were needed because AI was terrible. It was necessary to have smoke grenades because these other compensations made certain configurations of enemies and cover frustrating. Purists might say "This is Call of Duty," but how many other games get a free pass when refusing to innovate from their predecessors?
Halo got a lot of crap for repeated area designs, but at least there were multiple ways to attack each situation. As Bungie put it, it was the same "moment of fun" over and over again. Black Ops is the same moment of predictable annoyance over and over. Instead of forcing you to critically think, death in Black-Ops feels like you just got unlucky playing the exact same interaction over and over again in the only way possible to play it. Theres nothing to do differently--just rush ahead and cross your fingers again. You are bound to get unlucky and die--even doing the right thing. When you do, unpredictable load points reward you with the with the same set of identical interactions and identical solutions. And then suddenly, when things work out, the gratification isn't there. You did nothing different. If the definition of madness is "doing the same thing and expecting a different result," then I guess I was mad the whole time I played.
Aiming is also problematic. I understand that real guns kick, but when you have an enemy completely filing my sights and the recoil from the last shot makes you miss anyway, you don't feel a sense of reward for aiming and you certainly don't feel a sense of realism; you feel a developer trying to compensate for poor difficulty balancing.
"Throw smoke and run into it" seems like a poor mechanic after a while. In the Infinity Ward games you throw smoke to get a tactical advantage, get away, or provide temporary cover to move to a new position. In Treyarch games, you do it because its the best way to stop infinite spawns. The former feels immersive, the latter feels like band-aid for poor game design.
It seems like Treyarch, in a misguided attempt to differentiate themselves from Infinity Ward and to give long time COD fans exactly what they've played over and over, actually refuses to let the series mature into a dynamic, creative, and frankly more fun experience.
Yes, it is challenging on veteran with high infinite spawn rates. It's challenging that the only solution is to press forward into oncoming fire. But it was also boring and I'd like my money back.
The bottom line is: if you want to romp through the game one lower difficulties or like the Multi-player, give it a shot. It looks good, and is entertaining. I enjoyed the voice acting and the story. If, however, you play through shooters at max difficulty and prefer to get your multi-player in MW2 or the new Halo offering, rent it or wait for better pricing.
242 of 329 found the following review helpful:
 The COD gravy train of hype churns on, but I'm glad to be along for the ride Nov 09, 2010
By Ben Rowland
Ah, another year, another Call of Duty game. It seems like the annual release of the next installment in the iconic first-person shooter series should be a national holiday, given how many people attend the midnight launches for the game and no doubt skipped work or school the next day (myself included). Having hit the apex of popularity with Modern Warfare 2, the big question is how Black Ops will compare. I don't live and die by COD games as some people do, but I can say that Black Ops is one of the most satisfying and intense shooters I've ever played, with the best campaign out of all the games in the series and a multiplayer aspect that I can finally enjoy.
Perhaps I'm the odd one, but I mainly buy these games for the single-player campaign as I am not the best at online shooters. The campaign in Black Ops is easily the best out of the series, with more cohesive storytelling and a more satisfying conclusion than the previous entries. Set in the Cold War era (early to late 1960's), you fight your way through diverse terrain in Russia, Cuba, and Vietnam, among other locations. As with other games in the series, you play as two main characters and you go back and forth between their missions. Without giving too much away, the story is pretty stock, but the manner in which it's told and presented is a big step forward for the COD series, which has lately felt like a batch of multiplayer games with a brief single-player campaign tacked on. Black Ops gives players a better experience in this regard, and despite being brief (7 hours roughly), it doesn't feel too short or seem to end as abruptly as the Modern Warfare games. The difficulty settings are standard for the series, and for achievement/trophy hunters, the biggest rewards come when playing on "Veteran" difficulty.
The style of gameplay, the weapons and the linear design is all par for the course, but Treyarch has done a wonderful job at bringing this era and the surroundings to life. The cinematic quality that made Modern Warfare 2 such a hit is still intact here, and the graphics and sound are as amazing as you would expect. What I've always enjoyed about the COD games are the tight controls, and Black Ops will fit like a glove for any FPS fan. The multiplayer, undoubtedly the biggest day of Black Ops, is surprisingly accessible for people like me who typically get owned when going online. The focus is on class creating and experience points, and while I've only played a couple of hours, everything seems to run smoothly and without lag. My only fear is that the usual frustrations, such as campers and rude teenagers acting like idiots, will eventually creep in, but I'll be optimistic and see how things play out.
I don't believe in gushing over games and hailing them as the "Best Game EVAR!", so I'll avoid hyperbole and simply say that Black Ops one of the better FPS games that I've played. If I have any negative feedback, it surrounds some of the difficulty spikes and the dumb-as-bricks AI of your teammates (and some enemies), but that was the same case with Modern Warfare 2 and especially World at War. Black Ops is not a perfect game graphically and it doesn't reinvent the wheel for FPS games, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying experience that I don't regret investing the time or money into.
21 of 27 found the following review helpful:
Beyond Zombies, It's Disappointing. Jan 07, 2011
By tvtv3
"tvtv3"
The overall storyline in CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS focus upon Alex Mason, a member of the CIA's Studies and Observation Group (SOG) or Black Ops for short. The game opens with Mason tied to a medical chair, surrounded with monitors with a non-descriptive disembodied voice asking him questions. At the same time Mason keeps hearing and seeing a list of numbers. It's unclear until about halfway through the game whether Mason has been captured and is being interrogated by an unknown enemy or if he is being questioned by a friendly force trying to extract life-saving data from him. The game progresses through a series of flashbacks that show what Mason has been through and how he came to be in the chair he is in. The flashbacks take the gamer from Cuba and the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to a frozen wasteland near Russia and to beneath the ocean. The climax of the game leads up a climatic battle that loosely ties to actual history.
The overall graphics in the game are spectacular. There are many times that you look around and get the impression that you are playing a movie and not a video game. At certain points in the game, the images are extremely lifelike. The voice acting is strong and the music does an excellent job of accompanying what is happening during the story.
I usually don't play multi-player levels, but BLACK OPS has a special multi-player/co-op mode where you can fight a zombie horde. The "Zombies" mode is exciting and addictive. I just wish there was an end point somewhere; the zombie hordes never stop invading.
With that said, CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS is a disappointment. The overall storyline is short and the "reveal" at the end is disappointing. I mean, do we really need another Manchurian Candidate scenario?
The way the game operates is frustrating, too. BLACK OPS has been marketed as though it offers a more expansive and innovative gameplay, but that's just not the case. You have to complete each objective a certain way, otherwise the game doesn't progress and you are killed. The A.I. buddies that fight along your side don't do anything during actual combat and the blunt of the enemies attacks are always at your character. If you try to hide and peak a shoulder or a toe out, you're dead in a few seconds. There's no thinking outside of the box and if you try, you die. During battle sequences, if you stay in one spot it doesn't matter how good of a shot you are or how many enemies you kill because they just keep coming and coming and coming. The men at the Alamo had better odds than you do if you attempt to stay undercover and fight it out without advancing.
Beyond that, I was also disappointed by how little you actually get to play in certain environments. BLACK OPS was marketed as being a Cold War video game. For example, despite the historical negative connotations of the actual historical war, the prospect of fighting in Vietnam as a secret covert agent is exciting. You imagine all the possibilities of fighting and surviving in a jungle and think of a video-game version of Rambo. Instead, you are given a few sequences that have to be accomplished in a certain way and only about 25% of the game being spent fighting in Vietnam. It's like playing a game in the American Civil War only to find out that for over half of the game you're neither going to be a Yank or Reb but will be playing a Native American in a completely different conflict between two warring tribes out in Montana.
Overall, the graphics and voice acting are superb, but the storyline is weak and the gameplay is frustrating and non-innovative. BLACK OPS looks fun from the outside, but when it sees the light of day, it's a disappointment. The best thing about the game is the Zombie mode. Kids will probably enjoy it, but those over 16 or anyone who is a more experienced gamer will probably be disappointed by it.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Ehhh Jan 18, 2011
By dothedew
Sorta fun game. Zombies, Sticks and Stones, and Hardcore modes are fun. Normal mode is a joke (as usual). The story line is just stupid for a few resons
First, half the story is in audio played at such a low volume ya gotta crank the volume up on your TV just to hear what he is saying. After the segment ends it blast you back to normal volume. very anoying
Second, some of the missions are fun but most of them are just rebranded from older games. I will admit there is a chopper battle thats fun however if you leave without killing all the tanks ya just get blown up for no reason. Nothing hits ya, just blow up...
Not a very good game saddly :(
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