Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 review

[Administrator]

A day will dawn when the muscularity and variety of Call of Duty's multiplayer component aren't enough to compensate for the muddled single-player - when the euphoria of a cross-map Tomahawk kill fails to outweigh the leaden writing, the hand-holding and the tedious inevitability of an on-rails vehicle sequence. That day isn't today, but perhaps it isn't far off.
While ostensibly a question of hardware, Activision's decision to chop the campaign from the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Black Ops 3 sends a fairly unambiguous signal about which parts of the package it considers worth the asking price. The story itself - a fretful piece of fourth-wall performance theatre that riffs on ethical and existential anxieties raised by the advent of military bio-augmentation - suggests a developer casting around for a sense of purpose. It alludes to the franchise's ongoing design hang-ups so frequently and explicitly that this is as much a cry for help as a battlecry. The new cybernetic abilities at least add nuance to larger firefights, and are the basis for some barmy, extremely self-aware level design. But at the end of the day, Black Ops 3's campaign embraces more of Call of Duty's old shortcomings than it casts aside.
The restoration of four-player co-op - a much-touted feature - underlines all this. There are moments when the size of the environments and spread of auxiliary powers accommodate real teamwork - one player hanging back to remote-possess a trundling caterpillar mech, while another deploys nanobots to lock down infantry so that the remaining two players can wall-run into their midst, brandishing SMGs. But ultimately, the effect of having more players around is to make environments feel smaller, the rigid gating mechanisms all the more aggravating (there's the odd invisible barrier, even, while an NPC finishes uttering some forgettable line of dialogue). And climatic battles too often default to chipping away at a juggernaut with a ridiculous health bar, rather than inviting you to make clever use of all the superhuman abilities at your disposal.
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