Some games are very easy to complete, you can’t put them down and they are over far too soon. Other games may be short, but annoy you all the way through them and you actually start to wish they would end. Call of Duty: Black Ops was one of those latter games for me. It’s also a recent game, which makes a change from clearing my back catalogue.
I do like a good shooter, and Black Ops is undeniably a good shooter. The multiplayer is the pinnacle of the genre and Zombie mode is sublimely fun. It truly is the best game in it’s class for multiplayer. 10/10. Can’t wait for the next one to see how they make it even better.
The problem is that you don’t complete a game in the multiplayer and so I’m not writing about that. The single player is the one with the end credits and having seen them now all I can say is that for such a short game I found it a real slog.
This begs the question as to how I can not really enjoy a shooter with the best feeling mechanics for actually shooting at the moment. The answer, after a lot of thought, is the level design. I just really didn’t get on with the design direction for the game.
Firstly, but not very importantly, is the plot. The story is told mostly through flashbacks with you strapped to a chair in an interrogation room being asked about your past missions, which means you are jumping between black ops missions in places like Cuba, Russia and Vietnam. The plot isn’t uninteresting and almost hangs together but it never feels like it was really thought all the way through and is more of an excuse to string together the varied environments.
Since it’s the level design that got to me the most I’ll start by saying how great they look. A lot of care and attention has gone into the art design and there are some wonderful set pieces. Where it falls down for me is that there are very few points in the missions to enjoy the environments. You are pushed between firefights almost constantly. The ratio of action to downtime is too skewed for me to really enjoy myself and I can’t help but feel that the game could have been longer by adding more padding and actually been better for it.
I also didn’t like missing what I was meant to be doing because it wasn’t clear enough and there are some notoriously awkward moments in the game. A quick straw poll told me that everybody hated the level in Vietnam in the trenches because people missed how to stop the infinitely spawning enemies (kick the barrels down the hill) and a couple of my friends were stuck there and had given up until told how to actually do it.
Another thing that is getting to me more and more as time goes on is comical gore in games. I’ve never shot anybody with an incendiary shotgun in real life, but I’m pretty sure that their limbs don’t fall off quite like they do in this game. It’s a very violent game and some of the weapons are truly horrific, but it feels like they’ve stepped slightly beyond that and it’s a little bit off putting to me. Some of the deaths wouldn’t be out of place in a flamboyant shooter such as Bulletstorm.
It all comes together into a game that I should love, but don’t. The only reason to replay the single player campaign for me would be achievements, and that’s never a good sign. You never feel that you’re on a journey, you never feel like the world is anything more than an amusement park for your entertainment and worse of all it could probably all be fixed not pandering (I assume) to the hyper players who need 100% action, all the time.
At least the multiplayer is great.
5 comments
Gazruney
March 10, 2011 at 12:18 pm (UTC 0)
Ha! I did’nt realise about the barrels either
.
I just hard assed fought my way through on normal and hard lmao.
I think the veteren playthrough may go a bit more smoothly now Jon thanks very much for the tip XD.
Telke
March 10, 2011 at 12:39 pm (UTC 0)
(played on PC) sections of the SP campaign fall apart really quickly if you stop running, as well – I fail the bridge jump after the rocket blows the bridge apart, at least once every time, simply because I instinctively take a step back to get a run-up, and suddenly “FAILED – TOO FAR AWAY FROM TEAMMATES”.
The level set in that city, after you hit the scientist, is stupid as well – if you dawdle through it, the scripting becomes painfully obvious as enemies spawn just out of sight. That level is only textured well in one direction, as well – if you turn around, particularly while descending to street level near the end, half the walls are really basic.
Just in general, sections of the SP felt clumsily done; Treyarch is getting much better, but they’re going for the Michael Bay-esque explosive setups, and Infinity Ward had a better feel for that sort of scripted event. I doubt IW can do that anymore, with 48 people missing, but we’ll see.
As for the multiplayer – it’s good; it’s fun, and better-balanced than MW2 was. On PC there’s only one server provider, and the closest servers to NZ are in Sydney, so we’ve got a few latency issues. I’ve noticed it makes me rage a lot more; I can play TF2 for ages, even when having a pretty bad play experience, but if I have two bad games of BlOps in a row, I’m likely to go read a book instead.
In conclusion, CoD 1 and 4 are still the pinnacles of the series, in my opinion. and yeah, those barrels are a b*tch,
Jon Shute
March 10, 2011 at 1:03 pm (UTC 0)
Ah, that bridge got me too. Then after it the jump off the mountain did as well as it was a timed section with no instructions and the action, throw yourself off the bloody mountain, was not on my list of ways to survive the situation
brokendiet
March 16, 2011 at 1:06 pm (UTC 0)
I hated Black Ops with a passion and really didn’t understand why it’s sales figures are so massive. Your blog gives me a clue as I rented it and never got to play the multiplayer. The singleplayer parts annoyed me intensely by having the same guys spawning in the same spots over and over if you don’t move on quickly enough.
The one bit I actually enjoyed was the Vietnam trenches and actually getting the feeling you were playing a part in one of the films like Platoon. It did take me ages to twig about the barrels though.
Jon Shute
March 16, 2011 at 1:18 pm (UTC 0)
I suspect that a large number of people buy one game per year and take months to complete it, even if it is as short as this. Actually I know it’s true for at least one person as a friend was doing just that (a lend of a stack of PS3 games seems to have cured him though)
If you only play one game and everybody says it is great then that’s what good games must be like…