Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Total letdown"

Campaign Review - *Spoilers* although that should not bother you because hopefully you will stay away from this game and save yourself the disappointment.

I write this with a heavy heart. I have long been a huge fan of COD and always defended the series anytime people said it was just the same old recycled garbage. With Black Ops 2 however, that could not be any more true, only it is recycled garbage along with near-last gen graphics, poor performance, stolen or copied parts of other games, and a story so ridiculous, convoluted, predictable and absurd that it seems to have been taken straight out of a mix of an Anime comic and Jason Statham movie.

GAMEPLAY- Instead of focusing on being an effective and enjoyable FPS, BO2 attempts to be every kind of game you can think of, from role playing, driving, tactical strategy, flight simulator, James Bond remake, you name it. It's like a video game buffet, but just like with a real buffet, the food may look and even taste pretty good at first and you may be pleased with the variety but you know deep down it's just a bunch of deep fried re-fried oily garbage that will make your bowels beg for mercy hours later. At best BO2 does a mediocre job on any of these attempts. The strategy comes in optional side missions where you go back and forth commanding and taking control of squadrons of drones and soldiers. It's a little interesting at first and affects the story somewhat but ultimately it just feels like filler and isn't much fun to begin with. The James Bond part comes when you control a little robotic spider and navigate it through a series of vents. This part is almost certainly stolen completely from the game James Bond Everything or Nothing (an actual great game). Gunplay feels stiff and sluggish, and as another review mentioned, shooting from the hip often seems a lot easier making it much more arcade like. One of the things I most loved about COD was how realistic the games were. This game takes place in large part in the year 2025, only about a decade away and yet every crazy technology has been invented, from VTOLS, invisibility suits, nano gloves and guns that look stolen from Red Faction Guerrilla. It just feels like a rip off of Crysis mostly.

GRAPHICS/PERFORMANCE- I'm not a big critic of graphics unless they get worse for no reason and the game runs poorly as well, which is the case here. The graphics aren't aged compared to the other COD games, they are WORSE. The characters look smaller, the environments look semi-cartoonish (and not in a cool Borderlands way) and the guns look like toys. Add to this that the game is full of lag and stutters even on low settings. I don't have a beast of a gaming laptop but it runs Dragon Age, Crysis 2, the other CODs etc without a hitch, what went wrong here? This reminds me of Homefront, bad graphics and poor performance, very bad. Mouse control is either too heavy or too accelerated, making it hard to aim down the sight and forces you to shoot from the hip way more often they you'd like to in an FPS.

SOUND- The score seems to be made up of about three songs. One or two for the past missions, and one 80's techno for the future missions. Gun shots and weapons sound a lot less real than in past games.

I draw two conclusions from BO2, first that Treyarch or Activision or whoever have simply run out of ideas and just decided to mix in whatever anyone else has already done and second that they simply don't care about the quality of the game. They've made so much money just from the label and a new release each year that I think they just assume this model will last forever. Don't buy this game or even waste your time playing it, it's not good and it's time more COD fans came to grips with that. As for the people who gave the game 10s and 9.5s, I have a feeling they'd be equally psyched if you dangled your keys in front of their faces.