Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

Black Ops 7 offers solid co-op action and refined multiplayer with great maps and modes, but its campaign lacks Cold War’s brilliance. Bold, fun, yet not revolutionary.

A year after Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7 doesn't try to reinvent the wheel: it essentially builds its offering on the innovations of its predecessor, but it does it well, even very well. The wall jump is perfectly integrated and complements the gameplay, whose frenetic pace remains as exhilarating as ever. The cooperative campaign, for its part, fully delivers on its promise. For the rest, everything isn't perfect, and there's a lingering sense of recycling, even of incompleteness in some cases. This was undoubtedly the price to pay for bringing such generous content to life. A very solid game, but one that doesn't quite reach the pinnacle.

With excellent maps, slick and expressive movement, and the superb new Overload mode, Black Ops 7’s core multiplayer experience is brilliant. Zombies fans have plenty to sink their teeth into, even if a lot of its modes return from past games. BO7’s campaign, however, is its biggest disappointment, and its Endgame experiment mostly falls flat.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is actually a surprisingly fun game, but it doesn't truly live up to the spirit of Call of Duty. They're particularly disrespectful of the story modes that have shaped the series in recent years. They're stuffing all the zombie and multiplayer-based modes into the main story. Under normal circumstances, Raul Menendez would have been a better fit with AI. We could have seen more compelling action in 2035, and with the new characters introduced by David Mason and Mike Harper, we could have had a truly fantastic experience. So what have they done? They've gone out of their way to use the same maps, use certain characters, turn them into monsters, and make them play everything but Call of Duty. Respect your past games, and the story mode that brought you to this level. While it's not as terrible as Modern Warfare III, it has a terrible story mode.

If Activision and the numerous studios working on Call of Duty wish to make a game worth buying each year, the answer is innovation. It’s time to be bold and try something new. You have a problem as an annual franchise when players are constantly asking what’s new in this year’s entry. The market is not going anywhere—that much is clear with EA propelling its Battlefield franchise to bigger heights than ever. However, if Call of Duty cannot find a pathway to be creative, I fear the franchise will only continue to stagnate, becoming only a memory of what once was.