Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Rent it first"

This review will primarily cover the campaign. Which, like the campaign will be absurdly short, make no sense to anyone, but thankfully you can skip right through, and get right to what you really want; the multiplayer content. Press "X" to skip to multiplayer content. So the single player campaign starts out with the covert involvement of US operatives in a civil war in Angola between Soviet backed and Cuban lead revolutionaries, and nationalists (read US-friendly). This battle is largely insignificant, but it hints at the campaign's main theme, blowback. If players are willing to put the mental effort into piecing the campaign together, the plot is at least plausible, and based around historical fact, population trends, technological trends, and some conjecture regarding the possible development of illegal trade in Latin America. Unfortunately the campaign does little to explain explicitly that this is so. Additionally, at least some of the technology on offer is at the very least plausible as well. This provides a decent grounding for the tech on offer, again though the game considers clarifying that fact insignificant. Likewise, the game considers its characters largely insignificant, all cut-scenes are skippable allowing players to ignore the story entirely. Black Ops 2 offers two, I hesitate to call them innovations, in the campaign. First is the option to customise weapon loadouts at the start of missions. While new to Call of Duty, this is nothing new in the genre or games in general. Secondly, Black Ops offers a few RTS-lite missions, which are also skippable, and have bad AI. Ultimately these missions are irrelevant, and don't really fit. In my opinion Ghost Recon: Future Soldier did this far better. My prevailing memory of the campaign in Black Ops II is of feeling like a fool. I wasn't playing a new game, it was just the latest Call of Duty, and it wasn't the focus of the developers.

At the risk of being way too subjective, I will say I miss the absurdity of the first Black Ops' zombie mode. Zombies will occupy your time for a little while, it evokes a sense of urgency well, and probably always will, even without Richard Nixon, JFK, Fidel Castro, and Robert MacNamara. Like the first Black Ops, zombies is not the jewel in the Black Ops crown, that is multiplayer.