Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Guilty pleasure"

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Gameplay: A-
Storyline: A
Sound: A
Graphics: A+
Replay Value: Mucho Grande
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GOOD:
*Thrilling campaign
*Enriched environments
*Awesome Multiplayer
BAD:
*Rather short single-player campaign
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Call of Duty is the largest and most well-known franchise in the gaming industry. There are a lot of expectations from this series, and Treyarch has once again met those expectations and brought us the new installment of the franchise – Black Ops. Call of Duty Black Ops delivers intense action, glorious visuals, impressive audio, and ingenious multiplayer. Similar to Modern Warfare 2, but with a little more modifications.

The storyline take place mostly during the 1960's and takes you to Cold War hotspots such as Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam. The protagonist of Black Ops is an elite covert operative named Alex Mason. You start out the game in a room, and find yourself being interrogated. Mason doesn't remember anything, and throughout the interrogation you play Mason's memories. Each mission slowly comes together to build a momentum as each interrogation cutscene puts another piece of the puzzle together. The hazy edges of your consciousness conceal information that must eventually come to light, and the erratic visual effects and unnerving audio that encompasses your interrogations sometimes bleed into your mission memories, creating a great tone of uncertainty that plays out in astounding and substantial ways.

Black Ops covers a wide array of geographical landscapes and gameplay. A dramatic breakout from a brutal Soviet prison is one early highlight, and later missions feature frontline conflicts, urban firefights, and mountainous infiltrations. Environments are richly detailed, and though the campaign may have a few technical problems - such as the occasional problematic checkpoint or the odd teleporting ally – these moments aren't likely to impede your amusement. In addition to the on-foot action, you do use a wide variety of vehicles to achieve success in your missions. Sometimes you'll be in the gunner's seat while other times you'll be behind the wheel, and although the vehicle handling is discreet, the thrill of blowing stuff up and speeding through hostile territory is unquestionable. The core run-and-gun mechanics remains exciting as ever, and the gameplay variety throughout the campaign keeps the action moving at a great pace.

Although the campaign is a adrenaline-fueled good time, it's not that long. The thing that will most likely keep you coming back to Black Ops for months to come is, predictably, the online competitive multiplayer. At its basic, this is the accustomed top-notch Call of Duty action that gamers have been appreciating for years. You gain experience for doing well in battle, and as you level up, you gain admittance to new and influential ways to customize your loadouts. New weapons and maps freshen things up, and one of the new killstreak awards is an explosive-laden remote-control car which is a pleasantly lethal device. The key new element to the multiplayer is currency. In addition to receiving experience for battlefield performance, you earn Call of Duty points, which can then be spent in a variety of ways. Most perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks, and equipment items are obtainable early on, providing you to bomb out the points to equip them. Customization selections like face paint, player card backgrounds, and the new create-your-own-icon tool are all accessed by spending points. Having the option to pay your way gives you more loadout options at lower required levels than previous Call of Duty games.

The Call of Duty points also permit two awesome new mechanics, the first is contracts. Like many multiplayer challenges that reward you with experience points for completing goals, which contracts you have to pay to complete them. If you do so within the prearranged time period, you receive an organized payout. If you pay 50 points for a contract and succeed in that contract, you'll earn 11 points for all your trouble. If time expires before you complete that contract, you loose the points. The tougher the contract, the more it'll cost, however, they have the larger payouts. You can have up to three contracts active at a time across three different categories – Mercenary Contracts, Operations Contracts, and Specialist Contracts. Contracts offer a nicely incentivized version of challenges and gives you something fun to attempt for if you ever get bored.

The other cool new mechanic is wager matches. In these matches, you pay an entrance fee of 10, 1,000, or 10,000 points, depending upon how much points you have, and then you get to play some of the most unique game modes that Black Ops has to offer. One mode gives you increasingly better weapons for each kill you tally, while another gives you a pistol with one bullet and only three lives to live. At the end of the match, the points is split proportionally among the top three finishers while everyone else comes away empty handed.

The rather popular four-player cooperative zombie-killing mode that was first debuted in Call of Duty World at War has returned. The fight to stay alive against wave after wave of zombies is still an intense and strange struggle, and new maps and playable characters take the eccentric humor of the situation to a whole new level. This mode supports four players online or two locally. Two local players can also play split-screen competitive multiplayer online, while four can divide the screen equally among them and set up competitive local matches.

Call of Duty Black Ops is an amazing game with new modes and mechanics that give a jolt of enthusiasm to the game. Though the campaign may be short, but the engrossing storyline gives this game the best thrill a gamer could ask for. Black Ops lives up to the top-notch lineage that the franchise has earned, giving gamers a tremendous new shooter to enjoy.

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Recommended? – Yes
System(s):
*PlayStation3
*Xbox360
*PC
*Wii
*Nintendo DS
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Features:
*Achievements/Trophies
*Downloadable Content
*Leaderboards
*Chat
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