Xbox Games

Call of Duty: Black Ops is a first-person shooter with stealth and tactical play aspect that puts players in the role of a shadow soldier fighting in a assortment of with respect to history representative fictional Black Ops missions of the Cold War era. Created with the input of actual Black Ops soldiers from the time, the game mixes established Call of Duty tactical shooter gameplay with new gameplay choices designed to exaggerate the players’ experience. Additional features include broad multiplayer options, along with new vehicles and explosive new weapons. .caption { font-family: Verdana, Helvetica neue, Arial, serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; } ul.indent { list-style: inside disc; text-indent: -15px; } table.callout { font-family: verdana; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1. 3em; } td.vgoverview { height: 125px; background: #9DC4D8 url(http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page/callout-bg.png) repeat-x; border-left: 1px solid #999999; border-right: 1px solid #999999; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; padding-bottom: 10px; width: 250px; font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px; }

Putting Out the Hotspots of the Cold War
Follow-up to 2009’s blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops breaks new ground in the Call of Duty series and the video game industry at huge by delving into the not-so cold conflicts of the Cold War.

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Most helpful client reviews

575 of 744 people found the following review helpful.
COD Must Evolve
By 3V0LVE
Great production value does not make a outstanding game.
I’ll get started with the good things. COD:Black Ops graphics are on-par with any top-shelf title and it has an fantastically smooth feel. The game is reported to run at 60 frames per second and it feels very high def. The voice acting is good, and distinctly the production value and syndication budgets are both very high. However, graphics, and hype do not make a good game. Gameplay and immersion do. Here’s why COD:Black Ops Fails utterly.

116 of 150 humans found the following review helpful.
An Unfortunate Step Back
By reedissleeping
I had never been a fan of the franchise, preferring to do my shooting in the more Arcady Half-Life engine, Halo, Fear etc…

Then I played Modern Warfare, and loved it. You felt free to act. On veteran, the game was challenging. The worlds were large, and the oppositions didn’t re-spawn to infinity. This permitted you to genuinely be originative in your strategy, rather of tunneling. You could fall back, flank, snipe, or rush. Level design facilitated all schemes and the AI responded. Some levels set up better for dissimilar strategies, but the important thing is that it felt organic. When players died, they felt they could do something different–that they had control.

A majority of the positive reviews for this game focus on it is a lot of improvements over other Treyarch offerings, and hey are right to do so. The graphics, story, voice acting, and music are a step up (from COD:WaW), as well as the addition of a great deal of “cool moments,” and extras like Zombies. However, there are severe troubles that get brushed over. I feel like multi-player issues have been covered. So this review will tackle single player.

While game-play seems liquid on having little impact difficulties,fundamental difficultnesses express themselves at the more difficult settings. My play through on Veteran got boring fast for the most part due to the fact that Treyarch uses infinite enemy spawns to recompense for poor, predictable level design and unacceptably bad AI. Eventually you realize that besides a few “cool” roller-coaster moments type moments–fun but there’s only one track, most of the game comprises of a long corridor or an enclosed “box” with predictably placed pieces of cover. Even even though there are things going on outside the “box” and the graphics seemingly connect them (see the trenches in the Vietnam level), you cannot interact with them. Visually it is a huge world; in exercise it’s claustrophobic. Enemies advance mindlessly in single file from the most distant cover to your position, in the long run charging recklessly from the last piece of cover. To “kill” them you need to toss smoke grenades, sprint past a lot of imaginative line, and hunker down. If you get unlucky and the RNG pops off a couple head shots, prepare to live the last 5 minutes of your life over and over again.

Lets be frank–in the early versions of COD, this was a requirement because of inherent technical limitations. The “box” existed because huge interactional environments weren’t possible. The endless spawns were necessitated because AI was terrible. It was necessary to have smoke grenades because these other compensations made sure configurations of oppositions and cover frustrating. Purists might say “This is Call of Duty,” but how a good deal of other games get a free pass when refusing to innovate from their predecessors?

Halo got a lot of crap for repeated area designs, but at least there were multiple ways to attack each situation. As Bungie put it, it was the same “moment of fun” over and over again. Black Ops is the same moment of predictable irritation over and over. Instead of forcing you to gravely think, death in Black-Ops feels like you just got unlucky playing the precise same fundamental interaction over and over again in the only way possible to play it. Theres not one thing to do differently–just rush in front and cross your fingers again. You are bound to get unlucky and die–even doing the right thing. When you do, unpredictable load points reward you with the with the same set of identical interactions and identical solutions. And then suddenly, when things work out, the gratification isn’t there. You did not one thing different. If the definition of madness is “doing the same thing and expecting a dissimilar result,” then I guess I was crazy the whole time I played.

Aiming is likewise problematic. I grasp that real guns kick, but when you have an enemy completely filing my sights and the recoil from the last shot makes you miss anyway, you don’t feel a sense of reward for aiming and you surely don’t feel a sense of realism; you feel a developer attempting to recompense for poor difficultness balancing.

“Throw smoke and run into it” seems like a poor mechanic after a while. In the Infinity Ward games you throw smoke to get a tactical advantage, get away, or provide temporary cover to move to a new position. In Treyarch games, you do it because it is the best way to stop infinite spawns. The former feels immersive, the latter feels like band-aid for poor game design.

It seems like Treyarch, in a misguided undertake to distinguish themselves from Infinity Ward and to give long time COD fans precisely what they’ve played over and over, actually refuses to let the series mature into a dynamic, creative, and frankly more fun experience.

Yes, it is challenging on veteran with high infinite spawn rates. It’s challenging that the only solution is to press forward into oncoming fire. But it was also boring and I’d like my cash back.

The bottom line is: if you want to romp through the game one lower difficultnesses or like the Multi-player, give it a shot. It looks good, and is entertaining. I enjoyed the voice acting and the story. If, however, you play through shooters at max difficultness and prefer to get your multi-player in MW2 or the new Halo offering, rent it or wait for better pricing.

6 of 6 humans found the following review helpful.
Stopped playing it after 1 month…Back to COD MW
By D. Maul
90% of my game play is multiplayer on Xbox Live so my review is based mainly off of the online experience.

Cons
-Horrible spawning spots, killed galore times 1-2 seconds after re-spawning, makes me want to quit the game.
-Lag and poor connections (may be portion Xbox Live at fault).
-Poor sound quality (Modern Warfare 1 and 2 are much better for sound). Surround sound is very weak, bass is horrible, sound to actual player emplacement is very innacurate.
-Graphics are OK.
-Player motion is poor as a heap of times my hits and shots do not register on the enemy player (as witnessed in the replay). I may shoot and hit a player 2 or 3 times and it does not register at all, but I am killed instatly. Yes I am reading it right, no I am not complaining when it comes to players, it is the game.
-Weapons are cheap sounding and are very weak. This is a major flaw in the fun factor. I can’t get into the game when it feels like I am shooting a BB gun but am keeping an M16 or Commando. Grenades sound like fire crackers.

Pros
-Very intracate maps a large total of detail and some are rather large.
-Lots of customization of your charictor (face paint, gun camo, etc…)
-Matches are made quickly, not a lot of waiting amidst games.

Overall I gave this game 2 stars because I played it for 1 month from the date of release before putting back in the box and haven’t touched it since. It is not a fun game and it was hyped up way too much and it has not genuinely made the online game play any better but in fact it is worse than the Modern Warefare games. Black ops will have to be Black Listed as will have to Treyarch. Bring back Infinity Ward and the developments made by Infinity Ward in the Modern Warfare Saga.

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