Editor’s Note: This review is not yet finalized and will be changing in the near future. What you can find below is our thoughts on mostly the campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War. Our extended thoughts on multiplayer and Zombies will be coming soon.
If it’s November of any given year, that means there’s a new Call of Duty title gracing store shelves and digital marketplaces. This year’s title is another entry in the Black Ops series, so if you’re expecting anything similar to last year’s Modern Warfare, you’re sure to be disappointed. So far, I’ve only played enough of the game’s campaign to feel confident in reviewing it alone; a complete review including the game’s multiplayer will be coming later on in the week, so keep an eye out.
For now, I’ll be focusing on the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War‘s single-player campaign. Recent Black Ops titles have set themselves far into the future, picturing what warfare and covert operations will look like when jetpacks are also readily available. This entry, however, is a return to the earlier Black Ops titles in almost every way. Taking place in 1981 during the (you guessed it) Cold War, players fill the familiar shoes of Alex Mason, a man obsessed with numbers, and a mysterious character named Bell, who players assume the role of for most of the game.
From its first mission, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War takes steps to demonstrate how it’s differentiating itself from other titles. Players start by ambushing a house filled with enemies ringing in the new year and chase their team’s target across rooftops. When he’s finally captured, players get to actually choose what to say in the form of a dialogue tree. At least for me, this was a huge change for a Call of Duty title. I’m more accustomed to letting the game’s characters do the talking while I have fun running and gunning.
That being said, being able to actually get involved in the game’s story is extremely welcome. Every dialogue choice has an effect on the game, from the innocuous to the explicitly obvious ones. There are multiple points where players can choose to throw that target off the roof as soon as he spills the beans, or players can capture him for further interrogation right there, changing the game’s ending in its very first mission.
Dialogue trees are just one of the many departures from the Call of Duty norm that Treyarch has decided to make. The second comes almost immediately after the first mission wraps up – you’re introduced to the new Black Ops team and the safehouse you’ll all be calling home while working to prevent the actions of Perseus, a Russian agent that has changed the balance of the Cold War every time he’s come into play. This base of operations is also where players will be spending their downtime. That’s right, there’s time spent in a Call of Duty title not purely blasting bad guys away with enormous weaponry.
And really, it’s pretty nice. For once, players will get to learn a little bit about the characters they’re working alongside. It’s something that the Call of Duty series desperately requires, or at least has for me. Take for example Captain John Price, as he was in the original Modern Warfare games. He’s beloved in the older Call of Duty groups for being an all-around badass, but outside of that, players don’t really know much of anything about him. He’s like John Wick if we only saw the parts of the movies where John Wick shot people; that’s his only personality trait. Instead, players get to actually learn a little bit about their crewmates, and I ended up taking every opportunity I could to do so. These small, short interactions reveal the most interesting pieces of dialogue in the entire game.
But once you get back to the story of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, things go downhill quickly. The game moves at a blisteringly fast pace and wraps up in about six hours total. Over the course of my first playthrough, I struggled to stay engaged with the game’s continually developing story of espionage, intrigue, and who stole however many American-made nuclear warheads. In fact, without looking at the notes I took while playing it, most of Black Ops Cold War‘s campaign is a blur – it all mushes together into one extended combat sequence. There are a few key sections of missions that stand out. One of these sequences places players in the shoes of a CIA plant in the Lubyanka, the center of the Soviet-era KGB. Another has players fighting through a Russian model of a typical 1980’s American suburb. These situations are fun, although only because they offer delightful changes in scenery.
Additionally, players have access to side-missions that can be accessed from the safehouse. These one-off missions don’t boast a huge amount of content, but unlocking them is the real joy. The two missions require players to gather evidence from other main story missions to be completed successfully. Once gathered, players have to use that evidence to solve puzzles, with one requiring them to pick out targets from a large group and another tasking them with decoding a message. This process is unlike anything I’ve seen in a Call of Duty title and it’s genuinely pretty fun. It plays into the entire espionage theme of the game, which makes it such a pity that the missions you end up unlocking are pretty underwhelming.
When mission variety is as drab as it is in Black Ops Cold War, the saving grace of games like these is usually gunplay, but that’s not the case here either. Guns in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War are the worst they’ve felt in any Call of Duty title I’ve ever played. I should say that I never played Advanced Warfare or Black Ops 3 and 4, but regardless, this performance is simply poor. Every weapon lacks weight, and the ones that are supposed to have that boast an undeniable heft, like the game’s Gallo SA 12, which I recognized as the Spas-12 from other CoD titles. This hulking, automatic shotgun doesn’t let out a deep thump with every shell fired, but instead an unsatisfying “Bap!” The franchise’s staple AK-47 has its own similar quirk, dinging like a bell with every round let loose.
These issues, compounded with the extremely limited variety of weapons that players have access to over the course of the campaign makes the act of killing bad guys uninteresting and unsatisfying and is a death knell for any game based around doing that exact thing.
However, the largest issue I ran into with Black Ops Cold War was presented in its final moments. Black Ops games are known for their twists and turns, and this one is no exception. It has its mysteries, and there are hints toward something larger presented sparsely by easily-missed optional dialogue throughout the game. But when things come to a head and players are going through the game’s final mission, the biggest mystery it has is finally revealed, and just as quickly as players are made aware, it’s resolved. It was incredibly disappointing to have the most interesting plot point in this game presented and then wrapped up so quickly when it should have taken a more front and center position.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does some things right. It takes some brave, new steps for the franchise; it branches out with dialogue trees, downtime, evidence, and side-missions, all of which add at least something to the game. It’s not always something of substance, but they never take away from the overall experience. I can certainly appreciate the attempt to make something different here and hope that future Treyarch CoD titles continue to implement these changes.
However, the core experience of a CoD campaign relies on a gripping story, providing consistently fun and varied missions, and solid shooting mechanics, all of which Black Ops Cold War lacks. The campaign here is worth playing through once to familiarize players with the game’s guns and mechanics, but past that, I can’t recommend playing through this story multiple times to experience each end. It’s simply not worth it.
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