A lot of critics say that Call of Duty has become tired and is past its prime, especially in light of new competition from Battlefield 6 this year. But having played most of what Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has to offer at a review event, I would say this: Not today.
In fact, on this launch day for Black Ops 7, it’s wishful thinking to suggest that Microsoft, which owns Activision Blizzard (and mostly bought it to acquire Call of Duty for $68.7 billion in 2023), which in turn owns Call of Duty creator Activision, would allow this franchise to go to waste. Call of Duty isn’t going to lie down and let Battlefield take the, um, first-person shooter battlefield.
Like any year, there are pluses and minuses to this Call of Duty. It doesn’t have the massive battles, rumbling tanks or soaring jets like Battlefield. It doesn’t have the realism and cinematic effects either. But you can’t beat Call of Duty when it comes to the quality of the campaign storytelling, the atmospheric horror of Zombies and the arena-style modern gladiatorial combat of multiplayer.
Given these differences, I think it’s quite possible that fans are going to play both Call of Duty and Battlefield, with the competition between the games pushing the titles to new heights. That’s good for gamers and gaming, as Call of Duty generates $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year in revenues and Battlefield 6, which came out October 10, is well on its way to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
The big advantages of this year’s game is that it continues a story from last year’s Black Ops 6 that is still fresh in the minds of players. It also taps the big themes of Black Ops, which revolve around secret government weapons and espionage that make you paranoid; drug-induced brainwashing, or, in this case, computer-induced hallucinations that enable the game’s artists to go wild; and a squad of operatives who have to fight against the odds and often their own government’s agencies to save the world.
While those themes are familiar, the setting is very different, with a sci-fi feel that comes being set in the year 2035. Also, the developers are introducing co-op play of one to three players for the campaign, going beyond a single-player experience for the campaign for the first time.
Multiplayer has 18 maps at the outset, with more coming with every new season. In fact, the battle-royale oriented Blackout mode will return as part of the Avalon map in the second season early next year. Numerous reports suggest that Avalon, with its high-tech landscape and open fields, is such a big map it will likely be one of the Warzone maps.
The open world Avalon map will also be the setting for Endgame, which represents a crossover between the end of the co-op campaign and the start of multiplayer play.
It is a massive game, and that’s reminder that 10 studios worked on the game, with staff reaching into the thousands. They include Treyarch, Raven, High Moon, Beenox, Activision Shanghai Studio, Sledgehammer Games, Infinity Ward, Demonware, Digital Legends and
Activision Central Tech.
I had about 2.5 days to sample everything in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. We played most of the 18 launch maps, as well as three-player Zombies co-op and three-player campaign co-op. We tried out multiplayer, including the Skirmish modes of 20 v 20 and the arcade game Dead Ops Arcade 4. I was on a team of veterans for Zombies and so we made it through a whole experience more than once. The team believes this is the way for Call of Duty to deliver the highest value to consumers. The standard edition will cost $70 — a price that has been static since 2020 — and basically match the cost of Battlefield 6.
A wacky story that beats Battlefield 6
The co-op campaign has a better story than Battlefield 6 had, with more interesting characters. You can play the game as a solo character, or you can play it with up to three human players at once. Sadly, Battlefield 6 didn’t really put enough effort into its relatively short campaign. And so it was easy for Call of Duty to beat it on story.
At first, it seems odd that there are only three human players in co-op and yet there are four main characters in the campaign. Asked about this, Treyarch’s design director Matt Scronce told me that three players felt right from a gameplay point of view. It’s good to know that the team didn’t require four humans to match the four story characters. Gameplay rules.
And yet the campaign starts out by evoking the memory of Raul Menendez, a cartel leader who led a global uprising in Black Ops 2, which came out as a game back in 2012. The Black Ops events are triggered by the U.S. invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, with the formation of secret teams who perform off-the-books missions.
Alex Mason was one of those sent to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1961, but the attempt failed, he was captured, and sent to a Soviet prison. There, he was brainwashed, broke out, and proceeded unknowingly to carry out hidden missions within his secret Black Ops agenda. He’s an unwitting sleeper agent.
This triggers a clandestine war to brainwash agents, get them to betray their leaders, and carry out assassinations. Angered by the fallout of these missions that led to death of his sister, Menendez is one of the most memorable villains in Call of Duty history. In Black Ops 2, he triggers a war between the U.S. and China set in 2025.
Now Menendez’s populist crusade has been revived by a tech conglomerate, The Guild, which has its own motivations. The Guild built a private military corporation based on AI-based robots, cyberattacks and human armies. It also has a secret brainwashing toxin called The Cradle.
Led by Emma Kagan, The Guild has gone rogue and experimented with tech that induces mass hysteria and hallucinations — triggering combat in crazy situations where gigantic machetes fall from the sky.
The story threads are woven well. There’s a scene that blends Zombies, a prison escape from the original Black Ops and the present-day mission of JSOC. There are also
David “Section” Mason, the son of former Black Ops operative Alex Mason, leads the JSOC forces to investigate The Guild and uncover the shadow forces. As the player, your job is to dismantle the Guild’s operations in a covert war and lead the squad — which is caught in a crazy dream state where they don’t know what’s real — back to sanity.
Much like Far Cry, Black Ops 7 uses the hallucinations to create some of the weirdest backdrops ever for boots-on-the-ground combat. It’s a continuation of last year’s Black Ops 6, which used the same hallucinatory backdrop to combine Zombies and the campaign. While Kagan herself wasn’t much of a villain, I liked all of the wacky pressure and combat stress she brought down on the squad of heroes. She’s a master of psychological warfare and perception-altering toxins and more.
As an adversary, she manipulates David Mason through the memories of his father, and she tries to pit squads and their members against each other. The story takes us through themes of the dangers of unchecked AI, surveillance and corporate armies.
The missions
The game has 11 core missions that blend cinematic cutscenes with tactical squad-based combat. In the 12th mission, Endgame, you unlock the city of Avalon, the Guild’s headquarters in an open-world setting.
In co-op, the combat is better. The more human players, the more resistance the game throws at you in terms of difficult enemies to overcome.
At the same time, the co-op mode gives you more tactical options, like using a three-player team to pin down and outflank enemies. For instance, I played pretty crazy and aggressive with my character, knowing my Treyarch comrades were going to revive me. I used the grappling hook and exoskeleton jump to advance to the rear of enemies facing us.
Sometimes you face bosses that are difficult to defeat. Examples include the zombie bear Zursa in Zombies, or a skilled sniper who can move instantly from position to position, or Kagan, the tech-savvy CEO of The Guild, the private military corporation that is trying to take over the world.
The missions break down into multiple types. There are those where you fight through big infantry and robot forces. There are those where you operate in stealth. There are some where coming up with tech solutions such as hacking puzzles matters. There’s the dreamstate missions where you’re not sure what’s real but you really have to kill the Zombies, known as Fears in the dreamstate. And there are missions where you go up against various bosses or subbosses.
Another cool part of the missions is that they take you to so many different places in the world. Call of Duty is always a kind of travelogue, and this one is no different.
One of the interesting twists is that the Skyline multiplayer map from Black Ops 6 — one of my favorites from a year ago — is part of the setting in one of the missions of the Black Ops 7 co-op campaign.
We also revisit the highway battle in Los Angeles from Black Ops 2, as well as the yacht multiplayer map from Black Ops 2, Hijacked, in the co-op campaign. This serves to draw connections for players and get them more immersed in the lore behind the game.
Breakpoint, which is set in Avalon and a soccer stadium, has a massive firefight with with imaginary enemies in close quarters. There also firefights with bosses who are bullet sponges and can relocate in an instant. Fortunately, you have armor too.
Containment also has huge firefights inside the narrow corridors and open spaces of an underwater station deep within the ocean.
Inspiration for multiplayer
I’ve always thought that the single-player campaign provides more motivation for me to play multiplayer, infusing it with meaning. In this case, the co-op campaign ends with an Endgame mission on the open world map of Avalon that represents the beginning of multiplayer. There are also operators from multiplayer who appear in the campaign. This campaign fulfills that mission and does more as well.
What I like about the mixture of realistic fighting and insane dreamstates is that the team pulls itself together by making sure it protects the members of its squad. No matter how insane the hallucinations, they stick together.
In Endgame, your co-op teams goes raiding through the open world in a player-versus-environment zone where up to 32 players can play. There are bosses to fight and wide-open fields where you can make use of your wingsuit, exoskeleton jump or grappling hook. I think this mission — as well as co-op play — helps with the goal of transitioning a player from single-player to multiplayer with grace.
Drawbacks
One of the negatives of the combat in co-op mode is that you can’t really ratchet up the difficulty. Rather than try to create a difficulty mode for each human player, the devs decided to make everyone play at the same difficulty level. But for me, after a while, the enemies got to be too dumb and so I started running circles around them and exposing myself to fire in ways I would never do in multiplayer.
The devs dealt with the higher mobility of the human players by making hordes of enemies swarm you. They also turned their enemies into bullet sponges, and they can flash to new locations in an instant. I wished there were lethal enemies who moved really fast as well and moved like real people would do in similar situations.
Like Battlefield 6 in its campaign, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 suffers from having somewhat dumb bots (I hope that we’ll get smarter bots thanks to AI advances in the future). They aren’t very fast in reacting to movement and they sit still hiding in cover a lot. But Call of Duty makes up for that by having tons of enemies as well as bullet sponges.
Kagan is a pretty dastardly villain, but she is relatively easy to overcome once you strip away all of her tech gear and psych tricks. The final victory made me wishing that there was something more like a final boss to defeat.
Conclusion
I think a lot of people wrote Black Ops 7 as a weak year for Call of Duty. But I stand amazed at how much content is in this game. They didn’t skimp on the campaign the way that Battlefield did, and the game has a huge amount of content at launch when you consider the 18 multiplayer maps with changes in matchmaking, new kinds of weapons, a big round-based Zombies experience, the co-op campaign, Dead Ops Arcade 4 and the Endgame that takes players into Avalon, which I presume will be the site of future battlegrounds.
I wish the enemies had much better AI, and I look forward to the day when they can react on the fly and make the gameplay much more dynamic. I don’t expect to see that real soon, but it’s clear that human multiplayer combat is so much more of a live chess game than single-player combat is against bots.
I rate the co-op game at four stars out of five, and I give the overall game the same rating, as I also rated multiplayer at four out of five. While this may seem rather stingy, it’s the same rating I gave to Battlefield. And there is at least one other game that, maybe more, that I’ve rated at five out of five stars this year.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to Treyarch for the purposes of writing Black Ops 7 stories. I played the game at Treyarch on a PC.