Product Features

Genre: Action and Shooter
Publisher: Activision
Release Date: November 13, 2012
Available Platforms: PC, PlayStation 3, XBox 360

Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Nuketown 2025 Edition

Summary
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This first person shooter, the ninth game in this popular franchise, is a direct sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops. Part of the campaign takes place in the 80s (with the return of Frank Woods and Alex Mason) but most of the story is concerned with you (as Alex Masons son, David) carrying out your dangerous mission in the midst of a terrifying fictional futuristic (21st century) Cold War.

Accompanying the main campaign are branching storylines (Strike Force missions) and how you fare during these missions will affect the main campaign. Decisions you make during flashbacks to the past, will also have an impact on the outcome of your future 21st century game, and will alter circumstances each time you play. You may even be able to influence the unsettling plans of the game's main sinister villain Raoul Menendez who attempts to gain control of the US military from within.

You must find a way to stop Menendez. You must take on your dangerous, classified missions and as a covert operative you must employ any cutting edge, futuristic weaponry, robotics or technology that becomes available to you to try to eliminate the threat, retrieve the power and control and save the world. At the end of the game you will get the opportunity to see how things could have been different if you had followed another route.

There is a new multiplayer mode (that rewards good teamwork) set in the 2025 scenario and this mode includes a range of new features. Additionally, Zombies co-op mode has also returned along with a variety of new maps and special missions.

Dave Wallace December 01, 2012 PS3

****

It's always hard to write a review of a game that you think is merely average. It's easy to rave about a title that you love, and it's just as simple to berate one that's self-evidently terrible. But for those games that fall somewhere in-between those two extremes, it's often difficult to describe exactly why a particular game is not awful, but not particularly great either.

And it's especially hard to do so when you know that the game in question is going to be universally adored by the majority of gamers. So, you'll have to excuse me if what I'm about to say feels a little bit defensive.

First of all, let me begin by assuring you that I'm a big fan of first-person shooters. I've hugely enjoyed the PS3's Resistance and Killzone games, and I've also got a lot of pleasure out of previous games in the "Call of Duty" series - most recently, the original "Black Ops" title that came out a couple of years ago. So this review certainly isn't coming from someone who's indifferent to the FPS genre, and thus outside the target audience of this game. It's also fair to say that I have a huge amount of respect for what Activision and Treyarch have been able to achieve with the CoD franchise, in terms of building up a set of video games that not only carry a certain seal of quality, but which have also penetrated the mainstream consciousness so comprehensively that "Call of Duty" is one of the gaming world's few household names.

But with all that said, I'm not going to give a five-star rating to a game just because of its name, or the pedigree of its predecessors: and ultimately, there just isn't enough that's new or innovative about "Black Ops II" to make it stand out as above-average in a very competitive marketplace.

To be fair to the game's developers, there has clearly been a lot of effort been put into this latest iteration of the CoD series, and Treyarch have obviously made a couple of conscious attempts to freshen up the franchise in a couple of ways. Firstly - and perhaps most notably - they've transposed the series from a historical war setting into something more sci-fi and futuristic, by setting a significant part of the game in 2025 (alongside an accompanying parallel story set in the 1980s). A brewing war of superpowers involving China provides the backbone for the overall story, with the '80s-set sections showing how events start to build to a head, and the future-set parts of the game providing the fallout.

Setting part of the game in the future also gives you access to high-tech weapons and vehicles, lending the game a certain fantasy flavour that's new to the CoD franchise (even if most of the tech here feels slightly more plausible and grounded in reality than you might see in an out-and-out sci-fi title). And the futuristic setting also allows for new enemies, such as the drone attacks that reflect the kind of real-world concerns over unmanned warfare that we're seeing in today's headlines.

Secondly, the programmers have opted to include - for the first time in a Call of Duty title - a 'branching' story that allows you to make a certain number of choices that influence the way the game's plot plays out. It feels as though this is a direct response to games like the Mass Effect series, which have provided a hugely immersive experience by allowing you to feel as though you're truly in control of your own story. Unfortunately, though, it's only applied in a limited way here. The choices are fairly perfunctory and simplistic - giving the illusion of choice rather than a true sense of control over your destiny - and the decisions that you're asked to make don't really feel like they have a huge impact on the game (although admittedly, I haven't completed it yet, so maybe they might in the end).

Ultimately, these choices don't overcome the core problem with the game (and this is something that's common to the CoD franchise as a whole): you don't really feel as though you have any option but to follow the set, pre-determined path that the developers intended. It's increasingly the case with games like this that I find myself frustrated by how limited your input is, and how much of the time you feel like you're merely following orders - going where you're told to go and shooting at what you're told to shoot at, rather than making your own way through the levels. Coupled with the extensive cutscenes that move the story along, it ends up feeling like you're having occasional input into a movie, rather than enjoying a truly immersive, interactive gaming experience - and it's a growing weakness that could honestly put me off playing future games in the CoD series.

One thing that I will say in this game's favour is that it looks great. The graphics might only be a subtle improvement over the original Black Ops, but given that that game looked several years ahead of its time when it came out, maybe it's to be expected that they couldn't push things even further here. I get the sense that we might now have just about reached the limits of the technology of current-generation consoles - but even so, it's nice to see Black Ops II push the boundaries as far as they'll go.

To conclude: I'm sure that many of my criticisms won't be shared by other gamers, and the CoD franchise is big and popular enough that this game is virtually guaranteed to be a big hit. And the series' dedicated online multiplayer fanbase probably means that this game will provide a lot of entertainment to lovers of the franchise for many months to come yet.

But personally, I'm starting to realise that this kind of 'on rails' experience just isn't what I'm looking for in a game these days. Perhaps that criticism has been compounded by the fact that I've been playing this game alongside "Assassin's Creed III", which offers so much more in terms of genuine interaction with your surroundings, and choices that influence the way the game plays out. It might be unfair to compare the two - as they're such different types of games - but given that they're both competing for the lucrative Christmas market, I'm certain that I know which one I'd rather receive as a present this year. And much to my surprise, it isn't the latest CoD title.