Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review – Mixed Bag of Fun

The immediate sequel to last year’s Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7 ditches the late 20th century Cold War shenanigans of its predecessor and fast forwards to a drone-heavy near future setting with new weapons, upgrades with a futuristic bent and a quaint game design that splits the content into three silos depending on what floats your boat. 

After delving into all three of its content modes – the single player campaign and its subsequent open-ended Endgame, Multiplayer and round-based Zombies mode, here’s our Black Ops 7 review where we suss out if it’s worth your money.

The single player campaign is arguably the oddest one ever made in the Call of Duty franchise. Even factoring in the trippy missions in previous Black Ops games, the one that appears in Black Ops 7 takes weirdness to a whole new level.

Call of Duty Black Ops 7 review – What’s old is new – the Single Player Campaign and Endgame

At first glance, it looks like a fairly normal near-future campaign with you as one David Mason, son of the late protagonist Alex Mason from the original Black Ops out to stop a futuristic version of the Guild crime syndicate seen in Black Ops 6 that has now turned into the archetypical evil megacorp complete with faceless mooks, bipedal robot infantry and a legion of aerial drones. 

As with any Black Ops game, things go pear-shaped and the player, including his trio of squad mates, gets exposed to a bizarre psychedelic pathogen that gives them truly vivid experiences that translate in the most bizarre missions ever seen in any Call of Duty campaign.

One of the missions has you flinging building-sized machetes from the sky to take out a boss. Several of the missions have you revisiting missions from the original Black Ops but given a bizarre twist like breaking out of a prison with fellow inmates but they get swapped out with zombies. Things get even weirder from there on in.

Enemies are the usual sort, constantly spawning until you manage to take out a certain number or objective in the game or pass a certain point with the typical tactical acumen of a sack of potatoes. While in previous installments of Call of Duty have your teammates fighting alongside you, Black Ops 7 oddly has your teammates appear in cutscenes but disappear entirely during the missions.

Having them as bullet sponges alongside you would have been helpful but it’s just you this time around which makes for a bizarre game design decision. There is also the option to play the campaign in co-op but finding someone to trudge along with you in this mode with you is a rarity if not a test of friendship and patience.

Completing a mission gets you tangible rewards like skins and weapon blueprints that can be used in multiplayer, Zombies mode and Warzone which justifies you going through the campaign at least once. However, the difficulty spikes in the single player campaign makes this a challenge.

Each mission has to be finished in one sitting as there are no quicksave points. What’s worse, the single player campaign needs an online connection to be playable and cannot be run offline which is baffling.

Once you’ve finished the campaign, you unlock Endgame mode, an open-world PvE experience which resembles Modern Warfare 3’s Zombies mode where you’re tossed in an open world map with multiple respawning objectives and legions of enemies. Once you’ve had your fill of carnage, you’ll have to extract at one of several dropship points that let you escape the map. Fail to do so and you end up losing everything you gained in your short jaunt on the map.

The Endgame map can be traversed in its entirety but is divided into zones of increasing lethality such that new players have to grind their way to be able to survive in the highest level zones which have far tougher enemies but more rewarding loot. 

It’s an amusing distraction but there’s little impetus to aggressively explore barring the urge to level up as there’s no further plot to explore in Endgame. They have however added new content and are looking to do so over time so the jury is still out on Endgame but at present it’s still mostly a chase to snag experience points. Fortunately, the most recent update to the game lets you directly access Endgame mode without having to complete the campaign which is a lifesaver for those who have a day job. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review – Multiplayer and Zombies

The cornerstone of any Call of Duty game, the multiplayer mode this time around has ditched the irksome sliding and dolphin diving mechanics of the Black Ops 6 which had players literally sliding around corners as if the floor was coated with oil. However, this gets traded for something else that is slightly less irksome – wall jumps. If you time it right, you can hop onto a wall and perform an acrobatic leap up to traverse parts of the map. Resourceful players have found ways though to simply bounce off these spots to perform trick shots or to confound marksmen which leads back to the same problem that made Black Ops 6 a frustration in multiplayer mode.

In multiplayer, you get your usual choice of a primary weapon, a sidearm, a non-lethal and lethal throwable as well as a single power-up. 

Primary weapons cover the usual gamut with modernised analogues of the AK and AR-15 including a plethora of bullpup assault rifles. Beyond the customary assault rifles, you get sub machine guns, launchers, marksmen and sniper rifles, shotguns and oddities like antitank launchers and a crossbow.

Like previous outings you have to keep using the gun in firefights to level up and unlock more attachments. However, Black Ops 7 changed this formula somewhat as you can now prestige your guns to unlock special attachments. 

For the uninitiated, this means that you have to max out a gun’s level and then voluntarily reset it to zero to unlock a new attachment which is easier said than done with some of the harder to use weapons like sniper rifles or handguns.

These attachments are somewhat of a mixed bag though with some fundamentally changing the purpose of a weapon while others simply improve its existing capabilities such as reducing its recoil. It’s a fun distraction but it does mean that you will have to grind a weapon more to fully unlock its potential.

Throwables also get unlockable upgrades as well. Frequent use and successive kills unlock additional features. An example is the usual ‘Assault Pack’ upgrade that lets players restock their ammunition. Deploy it enough times and you can get an upgrade that lets it be used more frequently in a match or alternatively spawn with lucky ammunition that gets you more points when you successfully perform headshots. It’s a fun diversion but adds even more stuff to chase and level up beyond just weapons.

Multiplayer maps cover a gamut of new and old including classics like Nuketown though a learning curve is still needed to grasp the nuances of the new maps which include a shipyard, a solar farm and more. 

Once you’ve tired of multiplayer, you can opt for round-based Zombies with the first map Ashes of the Damned offering a massive, multi-step easter-egg campaign that needs a wiki to actually traverse as the steps are both obscure and challenging in equal measure.

The new map with season one, Astra Malorum takes place in an abandoned observatory that also has a massive easter egg to unlock. As it stands, Zombies mode is a fun diversion with mates and the chaotic nature of higher levels in the game which have literal armies of zombies out for your blood makes for hilarious if challenging matches.

Should you buy Call of Duty Black Ops 7?

The core game loop for Black Ops 7 has you shooting up stuff in as skillful a manner as possible to level up both yourself and your weapons and chasing prestige levels to unlock additional content be it more camo skins for your weapons, more player skins and attachments.

There’s a ton of prestige levels too – specifically ten prestige levels with 55 levels each along with a ton of weapon attachments to prestige and camos to unlock in each game mode – Endgame, multiplayer, Zombies as well as Call of Duty’s successful odd child – Warzone which is free to play.

As it stands the single-player campaign doesn’t seem as polished as previous iterations and the multiplayer and Zombies mode are both solid, if rather familiar jaunts for seasoned Call of Duty players.There’s a few gameplay twists here and there though you’re mostly playing through to discover more about the Zombies backstory by unlocking the easter eggs in the game. Endgame is a fun jaunt for a few times but needs more content to traverse the game beyond just levelling up your weapons and prestige levels.

If you’re a Warzone player, you’ll likely need Black Ops 7 to gain better access to the new weapons as all older weapons from Modern Warfare 2, 3 and Black Ops 6 are considered legacy weapons and ostensibly won’t perform as well as the new guns in Black Ops 7. 

Casual players new to the franchise may want to start off with one of the prior outings which have more robust single player campaigns though hardened Warzone players will likely need this to remain competitive while those who appreciate the Zombies experience may find this worth a whirl. 

Black Ops 7 review copy courtesy of Activision. For more details please visit https://www.callofduty.com/