Call of Duty – Black Ops – quick review
Ok, so I also recently completed Black Ops. The reason I’ve completed some games in a funny order recently is that I bought Black Ops before I made the PS3 purchase. I’d got a little way into the campaign on one of the harder difficulty settings on the Xbox and had gotten stuck, infuriatingly stuck. I thought the levels I’d played were ok but I couldn’t be bothered to pick up the campaign when I traded my Xbox version for the PS3 copy- which I did because I had a group of mates to play with on PS3.
Anyway after completing all the other FPS’s in my collection I thought what the heck I’ll give it another go, but I’ll just run through it on normal. And thank god I did…
My goodness, this game is good. The storyline, which I had originally thought a bit lame, is actually brilliant. I learned to love the characters quickly, enjoyed their exploits, guessed the main twist a while before the end (which gave me a nice smug sense of satisfaction at the reveal) and I defy anyone to not enjoy diving to prone!
The mix of action type (i.e. stealth, straight up shoot-out, prison break etc) hit a sweet spot for me, and was nicely split throughout the game. Characters from World at War making an appearance was a great nod to the previous game, and I thought this added to the depth of the storyline, though (as with a certain other main characters demise in MW3 – see my recent post about MW3) the death of Dimitri was a mixed bag for me – he did deserve a better death, as Reznov states.
The final flash-forward style scene was a nice touch, and made me jump straight onto the net to see what others made of it.
Multiplayer is great fun, again diving to prone all over the place is always good for a laugh! And the levelling system was enjoyable. For me, having played and made some substantial progress on the Xbox multplayer, and then having to start from scratch on PS3 was a little irritating, but at least I now know that prestige really isn’t for me.
Well done Treyarch – a COD game to really rival the Modern Warfare/Infinity Ward series.
Final score is 9 out of 10 – more than MW3 because my initial expectations were lower for this game.
Teachers comment would read: great work, some of the best I’ve seen – gripping, varied and interesting to the very end.
