Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a low point for the series, sacrificing the improvements made in Black Ops 6 for a directionless, boring co-op focus. The campaign fails to balance its conflicting tones while sacrificing the kinetic nature and creativity of previous entries. Multiplayer and Zombies both lean far too heavily on nostalgia, while featuring the noisiest UI in recent Call of Duty releases.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
Developer: Treyarch
Price: $70
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC
The publisher provided an Xbox code for review
The Black Ops 7 campaign is a follow-up to the Black Ops 2 campaign, using the events of the previous games to create a loosely connected series of hallucination missions, which fill in the gaps between linear levels and the open-world area of Avalon.
This year’s entry is designed for co-op first, a decision that ultimately results in a flat, uninspired campaign. With the missions designed around co-op, each level is much wider and larger than previous entries in the series. This results in longer stretches between action, as well as less dynamic combat arenas, since the campaign can’t funnel you into an area for a more designed sequence.
Black Ops 7 also fails to mix up the gameplay, losing the one-off stealth missions and fun ways to move throughout the world, like the Casino heist in Black Ops 6. The more exciting sequences come from the hallucination missions, which are a result of your squad getting hit with the deadly poison gas, Cradle. These missions do have some fun moments, like giant machetes falling from the sky, but mostly just funnel directly into a prolonged boss fight where you have to continuously shoot a big enemy with a big health bar, a trite staple of first-person shooters.
The narrative also flatlines almost immediately. The villains, Emma Kagan and the Guild, receive zero character development, with the motives for their terrorist acts that will kill millions swinging between purely financial motives and vague pining about paving the way for the future. Some aspects of Black Ops 7 maintain its Jason Statham action-movie tone from previous entries, but the squad banter during a mission leans far more on the MCU-esque “that was a close one” quips. Either of these tones on their own could work, but they conflict too much to work together.
The biggest failure of the bunch is Avalon, which serves as a hub area between some missions and as the playground for the “Endgame” mode. This is a large open map, with small points of interest scattered throughout. In a competitive multiplayer environment or a battle royale, the long stretches of empty environment between areas might still be exciting, but in a purely PvE mode, it’s boring to run from place to place. The Endgame mode is an extraction shooter, but instead of there being squads of other players that can kill you, there’s just a bunch of players running around, doing their own objectives. The objectives are pretty simple and flat, and the bullet sponge nature of the Black Ops 7 enemies makes each gunfight take far too long, making the whole experience feel tedious.
The multiplayer offering is more in line with what you would expect from a Call of Duty experience, but it’s still a below average experience. The guns in Black Ops 7 suffer from design fatigue. The futuristic setting means futuristic guns, which all start to blend together. While you can tell the difference between an SMG and an assault rifle, outside of obvious differences like burst-fire versus full-auto, weapons within a single category look and ultimately feel extremely similar. Swapping between guns and grinding for camos is just less enticing when the weapons don’t feel meaningfully different to use.
The user interface is incredibly crowded, with far too much on the screen to focus on the action. Some of it feels redundant, like having both a compass and a mini-map, while other aspects are overdesigned, like the equipment wheel that blows up your three pieces of equipment to take up a healthy amount of the corner of your screen. The maps are fine, but the futuristic setting continues to undermine the creativity, with one too many white-walled rooms and a tech-company feel.
There are obvious generative AI-created challenge cards featuring a generic cartoon art style and some obvious tells, like six-fingered hands. While the inclusion of gen-AI content is frustrating on its own, it’s emblematic of the experience of Black Ops 7. The rewards are visually unappealing, and the feeling is that this experience was not made with the level of detail and focus it needed.
Zombies is a bit hard to judge right out the gate, given there’s only one map at launch, which is a letdown. After a return to round-based, contained maps in Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7 launches with a single map, inspired by the launch map from Black Ops 2, a controversial map at the time. Instead of one large area that is interconnected and you can explore, Ashes of the Damned features a half-dozen smaller areas that you need to drive between in a truck.
Black Ops 7 is a Major Step Back for Call of Duty
You lose out on the elaborate pathing and fun discoveries by spreading the map out like this, not to mention adding in unwanted downtime as you travel from place to place. There is a single round-based map as well, but it’s just a siloed off section from Ashes of the Damned, making for a lackluster experience, even if the gameplay of Zombies feels just as good as it did in Black Ops 6.
The first season of Black Ops 7 is set to add seven more multiplayer maps, seven more weapons, and a new Zombies map sometime in early December. While that doesn’t help for the purposes of this review, it’s worth pointing out, even if that doesn’t address some of the bigger issues.
Black Ops 7 is a massive falloff from the last Call of Duty entry and a low point for the modern entries in the series. The campaign is a boring slog, sacrificing fun gameplay and creativity for a co-op mode that lacks any real direction or identity. Multiplayer is bogged down by similar feeling guns, a crowded UI, and sloppy AI-made rewards. Zombies is light on content, and the one map that is there fundamentally misunderstands what makes the mode fun in the first place. The only saving grace for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is that when the next entry releases in 12 months, its failings will be largely forgotten, along with the rest of the experience.
The Final Word
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 stumbles hard with a directionless co-op campaign, bland multiplayer, confusing UI, AI-generated filler, and a disappointing Zombies mode. A major step down from Black Ops 6.
MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
