Reviewer’s Note: All gameplay experience based after its CODMAS update (released December 16th 2025).
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s initial campaign experience will vary wildly, depending on when one decides to play it. For this critic, it was one of utter confusion. “Who’s this bald guy who just executed that tattooed lady from the alternate cover art?” “How did that bald guy’s phone hack another guy’s mind?” “What the hell is going on?” Before even opting into its campaign, one could’ve been spoiled about the potential fates of both main antagonist and protagonist because Treyarch wanted to hype up its first season of post-launch content. As a franchise nearing fifty separate entries (when including spin-offs and more), it perfectly reflects the dire state of things; essentially, this campaign is more of a hype announcement than a proper narrative. It’s another year and someone has to put more slop into the trough.
As Activision is wont to do after tough slumps, the nearest recovery stim is nostalgia; in Treyarch’s case, that means time-jumping to see familiar faces and places dating as far back as the first Black Ops. Ten years after the thwarted 2025 terrorist attack by Raul Menendez and his group “Cordis Die”, a new video of him surfaces. This doesn’t make sense since established canon had him killed by returning protagonist David Mason in Black Ops II. Seizing on this suspicious opportunity, a private tech/military company known as “The Guild” prepares for this alleged upcoming attack. Mason along with his squad – Surly Michael Rooker, Generic Goatee Black Guy, and Badass Spec-Ops Woman With Robotic Arm and Leg – infiltrate the city-state of Avalon in hopes of disinterring The Guild’s ulterior motives.
While learning Guild CEO Emma Kagan’s plans, the squad is ambushed and drugged with an aerosolised hallucinogenic toxin before narrowly escaping her guarded facility. They’d all be dead were it not for their advanced cybernetics. The only problem now is said mystery drug has leaked out across Avalon, forcing civilian evacuation, which essentially means Mason’s team is stuck deep behind enemy lines with a job to complete whilst managing intensely-vivid nightmares. The first of these has them confronting a phantasm of Menendez in a fantastical Nicaragua where airstrikes are colossal machetes and Spanish-themed music plays in the background because… well… who cares about plot or continuity at this point?
That question is sincere too. When talking about a storyline clumped up with nonsense rounding the seventh turn, why not use a dumb excuse to hop between disparate timelines, locations, and realities? After all, weirder concepts have been part and parcel for the Black Ops series since the beginning. The challenge comes down to tonal consistency; there has to be something just tangible enough for an audience to go along with – think advanced interrogation techniques and MKUltra in the original. Here, though, different questions keep popping up. Fusing “The Cradle” toxin with their brain and body cybernetic augments feels too easy of an excuse for zombies, a Michael Rooker kaiju, Lovecraftian monstrosities, and more to be inhabiting the same space, not to mention everyone experiencing the same nightmare simultaneously. It’s the equivalent of writers Jen Campbell and John Zurhellen hitting every random concept on a dart board and rolling with it.
To its defense, drinking in the absolute stupidity with friends occasionally elevates this dreck to “so bad it’s magical” territory. Few recent co-op experiences reach these peaks of shared laughter. Of course, that also comes with obnoxious tolls. Of all the “innovations” to Call of Duty (or CoD for short), who would’ve thought some of Black Ops 7’s biggest would be removing a standard pause menu and checkpoint saves? Since this co-op campaign is always online, its default settings also want to foist you into a lobby with up to three other players. Playing alone is still possible, and its single difficulty setting scales in proportion to number of players, but certain segments are clearly geared towards a full squad; hell, Treyarch was so committed to the bit that you’re not even given AI replacements! Flying solo means Mason is essentially talking to ghosts while pretending they’re still fighting alongside him. It’s utterly bizarre.
Infiltrating alongside these online demands is the campaign – yet again – appropriating DMZ and Warzone’s open-map structure while traversing to the next linear, hallucinatory level. It’s not as staid as Modern Warfare III’s attempt, but it’s missing a sense of direction compared to Treyarch’s experiments dating over a decade ago. There are some collectibles to find and secondary objectives to complete, sure, but everyone intuitively understands none of its appetisers are filling compared to better Far Cry titles or Metro Exodus. It’s likely just part of a publisher’s checklist and a means to artificially boost its ephemeral runtime (~4 hours).
Getting away from Avalon’s open world does bring out more of the gaudy absurdism, but it’s functionally little more than a conveyor belt of violence. Whether pushing ahead or hunkering down against enemy waves, the quickest way to success is tied to higher-tiered weaponry and spamming each character’s unique abilities. Never mind tactics or positioning, sometimes moving isn’t even necessary with excessive sentry turrets, various perks, and other goodies clear enemies for you. Virtually every boss fight just comes down to chipping away at weak points and taking cover when necessary; at most, you jump over concussive waves, dodge projectiles, and juggle a few minions. Beneath all of its sugar-rushes of timeline-jumping and goofy concepts lies a hollow experience, a collection of missions unconcerned with design or atmosphere compared to some of Treyarch’s previous.
This disjointedness redounds to its storytelling more broadly. In no uncertain terms, Black Ops 7 ranks as the most suspicious AI-assisted game script to date. Sure, sure, one can flippantly toss that accusation towards several past entries, but the reason it’s more tangible here stems back to its especially plastic dialogue, revelations, and betrayals feeling directly lifted from previous stories; at the same time, the way in which certain plot points are hastily introduced and concluded reeks of a different sort of artifice than other lacklustre CoD narratives.
Completing this around “CODMAS” ranks as one of the most peculiar experiences in recent memory. By watching the aforementioned Season 1 trailer ahead of time, you immediately know Kagan’s supposed campaign death at the end is fake – especially hinted by its cinematic framing. Now that the credits rolled, you’re then hastily dropped into something without warning: Endgame mode. During CODMAS, this means a Christmas jingle starts playing while a well-dressed Peter Stormare and three random operators parachute onto Avalon’s open world to complete various missions. It’s PvE Extraction but with quadrants housing tougher enemies and objectives. The mode itself is less interesting than the confusing way with which it’s first introduced; something about such a random tonal change and being foisted into something no one asked for feels like a perfect summation of this campaign writ large.
Naturally, Treyarch’s renowned Zombies mode returns with round-based options that emphasise either story or challenge. We’ve essentially arrived full circle at the point where they throw several things into a vat, incorporate new wrinkles, and continue previous storylines; rather ironic how its ‘Dark Aether Saga’ trumps the campaign by virtue of enjoying its own campiness. Though a fine distraction with a plethora of goofy weapons and equipment, this critic can’t help but grow less engaged with the nonsense in between. The simplicity of managing defenses, drinking a few colas, and surviving increasingly-difficult waves sounds better than following your friends as they recite an online walkthrough for the latest Easter egg, requiring someone shoot a specific doohickey which contains a special key for somewhere else and on and on it goes.
If not compelled to the grind levels in Zombies then the next destination is competitive multiplayer. Though mobility enhancements took baby steps during Advanced Warfare, the newer “Omni-movement” is a more universal locomotion system without exoskeleton-specific abilities; that said, it’s also pertinent to not oversell aspects like basic wall-hopping – which doesn’t even look very smooth. This translates to, shall we say, ‘Temu Titanfall’ fused with CoD’s traditionally low time-to-kill (TTK) and socially Darwinistic killstreak system; alongside that, Pavlovian triggers of completed challenges and level-ups splatter the screen so you’ll sink more time in for more digital rewards. The psychological tricks are obvious, yet there’s something about its… specially-branded adrenaline rushes that its competitors still have trouble matching.
For a franchise as thoroughly milked as this one, it says something when Nuketown 24/7 remains among its most populous modes (again). Honestly, this critic could never understand that phenomenon, especially when Treyarch’s new or reworked 6v6 maps utilise Omni-movement in more meaningful ways. Granted, there’s the benefit of decent DLC content, but even launch maps had a better batting average than most CoDs in the past decade. Modes, on the other hand, stack up comparatively. The headliner Overload is reskinned Capture The Flag but the goal is inverted to having you place this device in the opponent’s spot. You know what you’re going to get with Treyarch’s latest – as has been the case for several years.
It’s ironic that perhaps multiplayer’s greatest ambitions are in managing both creative and commercial excesses of purchasable skins. Black Ops 6 received intense heat for its assault on good taste once the likes of Nicki Minaj was fighting Beavis and Butthead; the Fortnite-ification of military shooters had reached its cringe-inducing zenith. Treyarch didn’t initiate that egregious trend, but we’ve reached a potential point of no return: of an identity so mishandled that the parody versions start to feel common over time. In a way, it speaks to the collective call of the series to take a reprieve before going back into the fray. Parts of Black Ops 7 are so wretched that one can’t help but wonder if that call might also be coming from inside the house.
Story via Cubed3. Read the original article
