It’s time for this year’s Call of Duty game to drop and while Treyarch has usually been pretty solid on all points with their releases, Black Ops 3 stumbles a little.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Developer: Treyarch
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 copy for review
Call of Duty plots have never been much to talk about other than the fact that they exist but I always enjoyed Treyarch’s work with the series which is why it bums me out that Black Ops 3 has one of the worst campaigns in the series.It has some solid set piece moments but none of them come close to the series’ high points and the story barely feels like a continuation of the Black Ops series besides two off-handed references to Menendez and NOVA 6. The plot itself is nonsensical. You have no idea where it’s going most of the time, but its nonsensical nature makes more sense once you discover a twist so hidden only a handful of players will discover it. It’s a clever inclusion but that doesn’t excuse an otherwise disappointing campaign. I can’t find a single character to care about and the protagonist himself is a cruel piece of shit.
The campaign is a bit more engaging this time around at least with the inclusion of challenges, a leveling system, a safe house in which you can set up various loadouts, and the new cybernetic abilities. You have three separate ability trees to play around with: control, chaos and martial. The first two ability trees focus on making stuff die or explode whereas the last does that to a lesser degree. You’re likely going to use control or chaos for maximum explosive murder. The abilities are a neat addition to the game and the cooldown on them is fast enough that you’ll be popping them quickly. My issue with the ability system is that you can only use one at a time. When you hop into a mission you’ll select one of the three abilities you want to start with and the only way to change it mid-mission is to find a resupply cache and swap it out there. By the end of the game I had the control tree maxed, and the other two nearly there but I only ever really used control since it has skills that can instantly kill robots & humans and it has the skill for taking over enemy turrets; it’s easily the best ability in the game. I would’ve liked to use the other abilities for certain scenarios but it wasn’t worth swapping out control for the time it would take to find the next resupply point. Eventually there is a way to cycle between all three ability trees but it requires you to level up to rank 20 in the campaign. To put a little perspective on that, I finished the game on hardened (which gives an XP boost) and completed nearly all of the challenges for each mission yet I only managed to reach level 12 by the end.. There’s not much left to replay aside from collecting the last handful of collectibles;grinding out missions and collectibles to unlock a feature that should have been available at the start, is not fun.
Black Ops 3 features four player co-op and it’s both amazing and the most infuriating thing in the world. When you have a solid team together you’re going to have a blast but the game straight up punishes you for playing with awful players.When one player dies without getting revived then it’s game-over for the entire team and the game restarts from the last checkpoint. This means if you’re stuck with some moron who thinks they can jump into the middle of a group of enemies, on veteran difficulty and, unsurprisingly, dies then you better jump in there too and try to revive him or else enjoy restarting from that checkpoint multiple times. You could argue that restricting co-opto only playing with friends or just find a new group without any idiots,but it shouldn’t have to work that way. If that person dies they should be out of the game until the next checkpoint is hit; the rest of the team shouldn’t be punished for the stupidity of one player. It’s an annoying part of what should be a fun part of the game.
Now what’s perhaps the most interesting thing the game does with its campaign happens after you complete it; you quietly unlock a new mode called “Nightmares.” In this mode you’ll replay through the campaign but this time around the missions have been rearranged and the game now features a narration between two characters discussing the events you did during the missions; oh yea, and all the soldiers have been replaced with zombies. Instead of the NOVA 6 gas killing thousands of people it instead unleashed the undead and you’ll find yourself being absolutely swarmed by them in these missions. This mode also plays significantly different from the main story mode since you’ll only be able to acquire weapons that are dropped by zombies as a sort of power-up along with your cybernetic abilities. This change forces you to play incredibly conservatively which feels super weird after playing through the same missions that forced you to play fast. Unlike the main campaign which could be played solo, this mode actually feels meant for co-op due to the stupid amount of zombies it tosses at you. I’d have moments where I’d run out ammo long before clearing a room and had no weapon drop from a zombie; having a few other players tagging along definitely helps improve your chances of survival.
Thoughts on the multiplayer side of things is the only reason people read these reviews or even discuss Call of Duty so let’s dig into that by saying it’s a mixture of good and bad ideas, but mostly good. First off it’s not as fast as last year’s Advanced Warfare which really annoys me as hours into the multiplayer and I’m still instinctively clicking in the thumb stick to boost around. The jetpack is nifty and the wall running is really fun but I would’ve really liked to have the boost here. Melee no longer being an instant kill is likely to polarize the community and while I’m not a fan of the change I’ll take unlimited sprinting as a fair compromise. Seriously, with the unlimited sprinting, wall running, and improved mantling, Black Ops 3 plays so much smoother and it’s a blast. The downside to all this is for players who prefer the slow game of a sniper are likely to feel left out since the maps don’t really offer much in that regard and with everyone moving at the speeds they are now sniping becomes a bit more challenging.
The Pick 10 system is of course back (I still prefer Pick 13 from AW) and for some odd reason the unlock token system is too. Treyarch introduced this with the first Black Ops and it still makes no sense having to level up in order to unlock gear yet not be able to use them unless you drop a token to “buy” them first. It leads you to likely wasting countless tokens on weapons you might not enjoy. If they really wanted this system to work then every item in the game should be available right from the start so you can spend tokens on whatever the hell you wanted. The only real way to test weapons without spending tokens is to hop into the campaign, go to the safe house, set up a loadout, and hop into the virtual simulator to test out just that specific loadout and then quit back out to the safe house to swap anything. The unlock token is just a frustratingly stupid system that does the exact opposite of what it claims to do. There would be less of an issue here if Treyarch included the firing range from Advanced Warfare to test out weapons. However, due to the nature of three studios working on separate and different Call of Duty games, the consequences of this becomes more apparent in Black Ops 3.
Zombies is back and you’re either still in love with it or apathetic towards its existence. The pulp ‘40s setting does help set it apart visually from past iterations however it still follows the same routine of boarding up windows, and getting pissed at your teammates for ditching you without alerting you to an incoming horde of zombies. The new ability to turn into a lovecraftian creature helps spice things up as you gain tentacle and electricity attacks that helps open up areas in the game. The surprising part of zombies is the ability to customize the weapons that spawn on the wall and the perks that you’ll get; there is also a level system and challenges to complete as well. As you play through the game, you’ll unlock gumball perks that you can equip into your loadout and those will be the perks that’ll spawn when you activate the gumball machine. These are interesting additions to the zombie mode but I would’ve been fine if they hadn’t been included. Of course, my number one issue with this mode comes back to not having some sort of host migrate feature. When the host quits the game ends and the fact that we’re still dealing with this in 2015 is mind boggling.
Dead Ops makes a return after a brief break and I wondered why because it looks and plays practically the same as it did with the first Black Ops. I like Dead Ops but it quickly becomes repetitive, even when playing with friends. With no significant change added, I found it kind of difficult to care much for it. It also doesn’t help that you have to jump into the campaign to play it instead of finding it in the zombies menu which would’ve made more sense.
In a package featuring a story mode focused on mind controlling AI and zombies in pulpy 1942, the weirdest addition is the new free-run mode. In it you have a handful of stages to run through as you compete for the best time. Just imagine Mirror’s Edge without the combat and tasked with running through some difficult environments. This mode also helps familiarize yourself with the movement system which helps with in the multiplayer where your skill is dependent on how well you’ve got a handle on the new traversal controls. It’s pretty nifty, but definitely comes off as a minor distraction and not something that’ll spin-off successfully as zombies did.
When playing through Black Ops 3, I wondered if there were too many modes in the game. Because it’s stuffed with things to do, it feels like certain parts, mainly the campaign, suffered. Don’t get me wrong, the multiplayer and zombies are still the highlight of this package and they definitely deliver but this is an interesting case of a game having too much content. If you’re only interested in the multiplayer I suppose this isn’t a problem for you, but this issue becomes apparent if you have any interest in multiple game modes. A perfect example of this can be seen with the game’s three separate leveling systems for the campaign, multiplayer and zombies mode. Having to level up to unlock the same gun you’ve already unlocked in two other modes and then having to level that specific gun to unlock its attachments (again) comes off as a tedious chore and slightly sours the experience.
The Final Word
Black Ops 3 might be a package of things I love and hate, but it’s mostly good.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
