Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

You've answered the other Calls of Duty, you've played the many games aping the series' success - you're a veteran COD player, and you probably think you know how this is going to play out already, right?

What if I told you Black Ops 2 has multiple endings? What if it has a loadout system in singleplayer - some of which let you access previously blocked parts of an enormous map? What if the multiplayer pushes the concept of the solo-camper even further from relevance? What if, from right now, everything you thought you knew about Black Ops 2 was wrong?

Black Ops 2 follows on from the first game - where the player followed the slightly confusing story of US Special Forces soldier Alex Mason, a man of many talents and many accents. Black Ops had twists and turns and was a legitimately good attempt to tell a Cold War thriller - though I'll admit it certainly got confusing towards the end.

In Black Ops 2 we fill the shoes of David Mason - though we have flashbacks from Alex's point of view. David, who followed in his father's footsteps (but manages his "Ausmerican" accent better) is knee-deep in another plot against America - though this one is a little easier to follow than in the first game.

The year is 2025 and a second Cold War exists as China and the United States subtly fight it out to control Rare Earth Elements - a group of minerals that are exactly as described in their name (rare, earthy and elemental.) Meanwhile, Frank Woods - Alex's gruff friend from the first game - has a visit from a known terrorist and things begin to take a very personal turn for the worse.

Black Ops 2 flits between the 1980s and the year 2025 to tell the story of both Mason's, but to be frank I found the 1980s missions to be a real drag. It has nothing to do with the fact that the 80s weren't an interesting time for international espionage - far from it - and probably everything to do with the fact that the year 2025 is just a lot more fun to be involved with.

This really hits home when you hit the man-made floating island - Colossus - a massive structure built as a resort for the super-rich. This is probably the first time you see Treyarch flex its narrative muscle to imagine a future outside of warfare, and it's a thoroughly interesting place to be.

Still, the “Whatever happened to Alex Mason?” nature of the 80s story makes it must-play for fans of the first game - which means that in essence Black Ops 2 is a twofer, closing out one story and perhaps starting a second. The Masons have a difficult relationship too, and while the game attempts to tell that story (amongst the two threads it already has going) it never really goes as deep as I would have liked.

The story is good, if perhaps just a tad underdone, but it isn't the star of this game. In Black Ops 2, the actual... game... is the star. And when I say the game, I mean the bits where you're interacting with your controller. In Black Ops 2, you impact the actual game in more ways than just how many people you shoot.

Let's temper that excitement for a second, because you're not suddenly playing Alpha Protocol. If each level of previous COD games was a corridor (or a hallway, as we might say) then BLOPS 2 levels have the architecture of the Taj Mahal. Most levels are wide, and they feature multiple paths to the end - paths you might not be able to open if you don't equip the necessary perk before the level begins.

This runs into the way that actions in the game have consequences. This is different to the way Mass Effect (for example) handles player decisions - where in ME3 the player might stop to choose between the good guy choice or the d-bag choice, Blops 2 lets the player act and then informs them of the consequences later.

In some cases this means that the player does something which results in another person getting burned - a simple cosmetic change - but there are a number of situations in the game where acting (or failing to act) will result in a meaningful difference to the way the game plays out.

There are a few binary choices as well - do you perform action A or action B - but the fact that these choices bleed into simply playing the game means that as a player you continuously question what you've done through each level.

Interestingly, it also means that you don't necessarily play Blops 2 the way you played previous COD games - running for the end is not always the best option - and it means that if the curiosity to know is there, you might wind up playing through the campaign many, many times.

This also carries across to the new Strike Force missions. Completely optional, the Strike Force missions put you in the shoes of nameless special forces soldiers commanded by David Mason to complete various objectives. The successful completion of these objectives will alter the way the game plays out - and depending on your actions in the main campaign, certain Strike Force missions might not ever open themselves up to you.

Essentially, where previously you'd zip down a waterslide, in Black Ops 2 you have a water park to play with.

This is a benchmark moment for the Call of Duty series. It's growth for the series in a very real way, and while it's a positive move it's not without growing pains. Some of your choices wind up being cosmetic only, and they all ultimately appear to boil down to only a few different endings. The story can be very difficult to follow as well - it jumps around quite a bit, and characters outside of the key four or five can occasionally blend together in a way which is almost indecipherable.

Multiplayer in Black Ops 2 will be another initial shock to the system of Call of Duty fans, thanks to its many points of difference - but ultimately I think players will quickly find their feet with it.

The first big shock will be the Pick 10 system - a new loadout feature which lets someone assign their points the way they might a Warhammer army. Your main gun, its attachments, your perks and grenades are all worth a point, and you're free to assign those points as you'd like. On top of these you have 'Wildcards' - modifiers which let you add an extra set of perks or equip a second primary gun.



Don't want grenades? Don't take them - take an extra attachment on your gun instead! Want an extra perk 1? Drop your flashbangs, grab the appropriate Wildcard and treat yourself to double the perks.

Early on though, most people wind up just recreating loadouts that worked for them in previous games. I found the P90 (now called the PDW), threw on Rapid Fire, a Red Dot Sight and a Silencer (after adding the 3rd attachment Wildcard), kitted myself with Perks that made me as invisible as possible and then I went to work.

It wasn't until I'd unlocked almost everything that I began to experiment - it just seems like an inefficient way to spend my time in a game which is ultimately a race to have the most power. When trying out different combos though, the power of Pick 10 starts to present itself. You can deck yourself out for specific scenarios in a way you couldn't previously in a COD game, and while it might take a bit of screwing around in menus, your loadouts for Domination might not be the same as your loadouts for Hardpoint.

Hardpoint, while we're at it, is another attempt by the Call of Duty caretakers to drive players away from Team Deathmatch - the shittiest game mode in all of video games. It's just a fancy name for King of the Hill, but when combined with the new Scorestreak system it makes the aimless running about of TDM look truly silly.

This is because the Scorestreak rewards your score, not your kills, so actively helping your team to victory is a much quicker way to get that gunship. Attacking the hardpoint is worth 1.25 kills instead of 1. Defending it is worth 1.5. This sort of stuff encourages players to actively work towards their team's goals without actually sitting them down and saying "Stop acting like a dickhead, if you want to kill **** just go play FFA with all the other slow kids."

Treyarch also kept Kill Confirmed in the game - Modern Warfare 3's attempt to fix the 'me me me' problem of COD multiplayer - and with these two modes available you have more than enough choice when it comes to team focused multiplayer.

Still, I feel they didn't go far enough - they didn't actually remove Team Deathmatch from the game. By leaving that abysmal excuse for a game mode in the game, players will still just go with what they know - and instead the players who want something more will now be split between two modes.

Between Scorestreaks and Pick 10, Black Ops 2 does plenty to change multiplayer, but Treyarch aren't finished there. They also included in-built League Play - similar to StarCraft 2's ladder system. You can create a team - your four player clan - or you can simply head in solo (to be paired up at random with people of a similar skill set.) I found it odd that League Play offered no capacity for substitutions in your team set - if one person drops out for a game and you replace him or her, you start a brand new team (and have to go through placement matches all over again.)

They also threw Codcasting into the mix - a portmanteau of COD and Podcasting that means exactly what it sounds like. You now have all the tools you need to stream (via Youtube), commentate and spectate on a multiplayer game of Call of Duty right in the box - and you can stream live games or recorded games.

Then there's Zombies. Treyarch's traditional addition to Call of Duty returns better than ever in Black Ops 2 thanks to Tranzit mode - a massive mode which lets the player move from location to location as they struggle to not die horrible, horrible deaths. Like a typical game of zombies (an undead variant on Horde mode, for the uninitiated) the players start off in a claustrophobic room as zombies attack. Here though, they're able to jump on a bus driven by the cousin of Johnny Cab to drive to a different location.

The thing is - Zombies is a four player coop mode, but the bus will take off about 10 seconds after the first person gets on - whether everyone is on or not. Instead of dying though, players not on the bus simply continue to fight it out - though now they lack the help of their teammates. This makes catching a bus a tactical decision - because if not everyone gets on, the whole team will ultimately die.

The bus stops vary in worth greatly, which means the decision to get off the bus is one of trial and error - but the hectic scramble to save a downed teammate is part of the fun of zombies, so regardless of whether you succeed or fail you're usually having fun. Zombies isn't the sort of mode you play with strangers, so when you and all your friends die you shrug your shoulders, swig some beer and start over - there's no real loss.

This is the biggest movement in any direction we've seen from a Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare - but unlike Infinity Ward's game changer, Black Ops 2 lacks a little in both the polish and conviction areas. It's going to be hard to go back to the same corridor shooters after Black Ops 2 - and it's going to be harder still for someone to convince me to play generic Team Deathmatch - but the game still feels like it falls short in some areas.

Meanwhile the single player encourages the player to champion their own destiny, but it seems content to remain mostly cosmetic in the things it changes. It's also quite apparent that this is the team's first attempt to work with branching storylines, because there are some logical inconsistencies that limit the overall intellect of what is otherwise a solid techno-thriller.

With Kill Confirmed and Hardpoint the multiplayer has the tools to once-and-for-all get rid of the cancer of online multiplayer - Team Deathmatch - and yet there it remains at the top of the list. Why bother continuing to drag players kicking and screaming into playing together as a team if you're then going to give them the tools to ignore it? You can't affect real change and still pander to the lowest common denominator.

If the next Call of Duty doesn't do certain things - doesn't remind us about teamwork in multiplayer, doesn't let us shape the story ourselves - then I'm going to struggle to see the point in playing. Black Ops 2 takes the Call of Duty series beyond the point of no return, and there is no going back. Seeing how the COD series shapes the games around it, while Black Ops 2 might not be as grand a step as I'd like, it's still a leap in the right direction.

With three helpings of game in one, Treyarch once again dumps as much game as possible in your lap - it's just not as tight an experience as we've come to expect from Call of Duty.

P.S. - The after-the-credits stinger is an abysmal way to end your super serious techno-thriller-action game, Treyarch.


GameArena travelled to California courtesy of Activision to review Call of Duty Black Ops 2.