The Call Of Duty franchise has been shared among two teams of developers: Infinity Ward, the charm boys who shaped the all-conquering Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 games, and Treyarch, who crafted the solid but typical World At War.
Lately, though, Infinity Ward has been riven with inner disagreements and walkouts and Treyarch have been playing close thought to what their rivals got right with their last game.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops is the fruit of that study. If you liked Modern Warfare 2 then chances are you’ll like this just as much, if not more.
The single player campaign puts you in the blood-soaked boots of a US CIA operative who manages to discover himself involved in all of the key flashpoints of the Cold War.
The story opens with you, viewing for all the world like David Beckham, being tortured by some unidentifiable foe and experiencing flashbacks to the Bay Of Pigs invasion, The Kennedy assassination and the bloodiest conflicts of the Vietnam War.
The Infinity Ward games had you playing through an interweaving narrative as different characters in an striving, novelistic, approach but Black Ops is a more direct action movie experience.
As a first-person shooter it’s state of the art. The physics and graphics are everything you expect from recent high-end console games and the story hangs together well enough to keep you involved.
As always though it’s the multiplayer that provides the game with its longevity. In that arena Treyarch have given us an embarrassment of riches to play with.
The normal multiplayer is comfortably on a par with Modern Warfare 2, with a new leveling up ‘game currency’ providing extra flexibility and spice. You can now bet your in-game points against other players to win even bigger and better weaponry.
Lately, though, Infinity Ward has been riven with inner disagreements and walkouts and Treyarch have been playing close thought to what their rivals got right with their last game.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops is the fruit of that study. If you liked Modern Warfare 2 then chances are you’ll like this just as much, if not more.
The single player campaign puts you in the blood-soaked boots of a US CIA operative who manages to discover himself involved in all of the key flashpoints of the Cold War.
The story opens with you, viewing for all the world like David Beckham, being tortured by some unidentifiable foe and experiencing flashbacks to the Bay Of Pigs invasion, The Kennedy assassination and the bloodiest conflicts of the Vietnam War.
The Infinity Ward games had you playing through an interweaving narrative as different characters in an striving, novelistic, approach but Black Ops is a more direct action movie experience.
As a first-person shooter it’s state of the art. The physics and graphics are everything you expect from recent high-end console games and the story hangs together well enough to keep you involved.
As always though it’s the multiplayer that provides the game with its longevity. In that arena Treyarch have given us an embarrassment of riches to play with.
The normal multiplayer is comfortably on a par with Modern Warfare 2, with a new leveling up ‘game currency’ providing extra flexibility and spice. You can now bet your in-game points against other players to win even bigger and better weaponry.
Moreover, fans of World At War’s survival-horror ‘Zombies’ levels get a whole new platoon of blundering undead Nazis to open fire, either solo or with a group of friends.
In conclusion, if you are a working stiff who gets at best an hour of week to play Call Of Duty online and are sick of being royally trounced by the legion of teenage truants who make up the game’s well-practised elite then you’ll be pleased to discover that Black Ops has an offline ‘botmatch’ mode where computer-generated players (amusingly sharing the names of your real online friends) play almost – but pleasingly only almost – as well as real human opponents.
Add to that the sheer joy of piloting an explosives-packed toy car into the room where your opponents are hiding - plus a secret mini arcade game - and you have an outright winner.
There have been rumblings of some serious problems with the performance of the PC version of the game but our Xbox copy ran like a dream.
Measured alongside the previous Call Of Duty game, it’s a minor but considerable improvement. Pre-orders on the game have been massive and the online community is likely to endure for a long, long time.
You surely only need one state of the art console shooter, and for the predictable future Call Of Duty:Black Ops is it.
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