C all of Duty: Black Ops 3 has the same challenge
as Advanced Warfare and Ghosts before it: How
do you take the biggest thing going for one
console generation and meaningfully evolve it for
the next?
Developer Treyarch took the Call of Duty franchise in
weird new directions with Cold War conspiracy in Black
Ops back in 2010, and in 2012 it picked up the slack left
by series originator Infinity Ward's implosion, taking the
lead with Black Ops 2. It wasn't that Black Ops 2 was
perfect, exactly, but it had ambition leaking out of its
ears, changing what people could expect from a Call of
Duty campaign while introducing the first major changes
to the series' world-conquering multiplayer system.
With Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Treyarch has shifted
direction again, with a major investment in cooperative
play in the game's campaign and the introduction of
new mobility and character creation tools. But in its
efforts to bring player choice to more of the fundamental
gameplay aspects of Call of Duty, Treyarch has made a
game that doesn't really excel at any one thing.
IN A FIRST FOR THE SERIES,
YOU CAN ELECT TO PLAY AS
A FEMALE PROTAGONIST
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 takes place in the same world
that Treyarch's previous Call of Duty games have,
though that doesn't make much difference. It's another
future teetering on the brink of chaos, where lines
between military and corporate interests are blurred.
For the first time in the series, the campaign allows you
to create a character, with a variety of ethnicities
represented. In another first for the series, you also can
elect to be a male or female protagonist, each of which
is fully voiced and acted within the most cutscene-
driven Call of Duty campaign I can remember. The story
starts with some promise, featuring a scenery-chewing
performance by former Law & Order: SVU (and True
Blood ) star Christopher Meloni as he explains how vital
total informational awareness is, and reveals the power
and necessity of the cyber rig, a set of cybernetic
enhancements your character quickly finds themselves
dependent on. But Black Ops 3 strangely fails to
capitalize on the big narrative beats of the series.
The story also just isn't very interesting. Black Ops 3
quickly flails at ideas of AI consciousness and the
"evils" of interconnectedness, and it's peppered with
predictable "twists." There are scenes that I'm sure were
meant to be edgy and morally gray; instead, it's just a
lot of hyper-earnest swearing and glaring. It was enough
to make me miss the number station-tinged paranoia
and conspiracy theories that the series started with.
All of Treyarch's Meloni-fueled world-building does
serve to set up changes to some of Black Ops'
fundamentals. Black Ops 3 tosses all of its predecessor's
narrative and mission choices, returning to the linear
structure of previous games. In their place, Treyarch
introduces a host of new mobility and offensive options
courtesy of the aforementioned cyber rigs.
This starts in the most promising way possible, in a
virtual reality training mission that gives you basically
every possible cyber upgrade at once. It was a lot of fun
learning to exploit the environment there, hacking
turrets, running on walls, double jumping with aplomb —
but then Black Ops 3 takes all of that away, introducing
a trio of skill trees in its place. As you play through the
game, you'll earn cyber cores — including extras for
better performance, which is tracked via a campaign
scoring system — which can be used to upgrade your rig
and unlock and improve those cyber abilities.
You can't have every ability at once — until, that is, you
reach level 20 on your campaign profile, which I didn't
hit on my playthrough on hardened difficulty. This is
where Black Ops 3's other big addition comes in: full
co-op support. Every mission in Black Ops 3 supports
up to four players, each of whom can outfit their soldier
as they would in multiplayer, complete with weapon
attachments and a variation of the popular Pick 10
system introduced in Black Ops 2 's online component.
But throughout the campaign, the goal of
accommodating both cooperative play and player
customization has as many negative side effects as it
does positive results.
Everything is better with more people, and Black Ops 3
isn't going to ruin friendships . But the occasions where
true tactical engagement required multiple people felt
minimal. Usually, my partner or I would pick things off at
a distance while the other did whatever "thing" there
was to do at a spot on the map. Often, this was shooting
a weak point somewhere, or doing the sorts of timed
button press activities Call of Duty is kind of known for.
Co-op feels most necessary when Black Ops 3 is the
least fun, which may or may not be the point. Call of
Duty has always featured enemies with superhuman
accuracy on any difficulty higher than normal, which I've
been known to jokingly refer to as Terminators.
However, for whatever reason, Treyarch has seen fit to
expand to actual, honest-to-goodness bipedal murder
robots, along with mech-suited soldiers and Warlords,
human-sized bad guys that are all but impervious to
normal weaponry.
These enemies aren't the quick kill that has come to
define Call of Duty's overwhelming hordes and spectacle
— they're the quintessential bullet sponge. This changes
the series' core gameplay loop of fast shooting and
prolonged forward momentum. Sometimes this plays out
in thoughtful new ways, as more powerful enemies tend
to be more aggressive — or in the case of injured robots,
downright suicidal — chasing you out of cover spots and
forcing you to coordinate with your teammates.
Assuming you have them.
Alone, well. It's a lot less interesting, and a lot more
frustrating. The decision to have enemies that take more
than you can generally throw at them doesn't feel like
it's been matched by a change in sensibilities with the
weapons at your disposal or their general heft or sense
of power. Despite gun audio that seemed much stronger
than Black Ops 2, Black Ops 3's weapons either kill
immediately or hit like frozen vegetables. The end result
is some pretty serious derailing of Call of Duty's combat
loop, and what takes its place isn't very fun.
With another person, these moments are more forgiving,
in part because you can revive your teammate. This
provides a little more space to experiment in the interest
of tackling a particular encounter in a less obvious way.
This is also ostensibly where your character's cyber rig
abilities come into play — fodder enemies don't really
require the ability to shoot robo-bees from your hand to
kill them around corners, after all.
Occasionally Black Ops 3 finds moments where the
powers and co-op really come together, finding a
delicate balance between challenge and empowerment.
There are glimpses of a game where all the lip service
the story pays to the crazy possibilities of cyber rigs
and the posthuman soldier are realized. But decisions
big and small undermine it.
For example, once you pick your ability set, you're
locked in for the level — until, for some reason, at level
20, you can hotswap between your different cyber rig
trees. This decision seems like a particularly transparent
means of adding "replay" value to the game in an RPG
fashion. But it makes for frustrating times where you'll
load into a level you haven't played and realize that your
ability set is inappropriate for the task at hand; an anti-
robot loadout doesn't do much good against an almost
exclusively human force, for example.
But more damningly, the number of abilities included —
and the introduction of the weapon/loadout
customization from multiplayer — result in a game that
doesn't feel particularly designed around anything but
the broadest possible capabilities. Where last year's
Advanced Warfare felt oriented around particular skills
and segments, Black Ops 3 seems far less defined by
those sorts of neat, unique gameplay moments.
Multiplayer at least allows the same new traversal
abilities that the campaign suggests, but makes them
consistently available. And with all of those tools at
every player's disposal, multiplayer should feel like the
most revolutionary aspect of Black Ops 3. It doesn't
quite work out that way, though.
While it has the same strong Call of Duty fundamentals
of fast movement and smooth shooting, and a very
hooky progression system, it also introduces character
classes. Each character class has a pair of special
abilities unlockable through scorestreak rewards that
you select like any other perk, and as you level up your
profile, you'll gain access to new characters.
But the reality is that the abilities of each character are
used so sparingly that they don't really nudge the
equation in any particular direction moment to moment.
Sure, they can be good for a few kills. But in a game
with as punishing a time-to-death counter as exists in
the multiplayer space, they're not, if you'll pardon the
expression, especially game-changing.
I didn't find the minimal importance of character classes
a deal-breaker, because that's not really what Call of
Duty is about. The series since Modern Warfare has
always been about granular character customization
rather than emphasizing specific power moves from any
one kind of character, and that customization is still
present. The character system itself feels half-baked. It
functions — it just doesn't seem to matter.
Worse, though, maps don't feel especially designed to
take advantage of the new movement mechanics, and
double-jumping and wall-running make players better
targets more often than not.
A NOTE ON LAST-GEN
While Black Ops 3 is appearing on the Xbox 360
and PlayStation 3, an important caveat: The
campaign is not included. Due to technical
limitations of previous-generation consoles, the
360/PS3 release is multiplayer-only.
This hurts for two reasons. First, Advanced Warfare
introduced plenty of changes to the way basic
movement and melee worked last fall, and it was a much
better game for it. And second, Black Ops 3's Freerun
mode provides the best example of what could have
been. Freerun presents holographic obstacle courses
designed to be run as fast as possible using all the tools
Black Ops 3 has to offer. Chaining all of those things
together as quickly as possible makes everything click in
a way the non-committal design priorities of campaign
and adversarial multiplayer just don't. It's the only thing
in Black Ops 3 I want to return to.
Freerun is just one of several extra modes in Black Ops
3. The popular Zombies survival mode returns, as does
Dead Ops, the overhead zombie shooter, which now
features a full, lengthy campaign. I'll be honest: I've
never enjoyed Black Ops' take on the undead with
Zombies, and nothing here sold me on the mode more
than usual.
Finishing the main campaign also unlocks a zombie
variant that takes out the human combatants and
replaces them with hordes of undead and the same
power-ups featured in Zombies mode — though the way
the existing game's story is covered up and repurposed
here makes the whole thing seem like a funny
afterthought rather than a fully realized concept.
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