Call of Duty: Black Ops (Xbox 360)

Following the well publicised fallout between Activision and Infinity Ward earlier this year, it’s no surprise that developers Treyarch were signed up to produce Black Ops - the latest chapter in the CoD franchise. Treyarch have received decent enough reviews for the work on CoD 3, Big Red One and World at War, but critics have often accused them of playing safe and not delivering anything new. Black Ops looks set to smash those criticisms once and for all.

The CoD series is perhaps best known for the depth and variety of its multiplayer modes, but I rarely play online so I’m not in a position to judge those - I’ll leave that to someone else. Instead we’ll look at the single player campaign and the new Zombie mode. As with Modern Warfare 2, you’ll have finished the campaign in 7-8 hours in the toughest mode, but that doesn’t mean to say it’s a poor effort - far from it.

Black Ops doesn’t follow the kind of level progression we’re used to from CoD single player games - instead you’ll find yourself playing through a series of situations from the Kennedy era in US politics, which take place across the globe… and all inside the main character’s head. This has to be the first game where your character, Alex Mason, spends all but one of the levels strapped to an interrogation chair. The scenarios are played out as part of an attempt by unseen interrogators to delve into Mason’s mind in order to uncover information that he swears he doesn’t know. Through the course of the game you’ll take part in the Bay of Pigs incident, storm a wrecked cargo ship, take a Hind helicopter on an explosive trip along a Vietnamese waterway and fight your way out of a Russian gulag - plenty of variety of the high impact kind. What starts as a fairly straightforward series of top secret undercover operations behind enemy lines rapidly turns into something far more sinister..

The three things that make CoD titles so special are cinematic action, tight controls, and immersive feedback, and on these counts Black Ops absolutely blows away the competition. The controls have an absolutely perfect sense of weight, precision and smooth operation, and the recoil of the weapons and subtle use of pad vibration complement the action perfectly. The simplicity of the control scheme is also welcome, as it cuts out the fiddly stuff in favour of a fast action-based setup - you can’t lean and there’s no cover mechanism, but it’s the same for everyone so stop moaning and start shooting!

The action aspect is Black Ops’ ace card, as each level provides a short, yet adrenaline soaked experience; this may be through the need to escape a building wired with explosives, a frantic ride as a gunner on board a jeep, or a tense crawl through the Vietcong tunnel network, but each will have you on the edge of your seat. The scripting and pacing are brilliant, ensuring that you’re never more than a couple of minutes away from the next big action moment, and for the first time a CoD game genuinely captures the sense of chaos in a no-hold-barred combat situation. There are times when you’re almost overwhelmed by the intensity of the surroundings and will be shot simply because your brain freezes in trying to work out what to do next. You’ll hit a few sticky moments when it’s not actually clear what you have to do next, but these usually resolve themselves if you head towards the next waypoint. One thing to note is that the game is 18 rated, and deserves to be - Black Ops squad members often have to take people out quietly, and their silent kills are extremely graphic on screen. There’s also a substantial bodycount and weapons have the ability to maim as well as kill outright, so the game pulls no visual punches. The graphics, as you would expect, are beautifully detailed with some of the best character modelling yet and still manage to belt along at 60fps for an extremely immersive experience.

Taking so many elements and situations and attempting to blend them into a cohesive campaign isn’t easy, as the poor single player mode in Medal of Honor demonstrates, but Treyarch have absolutely nailed it; the presentation is top notch, the cut scenes are perfectly judged, and the voice acting (from the likes of Gary Oldman, Ed Harris and Ice Cube) is spot-on. You’ll emerge from the other end of the campaign feeling exhausted but triumphant, with the sense that you’ve battled for much longer than just a few hours. If you want you can then go back and score extra achievements for collecting intel and completing sub challenges on each level, as well as completing levels on harder difficulty settings.

There is a warning here - Veteran mode in MW2 wasn’t particularly hard, but Treyarch have fallen into the same trap they did with CoD3 and gone too far in the other direction. Veteran mode isn't hard because of the severity of damage, or the accuracy of the enemy AI - it's hard because it plays cheap (and sometimes impossible) tricks, turns your team-mates into a bunch of muppets, and saves restart points in places likely to get you immediately killed. I spent an hour trying to navigate a single stretch of corridor before giving up in frustration, especially when an enemy soldier would run across in front of me, yet somehow deliver a fatal headshot with only the tip of his gun sticking out of a doorway. Apparently in Treyarch-world, soldier are psychic, can see through walls, and don't have to be aiming at you to hit you.

If we were to highlight a few other negative points they’d be exactly what you’d expect – the AI can be as dumb as a bag of rocks when it comes to tactics, the restart points can sometimes dump you in the middle of a firefight and there are times when the enemies will keep spawning until you work out what you need to do next. Oddly enough there doesn’t seem to be any way to drop just one of a pair of dual wielded weapons so you can aim properly with the other, so those end up being fairly useless. You might also struggle to follow the story unless you’re on the ball, and the low volume of speech in the cutscenes compared to the high volume of the action sequences might have you reaching for the volume a few times too many. Overall though these are trivial, and easy to look past.

Ah, nearly forgot – the Zombies mode. Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, Robert MacNamara and Fidel Castro, locked in the Pentagon, being attacked by waves of zombies and having to rebuild the barriers and defences between waves. If you can cope with the surreal nature of that situation you’ll love it, especially for the brilliant voice acting and one-liners. Just go with it. You can also fight through alternative maps, and there's a secret top-down shooter just to round things off - search youtube for 'deap ops arcade' for details of how to unlock it.

In summary Black Ops is not only a fantastic action game in its own right, but proves beyond a doubt that Treyarch are capable of out-manouevering Infinity Ward when they put their minds to it. If they could produce a title with this amount of action and the same length of campaign as CoD 2, they’d have the game world sewn up.

9/10