Reviewed on PC. Also on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
A year after Modern Warfare 2, which was either the worst game ever or the besterest, depending on to whom you are talking, their age and the pitch of their voice; we have another Treyarch CoD game. But a funny thing happened on the way to the web forum. BLOPS isn’t all that much more than World at War, yet the internal combustion at Infinity Ward has guaranteed BLOPS would be released without being in someone else’s shadow.
The Single player campaign starts off in the early Sixties’s during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. You play (mainly) as Alex Mason, a bland Australian actor posing as a CIA agent (which is ironic since that also describes Mason’s voice over artist Sam Worthington) as he recounts, seemingly under duress, a number of his recent missions (it’s right there on the menus when you boot up so it’s not really a spoiler). With action splintered across several locations such as Cuba, Vietnam, some icy place in the USSR, some shanty town in somewhere or other; it follows the hyperkinetic story-telling techniques as used in MW2, but without the most important story info imparted to you in boring-as-plain-cardboard loading screens. The game never lets up on the excitement. It’s quite a contrast to the rather muted and serious MoH reboot.
There’s nothing particularly new in terms of movement or combat (you can swim now and then, but only when the game wants you to) but this is a formula adhered to by every clone game (Medal of Honor) so why shouldn’t Activision? The use of flashbacks and disorienting graphics perfectly complement the all-over-the-place story (i.e. it covers the silliness with a veneer of credulity like dressing a clown in a tuxedo). Does it make any sense? No. It’s no worse or better than MW2 it seems, but it is a pretty cool roller coaster ride if you don’t think about it too much. Even if every mission has someone to tell you what to do every step of the way. Even though the action is scripted you have giant HUD elements pointing you in the right direction and NPC’s reiterating your current objective as nauseum. Even more action and even more jam on the lens!
But because it doesn’t mess with success, it plays really well and Treyarch have managed to produce a great set of levels with less of the overt me-too rehashes of IW’s more successful missions. One new element pushed to the fore here are the missions where you control a vehicle such as a chopper or gunboat. They control as well as the rest of the game (something too many FPS’s don’t get right when they add a new element for one mission-think of Alan Wake‘s awful driving) although the controls don’t let you get into too much trouble. Yyou can’t crash your chopper, for instance. Thing aren’t as finessed as the vehicles in Halo:Reach for example). I rather enjoyed these almost fail-free missions a lot more than the skidoo/ seadoo levels of previous CoD games.
WaW’s standout contribution to CoD was always the Zombie mode that is unlocked once you’ve completed the single player campaign. It makes another appearance here and although I won’t spoil it for you, I will say it is definitely worth playing through the game to get to it. The character you play as nearly made me soil my pants from laughing so hard.
Of course, being a CoD title, there is a large proportion of the game’s playerbase who don’t care and just want Multiplayer. It’s probably the most balanced MP of any Call of Duty game to date with only a few Killstreak rewards ruining the game for the rest of us (those damn attack helicopters turning a close game into insta-lose!). I’ve had quite a bit of fun with MP though I can’t say I’ve had the burn I’ve had where I’ve NEEDED to play it a lot (ie several times over the course of a day, every day). I still anticipate playing it for a few more weeks at least (though I am tempted by the Vietnam expansion for Bad Company 2), but then I can’t see much else in the short term that’s going to compete with it. One nice thing- PC gamers get dedicated servers back (albeit heavily controlled) and gosh wouldn’t it be great if more devs took Epic and EA’s lead to introduce dedicated servers on more console games. CoD on consoles always had one thing going against it and that’s IW’s peer to peer networking code/ matchmaking is awful compared to Bungie’s. Bungie doesn’t have radio controller explosive cars, though. I love me some RCXD.
The presentation looks as good as previous CoD games (or as decent as my gaming rig can handle. Word on the streets is that the 360 version is slightly prettier than the PS3 (probably in such a small increment that it hardly matters) and the PC, if it’s beefy enough, would probably outshine the console versions, particularly the Wii (at least Treyarch caters for Wii owners). CoD sound has always been great. Stirring music and sound design is only let down slightly by a lead actor who hangs on to his accent with such a tenuous grip that you feel like giving him some supaglu. Enunciate, Sam.
So overall, it’s a good to great game (though not quite excellent). You will not lose sleep if you don’t play it, but if you have any interest in shooters, BLOPS has much to recommend it. If you think the score is low, get a life. It’s a very good game just not a must-play.
Controller1.com recommendation 2/3
Forget God of War, Mass Effect 2, Fallout New Vegas, Final Fantasy XIII, Halo 3, GT5, Kinect, Move or Donkey Kong. Black Ops is the biggest game of the year. And it’s here.
Biggest doesn’t mean it’s the best, just the biggest. But that statement doesn’t exclude it from being good. It is good. Very good. And a lot of fun to boot. With the implosion of Infinity Ward, Treyarch no longer have to toil in the shadow of the series’ originators but can release a game that is as anticipated and enjoyed in its own right. Black Ops shown how much they have grown since making PS2 versions of CoD games.
Black Ops manages to build on the hyperactive action sequences that Modern Warfare 2‘s single player campaign seems to be vilified for but managing to make the story somewhat rooted in reality. It’s still aimed at the same target market and pushes the same buttons (i.e. giving 13 year old boys something else to do with their hands) as MW2, but in a way that seems credible. Make no mistake, it’s still bullshit. Just more believable bullshit.
What mistakes have Treyarch learned from MW2? Dedicated servers on PC, for one, even if the lag so far seems about the same as you’d get on a 360. Also, the killstreaks seem to have been reigned in somewhat so it’s not camp-and-nuke like MW2 had degenerated into. OK, the radio controlled car with the explosives is going to become annoying for all, but you at least have to control it in order for it to be effective. The single player story still has the Michael Bays about it, but that’s no reason to hate it. Treyarch still relay a lot of their story via cutscenes during loading screens but they aren’t the dry snoregasms from MW2, but explosive cinematics in their own right.
Are we getting sick of annual servings of CoD? Black Ops says not yet.
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC, PS3, PS3, Wii, DS. Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
Mock if you must but for the next few days at least I’m going to party like it’s 2008. I saw a couple of cheap games that I’d been interesting in playing during a lull SO LONG AS THEY WERE CHEAP. The other week I saw Quantum of Solace and 50 cent Blood on the Sand for cheap (AU $30 ea) and I thought “why the fuck not?”
I needed something relatively simple to cleanse my gaming palette after the majesty that was Uncharted 2 and before Modern Warfare 2. Something cheap, short and can’t be looked down as anything other than dumb fun. Quantum of Solace fits that bill quite well. I like James Bond films but I still don’t really know what to make of Quantum of Solace the movie. The title comes from an Ian Fleming short story where Bond is told a story by some stuffy diplomat-type over a cognac, a story about some couple who grew to hate each other. And it’s really quite dull. If I was Bond in the story I would have shot the guy telling the story for being boring. So the movie QoS followed on from 2006′s excellent Casino Royale movie. And then proceeded to ignore all of the lessons of Casino Royale. People didn’t want far fetched Bond plots in 2008.
Why is this important? Well, this game is actually two thirds a Casino Royale game and one third a Quantum of Solace game. A bit of context doesn’t hurt. So you take the Call o Duty 4 engine, give it to Treyarch who were making the better-than-everyone-was-expecting Call of Duty World at War at the same time as this and what do you get? Something that’ s okay rather than great.
As so many games from movies do, any location that appears in the movie is fair game for a full on corridor shooter fest that takes 20-30 minutes to complete. The final scene from Casino Royale is turned into the intro level to this game. Move through level, kill enemies, pick up cell phone’s convenient dotted around the map for intelligence useful (but by no means vital) to your mission. So despite this using the CoD4 engine, it doesn’t necessarily play just like Call of Duty. You run and gun in much the same way but you don’t have melee in the same way. If you get close to an enemy, you can click on the right stick and to trigger a quick time event where you have to press a face button (a different one each time) to takedown an enemy in a nicely animated unarmed
attack.
It feels as though this game took a lot of cues from the first Uncharted game, especially with 3rd person cover and action scenes. You can balance on beams (looking like Treyarch re-purposed some manual meter code from one of their Tony Hawk ports) jump over things and make leaps of faith just because the game says you can press ‘Y’ to jump. You have some hacking minigames which aren’t anything special but then this is a game designed for a very casual audience. That’s code for saying Normal is actually pretty easy.
So how does it actually play? Well it’s fun for a bit and it is thankfully fairly short. In so many ways you think you are playing a game from five years ago in terms of design and quite often the visuals. It also doesn’t run at Call of Duty 4′s standard 60fps frame rate, so it’s hard to see where the extra fidelity is going.
Presentation is fine for a licensed game but it isn’t going to wow anyone in this day and age. We have many of the cast members from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, including a bored Dame Judi and Dame Daniel. Gunfire sounds are somewhat lacking, however, but at least the James Bond theme is used in a more restrained way than some of the EA games on PS2.
So overall- cheap filler when you want something quick to snack on in between the ‘great’ games but there’s no reason to go out of your way to play it.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
My recent DLC binge netted me the Lost and the Damned and the CoD World at War Map Pack 2. I had intended to skip the GTA DLC since I had not come close to finishing GTA IV before getting sick of it and moving on to fresh gaming pastures. I think the reason I got it was some need to use up my Internet Bandwidth quota since 25GB a month goes a long way if you aren’t into Bit Torrent. Infamous also made me feel that going back to the slower moving GTA IV engine might be a step backwards but I tried it anyway.
I like it so far. I’m only a few missions in but it seems to be a nice take on Liberty City without feeling like a simple retread of IV.
The storyline with the bikers seems a lot easier to get into, less introspective than Niko and Roman, played less for laughs and more for drama. The guys of the Lost MC are fucking assholes of the first order but they make great videogame characters. Of course as a member of a motorcycle gang, you will be riding around on a hog for most of the time and unless you preferred these in GTA IV, they take a while to get used to riding these and firing a shotgun at the same time. Its also got that custom GTA difficulty about it but then I’m finding I’m enjoying it in this post-infamous world.
Johnny Klebitz, your hero for want of a better word, is a little more obviously fucked up thank Niko. He’s a biker and he just wants to keep to business. The leader of the gang, Billy, has just come out of rehab after being busted and is aching for action, such as starting turf wars with rival gangs etc. This being a GTA game, there ares no tea parties, group hugs and wondering if this is what its like When Doves Cry.
Also, despite me saying I’d had enough of WaW with a PC playthough, a 360 playthough and months of multi on both systems, I got the extra maps anyway. And because I’d been away from the multiplayer for so long, I immediately sucked more than a Wii game called Let’s Tidy Up After Ourselves in the NPD top 10. But after relearning not to suck, I’ve started to enjoy the new maps and not just stick to the three zombie maps. We have Corrosion, which seems to be some sort of refinery level where its Soviets v Nazis; Banzai, aan outdoor jungle level with a wooden bridge, waterfalls, tunnels and bamboo huts; and my favourite, Sub Pen, a really nice US verses Japan level that’s small and intimate but large enough for small or medium size groups.
Its interesting to note how in both of the map packs released for WaW so far, Treyarch have shied away from the larger tank based levels which were the more popular ones in CoD3. The tanks in WaW are just irritating since they dominate the levels and the anti-tank options are limited. The jury is still out on dogs but they are preferable to fucking helicopters, which is what I dread most about the upcoming Modern Warfare 2.
Just as a site update: The site has had fewer updates due to my work moving offices this last week. My studio is in disarray so there’s nowhere for us to record a podcast yet. Hopefully we can have something for you by next week. The first one might be a tad echo-ey.
Reviewed on PC (Single Player), Xbox 360 (multiplayer). Also on PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP. Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision.
So, despite the dire predictions of Call of Duty World at War being a total disappointment compared to Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, Treyarch have surprised us all and delivered a worthy successor to the most popular CoD game of all time.
CoD WaW follows a US soldier in the Pacific being led by the hand by 24’s Keifer Sutherland interspersed with playing a Russian soldier in the final assault on Berlin. It doesn’t try to out do CoD4’s sniper mission or the Gunship level. It has its own slants to those CoD4 signatures and adds a tank level and flying boat level. The shooting is EXACTLY the same as that in CoD4, which is what everyone who loved CoD4 but wanted more asked for.
Keifer’s gravelly tones tell you to shoot that. You shoot it. He tells you to shoot that, you shoot. “Those Jap bastards,” he says and you aim and open fire. Flames are a big part of this game. You wield a deadly flame thrower in some levels, including one level where it subs for the machine gun on a Russian tank. The flame thrower is a really nice weapon- much more usable than the one in Gears 2. The weapons are typical WWII fare with KAR98, M1 Garand, Thompson SMG, etc but they handle very nicely. There are a few large battles where progress is a little more difficult since Treyarch love their “infinitely re-spawning enemies until you cross a threshold” trick but overall the level designs are solid and fun to play. You may not have been to these locales, but if you’ve played previous CoD4 games, you have played them.
You can play the campaign either by yourself or in coop mode and once you’ve beaten it you get the Zombie mode “Nacht der Untoten,” which is basically a short version of Left 4 Dead. It is awesomely fun and highly recommended to give it a go. Pity there aren’t more levels but I guarantee this will be expanded upon at some stage. I’ve found that I’m unable to get online in the PC version so I’ve been playing a few rounds of this before I boot up CoD4 every night. I love it.
Multiplayer offers the usual modes, Search and Destroy (CS), Capture the Flag and Deathmatch modes. I mainly play Team Deathmatch but it compares quite favorably with CoD 4 and CoD3 multiplayer (CoD3, also by Treyarch did feature excellent Multiplayer modes). If you’ve played CoD4 MP, then you know what to expect. Just substitute Recon plane for UAV, Artillery for Airstrike and Dogs for choppers. That’s right, get to 7 kills without dieing and you can unleash the dogs. So long as you have no problems shooting digital dogs in the head, you’ll have a blast. Think of it as retribution for all the times in Nintendogs when your Alsatian took a crap when you were walking it. One thing that makes me think of CoD3 is the fact you can drive tanks in multiplayer. Overall, highly enjoyable. They even used Keifer to announce “Team Deathmatch” when you play as an American.
Graphics are excellent. I mean, they are jaw droppingly gorgeous on PC and console versions. Even in multiplayer, the 360 version ran at a smooth as butter 60 frames per second. Sound is also excellent though the weapon are a bit weedier sounding than CoD4 (but at least the sounds are different). The Flash cutscenes opening each level are also interesting and different from what you’d expect in a WWII-set game.
Since FPS WWII games set in the Pacific are pretty thin on the ground, the only competition is really the two rather poor EA Medal of Honor games (Pacific Assault and Rising Sun) and this game just wipes away all memories of those travesties. So, no it isn’t better than CoD4. It is close in many respects and doesn’t fail in any one particular area. That said, its an entertaining game in its own right
controller1.com rating 2/3 (or 3/3 if you love Call of Duty games and can’t face any more CoD4 MW) As Keifer says when the Marines win a multiplayer game “Out-fucking-standing!”
Well, I would be telling you how awesome this game is (PC version tested). But I can only tell you how awesome the Single Player is. It is an excellent single player campaign so banish thoughts that Treyarch couldn’t deliver in the wake of the juggernaught that is Inifnity Ward’s CoD4.
Except the multiplayer (which is by all accounts, awesome for those who can play it) is busted. I cannot get as far as making an online profile so I can play. Instead the game continuously cycles between trying to connect and make an online profile and error messages. I patched the game but it made no difference. Googling found it was a common issue in the Beta and others have had problems with retail. I then stopped worrying and tried to continue the SP, but the patching meant I had to restart the level rather than continue where I had gotten up to (This should never happen in a retail release BTW). I even had my machine just shut down twice whilst playing.
So my first PC game that I’ve bought on ages that I wasn’t also planning on buying again for console or play on my iMac (Spore) is likely to be the last. I want to play the Multi so much and this is highly frustrating.
Treyarch. You nearly pulled it off. You almost laid to rest the spectre of Call of Duty 3 (which at least had great MP). Instead I will make a pinata in the shape of your logo. I will dip it in petrol and set it alight before I start beating it with a flaming baseball bat. I will then douse the flames of the Treyarch Logo Pinata by pouring a bucket of Horse Urine on it and then offering the smoking remains to some very large and cynical hogs.
