Call of Duty: Black Ops

Earlier last week I finished playing the 7th installment of the Call of Duty video game series, Black Ops, for the Playstation 3 platform & I'm pleased to announce that the overall gameplay did not disappoint this particular gamer in the least bit.

Publishers of Call of Duty, Activision decided to use different developers than those of it's very successful & most recent predecessors, COD: Modern Warfare 1 & 2 to assist with the creation COD: Black Ops. While I did notice differences in the two gameplay experiences, that had more to do with the the fact that I'm comparing vastly different titles (in terms of storyline). Black Ops (developed by Treyarch) is NOT a sequel to Modern Warfare 1 nor 2 (developed by Infinity Ward).

Yet with Black Ops it didn't seem to me that there was any noticeable drop-off. My guess as to why they used another company would be that Activision wanted to ensure that there wouldn't be too long of a lag-time between the respective release dates of their various COD titles, so it makes sense to use more than 1 company for logistical purposes - that & the old adage of 'never putting all of your eggs into 1 basket,' of course — word is... there is a continuing beef among Activision & Infinity Ward.

In further comparison, the Modern Warfare titles featured a better variety of distinctly different battlefields & missions across the globe, while Black Ops seems to concern itself with fewer world-wide locales & focuses on the Cold War, so it seemed like I was fighting many battles in similar locations for much of the gameplay experience.

But again, to be completely fair, both Modern Warfare 1 & 2 were fruits far different from other releases in the COD series. Black Ops & most older COD titles involved more of a historical representation of World War II events, whereas Modern Warfare 1 & 2 had no such restriction during creation, so the sky was very much the limit. Modern Warfare 1 & 2 focused on more recent aspects of war during present time, so this isn't a criticism, but more of an observation rather.

I was slightly disappointed to with the rather short single-player campaign mode (much like Modern Warfare 1 & 2) & resulting ho-hum final battle, but giving rise to the extreme attention to detail required to produce such titles, I guess I can accept the somewhat flat ending of it all.

There are; however, other gameplay modes that become available upon the successful completion of a single-player campaign in addition to what has become customary for the COD series, a multiplayer mode which opens a new world of additional gaming to compensate for the shorter storyline of the single-player campaign.

Above all, I'm certainly glad I bothered to wait in line with at least a couple hundred other idots at midnight on November 9th, to pick-up my copy of the popular game. Initially, I planned to simply wait until getting off-work the following afternoon to grab my reserved copy (like the rest of the world, lol), but the closer it got to midnight, the more my anticipation grew...

It was worth the anticipation & any previous fan of this particular series of military based, role playing games should again, come away with a well-rounded (albeit virtual) sense of the battlefield experience & have tons of fun achieving each & every mission's objective. I eagerly await the release of the next Call of Duty title, Modern Warfare 3 in 2011...