These games are fun to me, I just wish some of the people who play them wouldn't take them so seriously.

you frogot to menton that you get to kill zombies AS JFK

i agree h20 sum ppl jus need 2 relax

I agree with you Sage. The graphics are nice, the sound design is well done, and it overall feels very polished. The campaign is surprisingly complex and the multiplayer is still very good. People really need to stop hating on this game because of what are really trivial complaints.

I honestly believe that this is by far the best CoD as of yet with having both an engaging main story campaign and a fun multi-player that, as of now, isn't riddled with bugs or hacks.


If all for anything, Reach and Black Ops are going to be "duking it out" for online supremacy as being the FPS of the year to me.

well black ops already won in my opinion. on sunday there were millions playing black ops, and a little over 100k playing reach.

Obviously the newer game is going to have more players. In a month or so it will be much clearer which one is more popular.

great review Bennett, let's hope the multiplayer doesn't have as much hacks or exploits in the future as (*shivers*) MW2.

Need we forget the reign of the Javelin?

Everytime I walked past my brother playing this I kept thinking 'gee that sounds like Sam Worthington'.

I might give this game a go, though I don't really have alot of time for them lately.
The special edition set came with some pretty cool stuff, the best was the RC car with built in camera and speaker.

I this is just so fantastically ironic it makes me actually really want this game. Now this might require an explanation so here goes:

The Origional Medal of Honor was about a lone operative dropped down behind enemy lines with later games adding in a few buddys. Then Call of Duty was made by the studio responsible for MoHAA who wanted to make their game more about a frontline soldier.

So MoH then started copying CoD, each sucessive MoH game becoming more about a soldier on the frontlines and cutting out the stealthy segmants. But now CoD has introduced stealth segments and has become focused on an operative, or group of operative behind enemy lines!

WOW.

Funny how nobody in their reviews seems to point out how dated the grafics are in multiplayer when compared to MW2 or even WaW. Seriosly i'm all about gameplay over grafics but come on, everyone gives it a 9/10 or a full 10, when it should really have a 7/10 at most. What reason is there for the console grafics in multiplayer look like a PS2 games when its predecessors have a much better texture resolution? As far the gameplay goes things are more balance now than in MW2, except the stupid RC-XD car with a one mile radious explotion.

Anyways it's awesome to play splitscreen online with a friend at home. It's a real shame that splitscreen seems to be slowly passing away. Guess programmers are to lazy to add it in their games the same way they put aim assist in 99% consoles shooters ( FPS and third person ) rather than a good aim mechanics where u can aim and move in the direction you wan't to, not the direction the game forces you to go. I could go on all bout the alternatives to aim assist in consoles shooters and why things are better without them, but im kinda lazy to start a debate and fight about something that i know im a 103% right :D

black ops has split screen, its just nobody wants to go to someone elses house to play a game they already have. unless its like rockband or something.

That's because they used the same game engine. Making a new one takes years.

Are you kidding about the graphics? You are really exaggerating. I play the PS3 version and they are of the same quality as MW2's.

"I only saw the streo type of Call of Duty as in people who aren' really gamers are the type to play these types of games not to mention first person shooters isn't exactly my favorite genre of games while I would love to see a diffrent genre get more attention I can at least see that I may not always to fair to this series and always just assume that the games would just cop-out affter every other title and let multiplayer do all the work."

This is by far the most painful thing I've had to read. I'm sure you can figure out why.

Now hey come on this guy just forgets what the shift button does im sure if you gave him a chance he would be able to write a very good sentence anyways call of duty is a great game i play it all the time with my friends it is very fun and i like the remote controlled car its also fun when i shoot someone in the face from a foot away and their blood goes all over it makes me laugh.

For some reason I always read run-on sentences like these in a Stephen Hawking voice. It's especially funny when they make no damn sense =D

i think the game gets a bit of a free ride, the multiplayer is great as always but it doesn't introduce enough new things to verify the high price tag, and with it being a yearly game now i really fear that the brand will take some heat.

for the most part i somewhat agree with you, but i think the voice acting is terrible, the Kennedy being worse than the mayor from simpson, but meant to be taken seriously, most of the voice acting is mediocre at best, and the amount of cut scenes just takes me out of the experience, but they actually admitted that they never wanted to put their focus or resources into the single player, the currency system is a nice addition but other than that it feels like the equivalent of a rooster update.

i dont hate the game, but im not loving it either, the multiplayer does seem more balanced, but i guess that in a few days there will be a new wave of people who figured out a way to just get random kills with explosives.

they really have to do something more if they want it to stay fresh with the yearly updates.

this game caused me to warm up to the CoD franchise, it really was an improvement from MW2, and i'm glad they got rid of the lame looking blood on the screen and changed it for some more decent blood that at least lets me see and go get some cover

so far so good, its the first fps i can play without getting frustrated that some idiot spawns behind my back and knifes me to death (something MW2 had a lot...)

My main problem with it is for the PC port. I have really no problem with the story and since everything else is almost the same like in gameplay and mulitplayer, it's the graphics that pissed me off. On the first day, the PC of the game was almost unplayable due to glitches and blurs from the engine the game runs on. A patch was supposed to have came out recently that fixed all the issues, but this strengthens the claim that developers worry less about their PC customers and focused all their efforts for console players.

My biggest problem with this game was the AI. I'm surprised you didn't bring this up Bennett. I don't know if it's the same on all difficulty levels though.

I played on the Hardened setting because I wanted a challenge, but little did I know the challenge was made of shitstupid AI. Instead of some real gunfights and cool strategys, the enemy takes more shots to kill and every single enemy fires at you and sometimes just straight rushes to you. At the same time your friends doesn't seem to notice these rushers even though they ran straight through them. Instead your teammates just stands there in cover and rarely shoots at all. When they do fire, they rarely kill anything, even if they are standing in plain sight, they fire on the ground or the ceiling, whatever.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of problems I had with this single player campaing.

Just like Halo Reach, Modern Warefare 2 etc. this game is extremly overhyped. It is a solid shooter but nothing out of the ordinary. 7/10 for multiplayer and 6/10 if you only consider single player.

I, myself, think that Black Ops and Reach were definitely overhyped this year. However, that doesn't keep me from wanting to play it. I haven't purchased it yet because I don't have the money, but it'll come to me one day soon. Most of the reason I play online is because I have friends on XBL that play, so we can do party chats and stuff. To me, it's more about the social life than the game itself.

But I can tell I will grow to hate that little RC car. I predict that a lot of my deaths will be caused by their explosions--and snipers.

So Bennett is like the only PS3 reviewer (possibly owner) on the site? Damn, that's sad :(

Oh I own a PS3 as well... well I hate FPS on any console :) I'm a PC gamer for FPS :D

I own a ps3 and used it to record footage for my Castlevania: Lords of Shadow review. I think it's a fantastic console!

Oh snap Sage made a "it's got X and Y what more do you want" 'joke'. And now for a little suicide.

Surprisingly, I actually want to play this CoD if only for the story because of the premise. I'm much more into diverse multiplayer modes where one jump equals death personally, but I can see why some do like it.

I just can't play another COD game, not after MW2.

If I play one more, it's going to be MW3, and just to finish the story up.

And I was frozen today.

I was definitely impressed by Black Ops. After the ragefest that was the multiplayer of Modern Warfare 2 and the terrible singleplayer of World at War, I was wanting this to be a better game. The campaign is really satisfying and Treyarch really listened to the fans when it came to fine tuning weapons, perks, and adding the new features for unlocking and earning weapons.

Even with the terrible start of the PC version, sniping made mostly useless, and a couple odds and ends, it's easily the best CoD release yet. Just got to level 50 tonight for multiplayer :D

I love how you only hit on online play for a little bit and totally ignore how much outrage people have for the shit that the connection to the black ops server is. over half the time you are in a bad room with bad connections and horrid lag so you barely get kills because where you are shooting and where the guy you are shooting really is are not the same point in the game.
You will need to get the strongest gun with the fastest fire rate to kill anyone in these lagtastic games because everyone takes 20 bullets to kill and thats when your not kicked from the game 5 mins in. plus the fact that they nerfed so many weapons and has significantly less weapons the mw2 ever did. Sure they took out nukes but if mw2 had just not had kill streaks stack no one would have gotten them because I hardly ever see any of the higher kill streaks in black ops but that might just be because I never make it to the end of game because I always lose connection.

IF you just take the time to go look at black ops forum page you will all of it is full of people yelling for patches to fix the lag in the game. its like you play the online long enough to get little rc car and see it needed points for money then stopped playing

damn this game is good.

even though its unoptimised as hell - produces "lags" even in singleplayer (even with high FPS it's stopping to draw every few seconds on fraction of second, graphic settings not matter, what happening on screen not matter), and it's dead freezes sometimes (sometimes on freaking prerenderred videos :) and you loose all saves until level very start (and levels are big).

BUT, design and direction is just great. i was killed like hundred times just because i wanted to look around and not shoot stuff. all the little things, all the details in models and textures. besides, the didn't build structures in Russia in real life that correctly and thoughtfull as game designers draw it :) not here, not in "modern warfare 2". believe me, i live not far from Ural Mountains ;)
and real soldiers wasn't that good equipped in 60s, nor they equipped as good as it shown in MW2 now.
story is awesome too, even though some things sometimes thrown down your throat tens of times like if you too dumb to get a hint first several times.

and how i freaking love first Hudson mission, on rooftops under rain. bioweapon, location, music in that and Weaver (what kind of surname for russian is that anyway ?) with his eyepatch reminds me of my two favorite games - Syphon Filter and Metal Gear Solid. good times. not to mention it looks just great.

one thing though - Sage said "Black Ops is a benchmark for all future FPS to strife for in terms of _gameplay_". i kind of disagree. if he means only _railroad FPS_ then YES. but otherwise, there is better gameplay mechanics for FPS exist. my favorite is FPS action-rpg (you know what game i talking about, don't you ?).
and since then making understructible everything, beside _some_ glass windows, is ok in FPS anyway ? fucking lighbulbs are rocketlauncher-proof. in 2010. but other railroad FPS are worse in that.

Call of Duty series is still an etalon of railroad FPS.

PS: if blur and "DepthOfField" are pissing you off you can disable them by poking in game config in $GAMEDIR/players. search for "blur", "distortion" and "dof", obviously.
lazy ass programmers - took a ready engine but was too lazy to provide some checkboxes. and how thrilled i was when game "autoconfigured" to 1024x768 4:3 fucking resolution on my 1920x1080 23' monitor but with "EXTRA" quality. yeah, get some "extra" stuff and blut the shit out of it on the screen, way to go. of course, by "extra" it just means that it will not lower texture resolutiuon on the fly from what artists put to it. but you still can't control LOD settings for models at all. not like i would use it on my main box but you don't get splitscreen on PC. so, wtf i supposed to do ? buy second expensive box and same game to just play with my girlfriend "zombie" mode or co-op in MW2 ?

This is great Sage. I have a Wii so I have the game on the Wii. I think the Zombie mode is kind of hard but I like blowing the heads off them (sometimes you have to shoot at the headless body to kill the damn thing) i just past the Vietnam level and you are right about the rat hole which is memorable

I have to say that it is way better than that piece of sh#t MW2. Still not sure if it's better than CoD4...

You are kind of correct about Call of Duty Black Ops. But I really don't feel like explaining all that I have to say. It is a game known world wide and I think that it is not really better than modern warfare 2. I have black ops too, and to be honest with you I still play modern warfare 2. black ops is only played for its 2 player online is what I think. Well that is what me and my friends think.