Call of Duty Black Ops Review - Three Thumbs Thown

Call of Duty Black Ops

I figured Black Ops would be the perfect start for my video game review.  Again, I haven't figured out a system for rating games, music, movies etc so this is subject to change.  In general, I will provide as little detail and reason as necessary to make my case for any particular game.  In this case, I will have no problem getting to the point because within the first 5 minutes of playing I realized that I had been ripped off.  Unfortunately I can't get my 60 dollars back at this point.

Let me just get this out of the way right now.  Call of Duty is the best selling game every time it is released.  What most people don't realize is that COD is released on multiple platforms, and that initial sales figure groups all of them together.  Most of the best fps are usually console exclusives.  So when comparing COD to a game like Halo the facts are usually misconstrued.  Anyway, with COD more and more people buy it because they think everyone else will buy it.  And unfortunately it is true.  This time around I told myself I wasn't going to buy Black Ops, but two weeks past the launch everyone I knew, even people who had stopped playing Xbox, had jumped on the bandwagon.  I, myself, was perfectly content playing Halo Reach, which I believe is one of the best fps ever made.  But unfortunately having a different opinion about my favorite shooter left me alone, playing by myself.  So for the sake of me being able to play with my friends, I dropped the cash.   It was a huge mistake.

Gameplay:  This for me is probably the most important part of any game.  I don't give a shit how good a game looks or how interesting the story is.  If it is not fun to play then there is no point in playing.  So here comes Black Ops.  This is the fifth, I think, of the Call of Duty series for the Xbox 360.  Black Ops was actually made by a different developer, which probably attributes to the fact that the game such so much.  I personally like Modern Warfare 2 by Infinity Ward.  Not only was the game pretty fun, but it looked great and turned out to be a very well polished fps.  I still preferred Halo 3 at the time, but MW2 provided a more realistic fps experience, and everyone I knew was playing it.  Anyway I popped Black Ops into my Xbox and within seconds I noticed that this game was almost exactly the same as MW2 except for that it looked like shit.  Things that suck about the game play.  They took away a lot of the good perks in the game and they made the kill streaks worse.  The core game play was still there, but it was only fun because I was playing with people that I know.  I am of course talking about multi-player.  I am glad that they added split-screen online play so now I can play with my brothers.  As for the single player campaign I couldn't tell you if it was good or not.  I have yet to play any of the campaigns of any of the CODs, I stick strictly to multi-player.

Graphics and Sound: Need I say it again?  The graphics suck.  This game looks horrible, see picture above.  The sound is also bad too.  The noise to stupid toy helicopter makes as it spawn kills the shit out of you sounds completely fake.  Out of all of the maps Nuketown looks the best.  For those of you who don't knwo Nuketown is a fake level in that its supposed to look like shit, and the game does that pretty well so in that sense the level looks pretty realistic.  However, everything else looks horrible.  The cars have squares wheels like in Canada.

Story: Like I said I haven't played campaign so I have no clue.  

Bottom Line:  By far the best aspect of the game is the Nuketown.map.  Its a really small close quarters maps that generates a lot of fun chaos.  Unfortunately that is the only good part of the game.  Graphics suck, sounds suck, and the game play hasn't really improved since the last COD.  And I almost forgot, they took away the Nuke killstreak.  Bottom line, if you are thinking about buying the game don't waste your money.  If you have it already do me a favor and don't lie to my face and tell me that its good.  I haven't played the game in two weeks, and I've never been happier.  I'm sure Black Ops is in the run for game of the year, but that is only so because of politics.  If you are not satisfied with the game you should stop playing, don't continue to play just because everyone else is.  If everyone would do that, then no one would be playing because truly this game is a piece of shit.  

thr33 thumbs \/