Game Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

It's only been 2 days since the release of Black Ops 2 and messages have been pouring in for a review, so here it is just for you guys, buckle up because this may be an unpleasant ride.

Black Ops 2 is a direct continuation of the story from the first Black Ops, yes it looks like its in the future but you actually play as Alex Mason from the first game right after the end of the last game and you also play as his son David Mason for the future missions. It's pretty clever how they connect the stories from father to son because they linked them up very well and proves for an interesting overall story. The problem with this comes in the form of Strike Force missions, which are mission in which David Mason directs soldiers in a battlefield to protect targets such as buildings or machines, or to attack and dominate a target. The success of these missions alters the ending of the game, the bad part of this is that the AI for the strike force is really bad at it's job so you have to take control of the soldiers or machines they provide for you in order to be successful. In addition to this, Strike Force missions are only available for a limited time between campaign missions so you HAVE to do them as they come out or risk losing them. Also if you fail one you cannot got back and redo the mission therefore altering your ending whether you like it or not, and the mission are not exactly easy either. The best way I found to complete them was to divide my forces into two groups if I had to defend two out of three spots, and to do this constantly as your forces get killed and help is not exactly quick to arrive while enemy forces arrive constantly. If you're on the offense the best bet is to send all your forces to attack a single point and then move on to the next one for quicker mission success as you are timed for offensive missions. Oh and also make sure you take over soldiers or machines at all times because the AI is not exactly good in this game. Moving on to multi-player, what can I say? It is not impressive, see now you have a 10 point system to equip weapons, add-ons and perks. A weapons is 1 point, a perk is 1 point, etc. The problem with this is when you have to forego certain elements that were readily available for you in other games. For example in the first Black Ops I used the perks Ghost, Hacker, and Sleight of Hand, which effectively made me invisible and a horror to machines controlled by the enemy. My weapon usually had a red dot and a silencer to further add to my play style and I had my sticky grenades, my claymore and concussion grenades. In Modern Warfare 3 they changed this to where you could only carry either a grenade or a claymore or a bouncing betty etc. Your weapon also had to level up to get your red dot or a silencer and your perks were divided, if I wanted to use the same type of style as Black Ops I was no longer able to do so, as Ghost was divided into two perks, Sleight of Hand was divided into two perks and Hacker wasn't useful anymore. In Black Ops 2, Ghost is divided into 4 perks, Hacker is back and so is sleight of hand but it has been changed a bit. With the 10 point system I cannot use grenades of any kind if I want to play in the style I am accustomed to and it's still not as effective as it used to be. Let's add to that that weapons have to be leveled up to get what you need like a red dot or a scope, and also I can no longer silence my weapon and put a red dot on it if I want to play in my play style and the fact that weapons such as submachine guns can kill you across the map now with a few shots yet assault rifles are taking forever to take a guy down. Call of Duty has always had problems with the balancing of weapons but this is ridiculous on a match yesterday the final kill was a guy shooting another guy at point black range with a shot-gun, it took 3 shots for him to go down, yet the same guy had just killed another guy with a sub machine gun in about two shots to the body, even the guy with the sub machine gun called BS on the game saying that honestly it was unfair the way he killed the other guy and then saw himself getting shot 3 times with a shot gun at that distance. The maps for multi-player are not that great either they seem uninspired and bland over all, and lets talk about grenades too, I've seen them blow up next to other players and even in front of me and not kill me, the accuracy on the guns is also horrible they jump so much sometimes it takes a full clip to kill someone if they a couple of meters away from you, and the spawn points are horrible, where I've had an entire team spawn right behind me after I've killed on of their team mates or I've spawned next to an entire team so I immediately got killed again and I am not the only one this has happened to either. The zombies mode has been changed but I have to be honest I am not a fan because it seems pointless to me to play survival mode, in Black Ops 2 this has been changed to somewhat of a story mode but I haven't really gotten into it so I can't say much about it, the time I did play it seemed better but I was alone so if anyone has more information on the TRANZIT aspect of it I would appreciate if you comment on it, the survival mode is back and GRIEF mode is fun, you play against another team and against zombies and the team that has surviving members wins, you cannot kill the other team, you can only fight zombies and perform actions that unleash more zombies on the other team. Black Ops 2 makes me feel as if the COD franchise died with the first Black Ops, MW2 was a great game and Black Ops actually topped that in my opinion. MW3 changed things way too much but it was bearable until the spawn points started changing and made you get killed easily because enemies would spawn on you or behind you or vice-versa. Black Ops 2 seems to just have taken the bad elements and threw them together to make a game, while some of the changes are welcome over all the game is flawed and could probably use a patch or two to fix some of the major problems. The 3D in the game is pretty awesome, but I did have problems with it in the beginning and had to change the settings in my system because the game wouldn't recognize my TV as a 3D TV yet my others games did just fine, but honestly it looks just as awesome as it did for Black Ops, except in campaign mode where the videos don't seem to be in  3D only the gameplay.

Drake's Reviews Score 6 out of 10