Activision’s juggernaut shooter is back, but can it overcome a weak campaign to counter the rising success of Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders? Call Of Duty’s omnipresence in popular culture has made it practically impervious to reviews over the past decade, but some cracks are starting to show. Fan complaints around the direction of the series, between inappropriate skins and the growing intrusion of microtransactions, have started to ring louder. At the same time, competitors like Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders are enjoying the sort of buzz Activision’s shooter used to generate a decade or so ago.
The latest instalment, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7, will undoubtedly sell millions of copies, but it is an underwhelming resell of what we’ve seen countless times before – just at a time when the franchise has never looked more vulnerable. The same solid foundation which has maintained Call Of Duty’s dominance for decades is still intact, but coming off the impactful innovations in last year’s Black Ops 6, this sequel feels like a rushed follow-up that’s lacking in meaningful additions.
In the case of the co-op campaign, the additions can be detrimental too. It is one of the worst campaigns in the series – a poorly designed patch job stitched together from the bones of Zombies, Warzone, and a new 32-player extraction mode oddly gated behind its completion. Activision’s recent decision to untether this Endgame mode from the campaign feels like an acknowledgment of its failure to combine the two experiences. In isolation though, the Endgame works as a decent, sedate spin on the extraction genre, in comparison to the franchise’s past efforts with Warzone’s DMZ.
Endgame is a PvE experience, and while it does lack tension without the competitive aspect, it works as an accessible entry point for the concept. In each round, you’re dropped into the massive new Avalon map, which is gated into four zones of escalating difficulty. Your primary goal is to increase your combat rank and acquire skills to progress through the zones. If you escape before the timer runs out, your rank and gear carry over; if you die, you lose everything. There is a final boss and Endgame-specific camos to unlock, but its slower pace works as a surprising draw.
If Black Ops 7 succeeds at anything, it’s in the breadth of its multiplayer. All the usual suspects return, along with two new modes. Overload is the best of the two, a 6v6 mode where you grab a device from different locations and place it in enemy drop zones for points. It’s similar to Capture The Flag but far more aggressively paced. Skirmish is a 20v20 battle where you fly in from the skies and complete objectives for points. It’s a fun expansion of Hardpoint but feels too familiar to leave a big impression. The Zombies portion is similarly stuffed with content, including the main draw Ashes Of The Damned, an evolution of the large-scale Tranzit map from Black Ops 2.
