Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review (Patreon)

If my watch is right, we’re about 1-2 years away from having the “we’re getting back to the gritty, real, boots on the ground gameplay that fans love” talk with Activision again. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 inches in the direction of wilder movement with its wall jumps, but the real extremes come from its campaign, which comes off as a more fully-realized version of the Modern Warfare III (2023) campaign. That campaign was rife with examples of sloppy bundles of Call of Duty’s multiplayer mechanics, repurposed and repackaged into something that tries to tell a story along the way. Here, those multiplayer roots are made even more explicit by the way the campaign is billed “co-op campaign” right on the main menu. Can you play it alone? Sure, yeah, you can force that, if you want. Should you? Eh. I’ll put it this way: if you’re expecting this game’s campaign to feel like a traditional Call of Duty campaign, you’re going to be disappointed regardless of how you set it up.

LET’S START WITH THAT CAMPAIGN

OK, let’s start with that campaign. The Black Ops sub-franchise is the part of Call of Duty that traffics in weird or futuristic technologies and concepts while specifically focusing in on subjects such as brainwashing, sleeper agents, and mind control. Typically that’s resulted in some kind of late-game reveal, like the Fight Club-like news that Viktor Reznov had been dead for years and mostly existed as a hallucination in Alex Mason’s head. Black Ops 7 feels like it’s firmly in “oh, let’s just get on with it” territory, because it just goes and gets weird in the very first mission, and stays that way the entire time.

The main beats of the Black Ops 7 campaign are actually kind of a rehash of last year’s Black Ops 6. Both games deal with a toxic gas that induces hallucinations called The Cradle. Both games involve the players racing against the clock to stop the bad guys from unleashing The Cradle on the world as a sort of false flag attack to further their true goals. And both games involve the player character(s) inhaling a bunch of the gas and tripping the fuck out. The difference this time out is that Black Ops 7 hits you with that gas in the very first level and spends the rest of its runtime weaving between its bone-stock military vs. PMCs story and twisted, nightmarish retellings of the events of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. One minute you’re tracking a drone or something and then, whoops, the gas kicks in and now you’re running down an upside-down freeway and dodging ghost cars while mostly shooting the same dudes and robots that were attacking you before the trip started.

The game gins up a sentence or two to explain why your four-person team is experiencing these shared hallucinations, and the game kinda rotates through all four of them so they each get to relive some harrowing moment of military mayhem from their past. The leader, David Mason, star of Black Ops 2 and son of Alex Mason, gets the most time to reflect here, as his past more directly intersects with the major moments in Black Ops history. But even though escaping Vorkuta by pushing those minecarts along those tracks was kind of a big moment six games ago, reliving it here with weird ghostly zombie figures doing the pushing just feels… dumb, I don’t know. The campaign also serves up some big boss fights, and these sequences might actually be the weirdest thing the Call of Duty franchise has ever done.

How weird? How about “the memory of Frank Woods that lives in your head becomes part of a gigantic, three-headed plant monster (also all in your head) that launches attacks at you while spindly spider creatures and zombie-looking things attempt to flank you (in your head????)?” The fights themselves aren’t especially interesting, it’s mostly just an excuse to put a big, weird enemy with a big, occasionally shielded life bar on the screen every couple of missions. If anything, the boss fights are nice diversions from the standard combat in Black Ops 7’s campaign, which feels vastly different than just about anything that they’ve previously done.

How do you feel about unloading 100 rounds from a light machine gun into a normal enemy’s face only to have to reload and keep shooting it for awhile before it goes down? Portions of Black Ops 7 redefine the very nature of bullet sponges in ways that drag the pace of the game down to an absolute halt. Some of the mechanics of Warzone trickle in here, with both you and most enemies having some quantity of armor in addition to your health bar. This means you’re probably a bit more resilient than the average Call of Duty protagonist, but it also means that you’ll occasionally have to run to one of the zillion armor/ammo crates that litter every level to restock your supply of ammo plates. Many of the levels—at least when you’re not in full-on Cradle gas freakout mode—feel wide open and Warzone-like, as well, but you’ll also see some rehashed locations, such as the yacht map from this year’s multiplayer (itself a remake of a map already featured in Black Ops 2 and Cold War) and the penthouse level from last year’s multiplayer. The bland, wide-open spaces along with the appearance of well-worn level geometry help make this whole campaign feel like something that was thrown together from available parts whenever possible. This is not the cinematic, over-the-top experience that Black Ops 6 was, which is a shame, because last year’s game is something I’d probably put in the running for the franchise’s best campaign to date.

Since it’s marked clearly as a co-op campaign, it defaults to automatically matchmaking and filling your squad with strangers whenever possible, but this matchmaking only occurs between levels. So if someone quits mid-level, you’ll be down a person until you cross that threshold. You can also turn squad fill off and play alone, if you really want to, but you’re not going to trick the game into serving up a traditional campaign by doing so. This thing was designed with multiplayer parts and built with down-but-not-out mechanics in mind. It does, at least, seem to scale in difficulty based on the number of players, but the difference seems subtle. The campaign does not have any difficulty settings on its own.

The online nature of the campaign means that you can’t pause it. It also has no mid-mission checkpoints if you quit. If your team wipes, yes, you will restart fairly close to where you went down. But if you quit mid-level, you get (”get”) to play that entire level again. This all holds true even if you’re playing alone, which really feels like something that should be patched in to meet solo players halfway, at the very least. I suppose the upside to all this is that you earn weapon and player XP during the campaign, which is nice if you want to grind out 25-30 levels.

The combat is a slog. Structurally it’s kind of frustrating, the boss fights are goofy, and the most difficult things you’ll face are the occasional objectives that want you to run mindlessly around a small area in search of the one computer that has a USE button on it so you can open a door and proceed. But even with all of that in mind, some part of me at least appreciates that it’s not just another Call of Duty campaign. I think if you and three like-minded friends saddled up and just yapped to each other for four or five hours while gunning things down you’d probably have a fine enough time with it. But again, just to make sure it sinks in: you don’t want to bother playing this if you’re going to insist on playing alone. Even filling your lobby with strangers and silently gunning down bad guys is preferable to playing it alone.

Finishing the campaign opens up a new campaign experience called Endgame, which so far seems like a relatively casual extraction-type experience, sort of a PvE-only take on the DMZ mode they tried out a few years back. Let’s get into more of that later, I’m exhausted from all this campaign-related talk.

THAT MULTIPLAYER

Competitive multiplayer is here and is largely intact. If you played the beta they ran not that long ago you probably already have a good idea about what to expect, though there’s a few things that stick out to me as potentially frustrating changes.

The current crop of launch week playlists favor “open” matchmaking that focuses less on matching you up with players that are at or around your skill level. This gets into the incredibly dumb “skill-based matchmaking” argument that gets pushed by streamers who don’t like that being good at the game means they have to play against other good players when what they really want to do is create videos where appear dominant by crushing players who are worse than them. This is an incredibly sad position to take and these people are, for the most part, pathetic clowns.

These lobbies are also persistent, meaning that you’ll stay with the same crop of players from match to match, unless you deliberately bail out. The argument here is that people will make friends if they can stick with the same players, which seems a little dubious, especially when you consider that the server culture of the old days required you to be able to browse the servers and join the same server every night, resulting in a mini-community forming around a specific server. You can’t do that here, so if you’re going to make friends, make ‘em fast, before someone quits? I guess? The value here seems minimal, especially in a world where most players don’t even talk at all during matches.

There’s exactly one normal playlist and it’s just a core “moshpit” of modes, forcing you to play a variety of objective-based modes alongside the standards. If you, for example, want to just play team deathmatch and you don’t want this open server nonsense… you can’t. This seems dumb?

Their playlists evolve and change over time, so we’ll have to see how long they stick with this. All of this matters because some part of the game just doesn’t feel right, and I’m still trying to nail down what that is. Some folks are complaining about changes to the way aiming, specifically automatic aim adjustments, work in this year’s game compared to previous entries. Some of it is that it took me around 30 levels of grinding to unlock the perks and loadout items that I want to use. And perhaps some of it is due to the weird playlist stuff. But it’s hard to lay these issues at the feet of any one thing. On paper the game is fine. In practice something about it just isn’t lining up for me at the moment… which is weird, because I came out of the beta feeling pretty good about the overall experience.

Changes include a general shuffling of the sorts of perks and loadout items at your disposal. The double-tap “tactical sprint” found universally in the last few games has moved to a perk, which has the net effect of slowing down the game a bit. The omni-movement stuff from last year is still here, making for nicely fluid movement in all directions along with the ability to dive sideways, backwards, and all that John Woo-type shit.

You can also wall jump, which is not wall-running, but also it’s not not wall-running with the way it’s implemented and the way the maps are built. This means you’ll find some maps with gaps in the floor, but friendly walls on the outer edge that let you jump into the gap, kick off the wall, and land on the other side. So while it isn’t technically wall-running, it more or less has the same effect that actual wall-running had in Black Ops 3, just for shorter distances. You can also use it to jump up into, say, a second-story window or onto a ledge that would normally be unreachable. The mobility is nice and gives you some good-feeling options for getting around a map. This helps on some of the old map remakes, since that mobility lets you attack things from slightly different angles and heights than you could last time around, but I will say that I’m finding the three remade maps currently in the rotation to be a bit of a drag. I think I’m just over the idea of Call of Duty map remakes… meanwhile Yet Another Version of Nuketown will join the game on the 20th. I will spare you a full-on aside, but I find the constant return to the Nuketown well to be a largely pathetic move on the part of Activision, a sign that players don’t actually want to play the game, they just want a small killbox they can run over and over again to grind out camos and unlocks and crap like that. Though who am I to judge, I like Shipment, right?

The current crop of guns and characters feel a little bland. While some might applaud that as a sign that the game is going to stay grounded—something some players called for after the last few years of ridiculous skins, characters, and pop-culture tie-ins and some particularly pointed comments from the developers of Battlefield 6—it still has the characters from the zombies mode in here as playable characters, and they’re once again kind of a bad fit. Like “old timey zombie robot” bad. Real “boots on the ground” stuff. Don’t worry, I’m sure the cast of Pluribus and Spongebob Squarepants will be in there soon enough.

In addition to the standard Call of Duty-shaped modes, there’s also a new 20v20 skirmish mode here that feels a bit different. These matches take place on a larger map that is constantly spawning new objectives to capture. You spawn in on a wingsuit and can more or less glide to any point on the map, and it also has armor plates, like Warzone. The larger map size and constant flow of objectives to capture is pretty cool, like it brings in a little of the size of Warzone, but the capture points give you something to focus on at all times. It’s not Ground War, and it’s certainly not a Battlefield mode, either. It feels like its own thing.

Ultimately the shooting is fine, some of the maps are neat, and there are some cool features in here, too, like little codes that generate when you customize a gun. These codes are then easily shared and imported by other players, in case you come up with something you thing “breaks the game” or whatever. It’s smart! But again, for reasons I have suspicions about but can’t quite put my finger on, I’m finding the whole experience to be a little passé this year. Perhaps it’s this growing feeling that they’re once again headed for another reboot. Hey, maybe next year they’ll finally bring back Advanced Warfare side-dodges or something cool like that! Ultimately, this game reminds me a lot of Modern Warfare III from a couple years back. It’s making meaningful improvements over the previous game, but it still maintains a lot of the same feel.

ZOMBIES?

I played around two matches of zombies in last year’s game and had a pretty good time, but I think a lot of the things that players seem to like about it also irk me. It’s fine. I’m never going to be a dedicated zombies guy. I will say that I found the characters and dialogue stuff in this year’s game to be a little worse. I still think gobblegums are kind of a dumb system. I still think the camos and assets and general “vibe” of the zombie stuff is dumb. Also, in a weird way, the campaign delivers a sort of half-assed zombies experience of its own, so I’m a little extra zombied out at the moment.

ALL RIGHT, LET’S GO BACK TO THAT OTHER THING

Endgame is the mode that unlocks after finishing the campaign, and puts you out onto a large landmass, akin to a Warzone map, on a squad of up to four players. The map is broken up into four areas of difficulty and it’s littered with mission markers for you to target and take on. These missions are repeatable little things like “stand near a cargo pod until it opens” or “shoot a high-value target to death.” For your troubles, you’ll earn levels on your combat rating, and each time you gain a level you’ll be able to choose one of two bonuses. Other players outside your squad appear as friendly (I don’t currently know if this changes as you make your way into the higher-difficulty areas) and you can even sort of work together across squads on some objectives. It’s quite friendly, compared to a lot of the other, similar options out there, but the end results of failure are the same: if you fail to extract from the Endgame zone before time expires or you get smoked, you lose any gear or items you had equipped and your combat rating is reset to zero.

It seems neat, and it feels like a fairly fleshed-out thing, leaving me to wonder what sort of updates they’ll do to this corner of the game over the next 12 months. That said, the way it introduces you to Endgame is maybe less than ideal. So I just finished the campaign, right? Me and two other players finished the fight against the… PMC lady or whatever, and the credits start rolling only to be interrupted by no fewer than three separate cutscenes. Then you’re dropped into Avalon with those same players and set loose. While I was more than ready for bed at this point, I figured I’d at least take a look at this thing, so we ran around and opened some cargo boxes and gained some levels. At this point, I had something to lose… so when I went to quit and saw the big "THIS WILL BE COUNTED AS A SQUAD WIPE” message, I flinched and stayed in.

One of the players decided to run over to Area 2, which is for players of combat rating 10 and up. We were combat rating 2, but hey, I want to help the team, right? So I ran along and found enemies that were probably three or four times as bullet spongey as the enemies in the campaign. After kiting around some dumb robot for a few minutes and unloading into its face for minimal damage, it finally went down. We finally managed to ping an exfiltration point and get out of the game, allowing me to go the heck to bed. The losses on failure seem like they’d be minimal, because it looks like you can just add loadout guns to your inventory, but as I haven’t been able to build a character from scratch yet, I’m not 100% sure on the penalties.

This mode has potential, though it’s sort of a shame that you need to finish the campaign to even see it. I doubt it’ll really hold up when compared to more dedicated games in this sector, but as some kind of iteration on DMZ, this feels friendlier, a bit more casual out of the gate, and like it might be kinda fun.

OK, I JUST WANT YOU TO SUM IT UP, MAN

Fine, sure. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is, for better and worse, a pretty different Call of Duty game, even if a lot of those differences are borne out of experiments and modes that make up some of the more checkered parts of the series’ recent past. I don’t think the campaign is especially good or that its story holds up against most of the other recent campaigns, though I would say that I had a totally decent time with it. It’s significantly better than the Modern Warfare III (2023) campaign, how about that? Low bar, sure.

I really like the way this game moves in competitive multiplayer. It’s got a good speed to it along with the ability to hop up into windows and stuff like that. Some of the loadout options are neat, but I’m finding that I already want to skip a few maps.

The Endgame mode is at least cool enough out of the gate that it makes me want to get back in there and see more of it, which is a vast improvement over the DMZ mode from a few years back, though I think it gets there by sanding off some of the edges and making failure less impactful than the typical extraction experience. That may turn off players who need a higher level of risk involved in order to feel anything, like poker players who can only play if money's on the line because the stakes and risk are the only things that make the game work for them. That said, I haven’t seen all the areas here and it wouldn’t shock me if higher levels and areas raise the stakes a bit.

This feels like a franchise that is once again trying to find ways to stretch into new ideas and experiences without having to completely re-engineer the game. The tech that felt excellent and absolutely necessary back when the first Modern Warfare remake overhauled significant parts of the engine is perhaps showing its age a bit. That this comes just a year after one of the franchise’s best campaigns is a little disappointing, for sure, but at least it’s trying out some different stuff.

Regardless, playing this game makes me feel like we’re destined to repeat this same cycle every five years: the return to tradition “boots on the ground” moment that resets things and gets players hyped up by promising to be the Call of Duty game they remember from their youth, which then slowly creeps forward in a variety of ways until, whoops! We’re putting our feet all over the walls again. Don’t get me wrong, wall-running is sick and I’m fine with the more “out there” sci-fi-like takes on the standard military story. But I feel like I’ve been here before and it’s easy to imagine that we’re slipping back down to road to a reboot sometime over the next couple of years. Hey… it worked last time, right?

3/5