Black Ops 3 is the coda –except not really– to the long running franchise, but with its release comes the feeling that we’ve been there and done that; and done better. Black Ops 3 is gorgeous, that’s without question, but other than the pretty visuals the game doesn’t offer much depth, instead choosing to take what starts as an excellent story about what it means to be human and spins it off into bat shit silly science-fiction. Look, I really enjoyed about ninety-percent of the game’s story, but instead of trying to make the statement the game was going for, it instead goes into SyFy territory; and not the good ScFi channel, but the bad, ala Mansquitto.
Our story sees a team of special forces operators in the future jumping headlong into action as they attempt to extract an important political prisoner that has been taken hostage. As these things tend go, the mission goes all fubar and the duo on the ground get rescued by some friendly augmented soldiers. This was actually my favorite part of the entire campaign, as you get to see the kind of things you’ll eventually be able to do without some convoluted tutorial. You’ll see these super soldiers do all sorts of crazy moves and that really gets your excited for the later parts of the game. As the introduction ends we see the reasons why you undergo this augmentation after witnessing a particularly brutal scene. Your partner also undergoes the procedure, but it’s never explained why as he’s perfectly okay, but since there is co-op here they had to fit it in somehow. Sure, I know the narrative requires him later down the road, but it gives us the first look at the hampered design that the writers had to work around.
These things happen a lot within the campaign in Black Ops 3. There is a really fantastic story underneath, but the writers always seem to be writing themselves out of a corner, with each non-twist becoming more and more bizarre. After all this you are then dropped into a tutorial, but I do have to give credit to the team for its implementation. Learning to use your new skills is a lot of fun as it’s not only a tutorial, but the entire thing is framed as a flashback to an event that helped lead to this new age of augmentation. Unfortunately this is really the only part of the game that expands on the interesting backstory and the only time we get to connect with the rest of the team of super soldiers from before.
Fast forward to years down the line because why let us play alongside these new friends so that, you know, we can build a connection, and we get to the games non-twist. These super soldiers are now the bad guys and your team of two go solo (duo?) to take them down one at a time. Again, this is where the story really falls apart. We have spent at best five-minutes of screen time with each of these characters we are tasked with taking out, so this weird connection the game tries to make the two heroes feel seems all sorts of forced. I should feel bad because I know these people, because I fought alongside them, shared stories, saved each other, but here we just fight each of the team that guided us through the small tutorial. If that wasn’t bad enough, the game goes all-out crazy toward the end with A.I.s and bad science fiction. It’s a shame that the game dropped the idea of what it is to be human as an augmented solider and who really controls you, to turn into a mind-fuck that just comes off as pretentious.
I never played Advanced Warfare, but talking to many that have they tell me how much it really changed the Call of Duty experience from a gameplay perspective. With Black Ops 3 nothing really feels fresh, even to someone like me whose last Call of Duty experience was Modern Warfare 2. The tutorial after we get retrofitted really gives us a taste of whats to come, but I never found myself using anything new that was presented to me. Sure, I can run across walls and pounce on an enemy, but the campaign never presented me the opportunity to do this as going in straight forward worked just fine. You can go into stealth mode to get the drop on the baddies, but I only needed to do this during a single boss fight. If you are going to give the player a ton of options to tackle the game, then you have to design levels where theses things come into play as say, Deus Ex does. If I can just point and shoot to victory, that’s what I’m going to do. I know that these things come more into play in multiplayer, but if you are going to do a single player bit, then use them to at least get me ready for the multiplayer.
Black Ops 3 also has to contend with the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution with regards to the augmentation thing. The problem with Black Ops 3 is that unlike Human Revolution which is built around augemtations, Black Ops 3 sort of just has them there for fun. There are three main cyber abilities, each with their own wheel sub-abilities, but I never even tried ninety-percent of them. A lot of them are really cool, but they don’t offer anything that your gun can’t get done just fine. Playing through the game I really only stuck with two abilities out of the dozens presented to me. I used the Immolate to kill bots, and the Sonic that made humans puke and die. Other than those two, I never found others that where worth switching to when I could just shoot someone in the face.
In fact, other than those two cyber abilities the game feels pretty straight forward. Guns all act well, if a little similar to each other, and you do get to adjust your custom loadout, but I always ended up going with the “field ops” kit that the game recommends for your prior to each mission. Funny enough, I spent a great many mission just shooting that I accidentally stumbled upon the fact that your could upgrade your augmentations with kits, that by the time I did this I nearly maxed out all my abilities. That is bad design when you can play most of the game with just to gun -you could probably beat it without using a single ability– when the game touts all these cool abilities. In the end Black Ops 3 just ends up feeling like any other shooter which is a shame and partially due to the insane turnaround time the series suffers. Instead of being something special, it has become lumped with the yearly iterations of Madden and Fifa; good games that don’t ever really change.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is a gorgeous fest for the eyes on the Xbox One. I’m not sure how far we are into this generation, but Black Ops 3 feels like the first game that really shows off what this generation can do. The facial animations and detail for all the main characters are all bloody fantastic. The capture work is top-notch and really helps to draw the player in, even if the story itself does everything to pull you right back out. Levels and stages look great and Call of Duty continues to be, well, Call of Duty. The game is all about giant set pieces and this iteration is no different. This works as the developers can guide your eyes to what you are supposed to see, but the second you go off path, even in the slightest, you can see where corners were cut.
I think there were only two types of main enemies in the entire game. You have generic character model one with a number of slight variations, and generic robot character one with its own minor variations. Sure, other characters get dropped in from time to time, but when it feels like the original Doom had a larger number of characters, you have a problem. Stages all look great, but don’t even think of straying off the liner path as the game will punish you as it would in a Battlefield style game which is at odds with the augs that ask you to experiment and explore new ways to progress. Black Ops 3 looks great, but the game does its best to only make yo see what it wants you to see.
The sound work in Black Ops 3 is outstanding. The voice work from each of the cast is fantastic and really serves to drive the game forward. You will find yourself wanting to keep plying just to hear more of the story. The only issue crops up in the audio department with the player character. In a first, you can choose a custom male or female character, and while this is awesome, it also shows some limitations as you can choose generic white male/female number one, or generic white male/female number one with a beard or different hair. The voice actors of each of these do a fine job, but have a hard time when any emotion is called for, especially when the main cast does a fine job at it. There where times, especially toward the end, where I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the stilted acting that I heard. Still, for most of the time the audio was on point and sounded great.
As many of you reading already know, I’m not much on a fan of multiplayer gaming anymore. Maybe because I’m older and don’t have the patience to master a game, or the fact that hearing some twelve-year old call me, and everyone else, the “N” word puts me off, It takes a lot to get me into an online game. Black Ops 3, to its credit, does do the multiplayer thing well. The standard multiplayer is a lot of fun and you’ll be seeing a lot of players using the new Bow specialist as that’s a lot of fun, even if the single player never gets to take advantage of it. The moves and abilities that you played with in the single-player tutorial now really come into play, but I still wish these multiplayer elements were better merged into the single-player experience. Where I did find a lot of fun in in the new Zombie mode Black Ops 3 offers up. I know it isn’t new, but now it has its own story and unique gameplay elements that it too is its on game.
You still have to hold out from wave after wave of zombies, but now the game is set in the 1920s and has a story wrapped around it, much in the same way Left 4 Dead does. You also get access to special powers and a transformation ability that are a lot of fun to use. Not only that, but there is a stellar voice cast here as well. Jeff Goldblum lends his unique voice and talents to the games story and you’ll want to come back to Zombie Mode over and over just for him.
In the end Call of Duty Black Ops 3 is a solid shooter in a series that is starting to show its age. I can easily recommended the game to longtime fans of the series as the multiplayer is still top-notch, but if you are new, or on the fence about the game there are far better options in terms of story and gameplay. The Call of Duty series really needs a breather and having two separate studios working on two different series is only going to hurt the game in the long run. Pick this one up if you can find it on sale during the Black Friday rush, but if you don’t, don’t feel bad as it’s just more of the same.
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