Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Review
Campaign of a Hero?
The narrative campaign jumps between characters perspectives and through time ranging from the cold war era with Alex Mason and Sgt. Frank Woods (Black Ops 1) to 2025 with Alex's Son (David Mason). All the soldiers stories are intertwined with the main villain Raul Menendez and his organisation Cordis Die. He is the type of villian where you he's not just evil because he does bad things but more because he is a product of imperialist nations during the Cold War era and has survived some incredibly traumatic experiences which warp him along the way.
The main reason that this Call of duty campaign stands out is the additional characters and storylines that come together increasing the enjoyablitity of the game without making it repeatative like playing online can be. Plenty of additional cutscenes come together giving each area of the campaign a nice finished feeling and knowing that your actions can change the way the story pans out over the course of the game. Depending on your actions you can get short cutscenes and objectives but also give you the option to take control over small strike forces within the game. The limited command control making this function a little less enjoyable though. Although the importance of the strike force becomes apparent when tension is added as an ineffective command can result in harsh concequences.
Shooting the enemies and online players is as fun as before with a range of new and exsisting weapons but also other perks and equipment available allowing you to see for example a stationary player through a wall/object before they reach you. The loadout before taking a new mission is changable with all the perks, attachments and equipment to allow the players to take whichever weapon combo as you can online into the campaign battlefield. This allows the use of any weapon more enjoyable as you can use whatever you prefer and not stuck with a standard assult rifle and pistol every level with the occasional shotgun or sniper rifle.
The Verdict
I believe Team Tryarch have not decided to play safe and have brought into exsistance a well put together game both offline and online. Hopefully later releases will not be rushed and retain the good input that has been put into this game and previous games. With the new load-out system and online gameplay I9 simply can't imagine that it will be reverted back to how to has been previously. I believe more should be added to Zombies and online though is it is very similar to previous Call of Duty games and needs new fresh ideas and removal of the poor Score Streak idea which I believe is no where near as good and enjoyable as the Kill Streaks in previous games.