Call of Duty: Black Ops

I tried really, really hard to come into Call of Duty: Black Ops with an open mind. It gets pretty hard to do when there have been six previous games in a series of varying degrees of moral offensiveness, but I really wanted to come away from this game not feeling like utter shit for having played it. From all appearances it kind of looked like Black Ops was going for a spy-themed deniable operations feeling, which, if morally corrupt in the real-world, has made for some entertaining films and games in the past.

Too bad that Black Ops sucks to the high heavens, and unfortunately for almost the exact same reasons as every other Call of Duty game before it.

The “hook” for Black Ops is that you play as Alexander Mason, a covert military specialist assigned to do the government’s dirty work. At the outset of the game, you’ve been captured by an anonymous organization, strapped to a chair, and interro-tortured for information about the various covert operations that you’ve been a part of over various parts of the Cold War.

Right off the bat, the game undermines its principal narrative arc, simply by virtue of being a game where you can die. What sense does that make? How would you have gotten to the present if you had died in one of your own memories? It doesn’t make a lick of sense and immediately makes playing any of the missions an exercise in turning off your brain to ignore this plot hole that you could drive a semi through.

That’s of course not the only problem with the plot of the game. The various Cold War locales – including Vietnam, Cuba and Russia – all play up extremely stereotypical versions of each place. Whereas a Bond film will include Communists as the “bad guys” and generally make a madcap adventure out of it, even belying a certain grudging respect towards them for making such good bad guys, Black Ops has no qualms about engaging in old-school “America = good, communists = evil” dichotomy without even a trace of irony or self-awareness.

It’s this po-faced seriousness that makes all of the Call of Duty games slightly jingoistic, and Black Ops is no different. This game even goes as far as to include awful John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara mannequin stand-ins to give the game some semblance of verisimilitude, but the script’s over-reliance on action movie clichés and the complete abandonment of anything that could conceivably be “real” history (the game’s explosion-heavy first chapter, which is supposedly supposed to stand in for the Bay of Pigs scenario when the US tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, is probably the most indicative of this) makes all of the action feel like a hoary action movie rather than a serious examination of historical military events, something that the Call of Duty games always seem to want to do.

Black Ops’s greatest failure, though, is in what I’m going to call the “gamer as God” syndrome. Oh sure, you can turn up the difficulty, which will mean more enemies popping up for you to shoot and fewer hits that you can take – but the game makes it abundantly clear that Mason is really an archangel in disguise or something. Did you know that soldiers can replenish health and heal wounds simply by sitting still for a moment? Or that they can carry over 1000 rounds on their person with no problem? Or that they have flashing objective indicators in their eyesight at all times, telling them which way to go, what to do, when to reload, and which weapons to pick up? I don’t care that these have become first-person shooter conventions by this point – in the world of Call of Duty, with its sky-high production values and scarily accurate attention to detail in creating realistic settings (if not in enemy intelligence, as they still, after six games, basically just pop up like targets at a carnival), they don’t make any sense.

This isn’t a game that you play so much as one that you’re begrudgingly invited to be pulled along through. With celebrity voice talent from Ed Harris, Gary Oldman and Sam Worthington, and the Michael Bay-esque playtime-to-explosion ratio (seriously, I thought that these were supposed to be black ops), one gets the feeling that the developers are trying to jam the conventions of action films into the world of video gaming, but unfortunately, that’s not how to craft good, interesting or thoughtful game design.

With all that being said, I guarantee you that 90% of the people who are picking up Black Ops couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the story – it’s always been about the multiplayer. Criticizing the multiplayer is a difficult thing to do, if only because it has become so entrenched (and in the COD series, so completely devoid of any game-like context) that it’s like trying to criticize a sport, which is all that any FPS’s multiplayer component is. I’ll say that besides a few dropped games that might have been the product of my sometimes-shoddy wireless connection, everything works really well, especially if you enjoy shooting at other people and being verbally harassed online. There are new gameplay modes and, in the biggest change-up, one accrues something called “COD points,” which can be used to purchase new weapons, outfits, and skills online, basically creating a merit system for good performance.

Even moreso than the single-player, the multiplayer is essentially meaningless outside of the satisfaction that one can derive from the mechanics of the multiplayer itself. I personally prefer couch multiplayer in shooting games, but if I’m going to be doing that, I’ll be playing it on a game that doesn’t make me feel so stupid for owning it.

There’s one final mode in Call of Duty that has everyone excited – the return of zombie mode from World at War. It didn’t make sense in that World War II game, and it doesn’t make sense here. There’s even a mode where you can play as Kennedy, Nixon, Castro or Kruschev and fight off zombies in the Pentagon. I’m sure this was meant to add some levity to the game, but it comes off as being incredibly offensive in a game that for the most part tries to be serious about war (even if it fails on so many counts).

I take offense to the idea that a game should be praised simply because its mechanics more or less work. True, the production values are out of this world, mainly because so many people (6 million on the first day of release) buy these games year after year, and all of the physics and guns and such work well and somewhat realistically, but there are so many conceptual flaws that this game ultimately feels completely hollow and (considering the fact that Activision is publishing the game) cynical. I wish that this was the last game in the series, because I’m sick of having to act like this is a cultural phenomenon of some artistic importance. It IS a cultural phenomenon, but only because it shows how easily manipulated by ad dollars and shooting 18 – 30 year-old males are.

Note: this review originally appeared, in abbreviated form, in The Carillon, the University of Regina's student newspaper.