The Plot. This game follows the memories of a member of a special operations team. Five years before the time of the game, you, Mason, were imprisoned in Vorkuta, a soviet prison camp. At present you are in an interrogation room and someone is asking you a lot of questions about your past and some weird numbers that you hear in your head. Basically every game level is a memory of Mason, some of them as seen by his CIA handler Hudson.
General thoughts. This is the third installment in the Call of Duty series not made by Infinity Ward. Treyarch has previously developed Call of Duty 3, which was a complete failure, and Call of Duty: World at War, which was not a complete failure, but was quite bad. This installment left me confused. I'm not sure if this game is good or bad. It did have problems, but it also had a lot of really interesting approaches to the way the story is told.
First of all, this is a cinematic shooter and as with all shooters of this kind, the most important thing for the game is to keep the player interested in everything that is going on around them. This is the part which Treyarch doesn't do very well. There were times when I felt boredom from the continuous slaughter of enemy forces with nothing much going on besides that and that never happens with the Call of Duty installments done by Infinity Ward. This, however, is not that big of a deal, since Black Ops had a lot of really cool cinematic spots.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is set in the cold war era, around the '60-s. The US is in a conflict with the soviet and there are also some problems in Cuba. True, there are not a lot of games from that era. Not as much as from the World War Two, at least. Although, Treyarch still managed to sneak some WWII into the game. It would seem that Treyarch doesn't know how sick we, gamers, are of WWII games, all of them about killing Germans with their high-pitch identical voices. Infinity Ward has understood this, hence Modern Warfare. It's time to move on. I myself enjoy modern weaponry and tactics.
One of the things that Treyarch did really well is the main menu. I have not seen a main menu this interactive for a long time. You basically sit, tied to a chair with screens all around you, with some dude asking weird questions and one of the screens has the menu choices, which can be controlled using your keyboard. At the same time you can look around the room. This is also the place where the story starts. At that very same chair. You don't know why you're there or who are the people who are interrogating you.
This game, as every proper cinematic game should have, has a lot of cinematic elements. You get to fly a helicopter, ride a motorcycle, drive a boat and even Almost fly a really cool military airplane. There is some skydiving, some rappelling down a mountain. I like how instead of just sitting in a chopper and letting your pilot do all the flying you actually get to take control and fly around the place. This is made very easy and arcade-like so you don't have to worry about the height of your chopper while you're mid-battle with an enemy chopper. This is a good thing. After all, this is not a flight sim and is supposed to be fun, which it is. There are also loads of little quick-time events of which none are actually difficult, but let you feel that you're really in the plot doing things and stuff depends on you somewhat.
A very serious place where this game is lacking is the gameflow. Not all the time, but at some points it could be a lot better. Sometimes you are given a task of some sort, you start doing it, but since nobody actually tells you how to do this, you end up dead. You get it the second time around, but then the flow will already be broken. For example, there was this bit where you had to climb a wing of a wrecked airplane. You are told to be really careful, but at one point the wing shifts a little bit and if you're on the wrong side of the wing, you slip off and die. This would have been a cool quick-time event instead, if the character would cling to the wing and somebody came to rescue him.
A thing that Treyarch did completely different in this game from all the previous Call of Duty games was that the first person character never actually spoke himself. If you're the main character and you're suddenly really chatty, it sortof loosens the grip on the credibility of the situation. This is the reason why Ramirez never talked back to the commanding officer that was ordering him to do unreal things in Modern Warfare 2. It was credible. The only person whining about it was the player in front of the screen. This brings me to another point. Black Ops didn't have much of the 'Player Do This-and-That While Everybody Else Stands Around Waiting For You To Loot The Place'. Sure you were told to shoot down a couple of choppers or tanks every once in a while, but there were a lot of things the AI could handle on it's own. Alas, fighting is not one of these things. The AI in Call of Duty: Black Ops, while very chatty, is not exactly useful in battle. Most of the time they're just hiding behind cover waiting for you to push on. Taking point is nice, but shooting all of the enemies on your own without any cover from your pals is not.
This installment, if compared to previous ones, seemed to be a lot longer. I'm not sure if I just got tired of it faster, but it felt like it was a lot longer. I'd say instead of the usual 5-6, Black Ops went on for about 7-8 hours. This is good, because this type of games are usually shamefully short. I understand, that every level involves a tremendous amount of work because of the cinematics, but 5-6 hours is not enough.
While most of the game reminds of all previous Call of Duty games, when it comes to style, this one had a weird feel about it. I can't really put my finger on it, but something didn't feel right. The main thing that was bothering me was the way the controls felt. I don't know why and I don't know if this might have been caused by my local settings, but this has never been a problem with previous CoD games. The aiming and shooting just felt very bulky and inaccurate. There are games where it's best to use iron sights and there are some where optics have the best feel, usually depending on the distance of the enemies, but this game didn't seem to be playable using optics. It wasn't too bad with snipers, but the ACOG sights just didn't feel right.
Another thing that seriously bothered me was the loading screen. It had flashes of information of all sorts and as Call of Duty games always have, the mission information is played out on the loading screen. However, Treyarch decided that it was a good idea to remove the loading bar from the loading screen. What this means is that if your system isn't top-notch, you'll end up looking at a blank screen for a while after the loading screen runs out of information to show you and until the mission begins. There is no way of telling if your system crashed or is it still loading.
The other thing I need to whine about is the saving system. At one point I had to leave and did a save&exit in the middle of the mission. When I came back, instead of resuming the mission where I left it, I had to start the mission over from the start. The autosave-resume thing seems to be a bug, because it worked a couple of times. Hopefully they'll fix it.
All in all, this installment of Call of Duty is much better than the two previously made by Treyarch, but it still doesn't measure up to Infinity Ward's thoroughness when it comes to cinematic shooters. I don't know, maybe more beta-testing with a lot of player feedback would help. In any case, this was not a bad game. It had a lot of really cool moments and it was generally a fun game.
The game had some really cool touches, like playing CCR's Fortunate Son in a Vietnam mission, which felt excellent, or Sympathy For The Devil by the Rolling Stones in the middle of a boating mission. Playing music that comes from that era worked really well with the atmosphere and I wish this type of thing will be used again. It also had Ice Cube as a very surprising voice actor. The character looked like him, too.
I would recommend trying this installment for every Call of Duty fan. This one really shows that Treyarch is getting better at this. This should also be played by any shooter fan, since it's on it's own a good shooter. I didn't like it in the beginning, since the storyline was weird and confusing (it even had a memory in a memory, Inception, anybody?), but towards the end, it grew on me. I don't feel sorry about trying this.
7/10 Flogs
No comments:
Post a Comment