Call of Duty Black Ops could possibly be the best Call of Duty game in the series and it wasn’t even made by Infinity Ward

When Call of Duty Black Ops was first announce last year and that the development studio handling the title was Treyarch a universal cringe took place while everyone had their doubts (including myself) that Treyarch could actually make a Call of Duty that could live up to the Modern Warfare series, but here we are a week after the games release and I will have to say I am pleasantly surprised.

Right from the main menu screen you will be able to control your characters head and hands and try and breakout of your captivity.  Once you get tired of trying to break free you will have the option to Jump into Single Player, Multiplayer, and Zombies.

Call of Duty Black Ops single player storyline is a little weak; which is really my only issue with this game. It doesn’t have the intense emotional feeling that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 had where you actually cared for the outcome of the characters.  While there are some intense scenes in Black Ops, don’t get me wrong they just have a different feeling to them, especially when hearing  Ed Harris and Gary Oldman as a Russian bark orders at you from time to time.  It wouldn’t be a Call of Duty game unless there was a mission from inside the cockpit of a SR-71 Blackbird or Hind Helicopter, and in Black Ops you get to do both! In one of the missions you have to guide your friendly troops from a SR-71 Blackbird without being spotted. The single player campaign feels slightly shorter than most other Call of Duty games, but with everything else that’s included in the game right out of the box you will be busy for awhile.

Multiplayer brings back a lot of the stuff people loved from past Call of Duty games but also added so much more. Just about everything needs to be unlocked or paid for and what I mean by this is that in Black Ops besides earning EXP you now also earn COD money which is used to buy guns and all other attachments, Grenades, ect once you unlock them. Black Ops also brings some new game play modes, one which uses some of your hard earned COD money to play. This game type is called “Wager Match” where you have the ability to wager some of your COD money in a match to earn extra COD dollars. Some of the game types you can play under this new mode are “One in the Chamber” where you have 1 bullet, your knife, and three lives, each time you kill a player you are granted another bullet. Some of the another game types are “Sticks and Stones”, “Gun Game” and “Sharpshooter”. Some of the other additions to multiplayer are the ability to customize your guns reticle and create your own emblems from 100’s of different images, but of course it’s going to cost you to unlock different reticle colors, images, and layers for your emblems and guns. This time around you also have contracts that are available to you to complete they are broken up into three different class’s, they range from getting 2 long shot kills to getting 75 kills with a particular gun. Overall Multiplayer is very enjoyable and will have you playing for hours to unlock all the new emblems and guns.

This time around there are two Zombie maps already available to you right out of the box (Depending on game version) otherwise the second Zombie map can be unlock from beating the game or in the main menu screen if you are able to break out of your confinement and locate and hack the terminal that is located somewhere in the room in the main menu. (See cheat section for this game for help) The second Zombie map that you can unlock is called “Five” and is probably the best Zombie map that Call of Duty has offered. It takes place at the Pentagon and you are able to play as John F Kennedy, Nixon, Fidel Castro and (the other guy the Cubin missile crisis era) Robert McNamara all with their own funny little quips that will have you laughing as you’re blowing Zombie’s heads off. From the computer terminal you can also hack it to unlock the classic Zork text game and a top-down arcade-game version of Zombies called Dead Ops Arcade which seems to be a take on the classic arcade game called Smash TV.

In closing Call of Duty Black Ops is a solid game. If you are looking at getting Black Ops for it’s single player campaign you might be let down as the storyline is a little weak. If you are getting the game for the overall experience of Single Player, Multiplayer, and Zombie modes then you won’t be let down. Time for me to get back to slaying some Zombies and as the good John F. Kennedy puts it “Mankind must put an end to the undead before the undead put an end to mankind!”