14 DAY TRIAL // 
Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a multiplayer game that also happens to have a single-player campaign, and there is no doubt that very soon that second part will be gone. So, the question is really simple. Is this the best Black Ops game released until now? The answer is that it depends on who’s asking, if you're 30 or 15 years of age.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember all that’s been done in the Call of Duty franchise. There are so many titles that even someone who plays games for a living has to stop from time to time to check Wikipedia.
I don’t know how many of you still remember that the first Call of Duty was built by a new company named Infinity Ward, which was made up of people from another studio named 2015. This might also sound familiar because they are the ones who started the original Medal of Honor series.
There were some creative differences at that time, and one of them was the central character of the games. The Call of Duty guys wanted people to feel like they are just a small cog in a really big machine and not a one-man army. As you can probably tell, that is no longer true. In any case, it’s easy to spot the pedigree.
Now Treyarch enters the scene, a studio that was initially tasked with building games in the Call of Duty franchise that would feel the void between two launches of Call of Duty from Infinity Ward. The first games were not even made for all the platforms, and they weren’t terribly good either.
Somewhere along the line, Treyarch figured that they can do better than just fill in a vacancy and released the excellent Call of Duty: World at War, which took everyone by surprise. Then, a couple of years later, they launched Call of Duty: Black Ops, which was even better. Call of Duty: Black Ops III is still trying to capitalize on that experience, but they are a long way from their humble beginnings.
Story
When one of your thoughts during a game is “I just want to get over this so that I can return to my normal life,” that’s not a good sign. Somewhere along the storyline you’ll start asking yourself about what everyone is doing and stop wondering about their motivations.
When Call of Duty moved to the modern era, a lot of people were not all that happy, but it soon became obvious that it was a good thing to do. But then Call of Duty moved to the future and things started to get strange, for both the players and that story.
I’m not sure who’s doing the writing for these games, but two things are obvious. They have no faith in the human race to improve with time, and the future that they imagine is not something that normal people would aspire to. It’s bleak, full of terrorist or bigger-than-life characters that want pretty much for the world to end.
“If you hear a writer talk about any of these things and you happen to be someone of importance at a major publisher like Activision, just kick them in the teeth.”
The bad guys seem to follow a similar trend of ridiculousness we see in older films. An evil man wants to crash the world economy, and he has an intricate plan to do so, but he doesn’t see that he’ll also go broke in the process. The same happens in Call of Duty games, with evil people doing evil things that would eventually hurt them just as much.
And this reminds me. Someone, please stop the writers when they come up with stories that involve corporations that have carte blanche in world security, privatized military, and access to all of the cool tech just because they are a “defense contractor.”
If you hear a writer talk about any of these things and you happen to be someone of importance at a major publisher like Activision, just kick them in the teeth. You’ll actually do them a favor and improve their writing in the process.
Gameplay and Multiplayer
The gameplay in Call of Duty didn’t get a lot of improvements in the last decade, with most of the gameplay keeping players with a huge reticle on the screen. This is not a problem per se since you can’t really do that much in an FPS, but it’s becoming tiresome.
In this year’s installment, the characters get some extra powers, mostly because they get a chip in the head that allows them to do some cool stuff remotely. These “powers” vary from mission to mission, but they are helpful in many situations, like destroying a group of drones, setting fire to enemy robots, or controlling automated sentry guns.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III introduces a new concept that might seem weird at first. Players will be able to unlock all the missions and skip to end. You can play any of the single-player missions once you unlock the central hub, where you find everything you need.
This is also the first game that allows players to choose from a man and a woman, for the single-player part, and from an assortment of pre-defined heads. This is not Fallout 4, but at least it’s something.
Which brings us to the multiplayer, and once you’re in that part of Call of Duty: Black Ops III, you’ll quickly understand why it’s obvious that this is a multiplayer game and not the other way around. There are so many things happening in there that even listing them all is difficult.
Basically, there is the regular multiplayer mode, with all the familiar variants like Team Deathmatch, Free-for-All, Domination, Demolition, Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint, Capture the Flag, Search and Destroy, Uplink, and Safeguard. On top of these, there are various customized modes, and three Bonus ones, Gun Game, Ground War, and Mercenary Moshpit.
Another novelty in the game is the introduction of specialists, which can be unlocked as you progress through the multiplayer and get better. They seem like specialized units, but in the end they are just regular characters that have a number of special powers, which need to charge, and you use regular weapons in the meantime. And if you’re wondering whether there is a guy with a bow, then the answer is yes.
And then there is the Zombie mode. It started like a small level in one of the older games and grew in a full-fledged gameplay mode. It’s difficult to make any kind of comparisons, but the closest one would be the Left 4 Dead series. You cooperate with other players to survive as long as possible in a close off level from incoming zombies. Some shuffle along, others are faster, and in the end everyone will die.
There is a second story arc attached to this mode, with some known actors playing the introduction for the characters, but who wants to know details about a parallel universe in which a zombie apocalypse took place 70 years ago.
Graphics and sound
Call of Duty: Black Ops III feels new, even if it’s not. The engine does its job well, and console players should not have anything to complain about. We tested the game on PlayStation 4, and the gameplay remained smooth for most of the time. As usual, it’s on par with the other current-gen titles and it’s pretty enough that it won’t draw any unwanted attention to it.
Even if the story is bad, we must imagine that the actors have been so well paid that they just had to do their jobs well. You’ll probably notice Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck, Battlestar Galactica), Ben Browder (John Crichton, Farscape), Christopher Meloni (Elliot Stabler, Law & Order), and quite a few others. All of these people are professional actors, and that is obvious, even with a bad script.
The Good
- Solid visuals
- Massive multiplayer
- Really fun zombie mode
The Bad
- Boring and confusing storyline
- Short campaign
- Forgettable characters
Conclusion
As for the single-player experience, I doubt that many people will remember it by the time the next game is released. The studio lost some of its mojo from the first Black Ops, and they are trying to do more complex scenarios in order to compensate. It’s not a bad story, but it’s forgettable, and that might be even worse.
