Developers Treyarch and Raven Software are drawing water from a nearly empty well with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. The newest entry in the long-running franchise is a direct sequel to Black Ops 2, a game released more than a decade ago.
If you haven't played that game, you'll probably be able to follow along with Black Ops 7's story just fine. It's a shallow adventure about shadowy criminal groups and false flag attacks that focuses more on tying Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 6 together than telling a coherent tale of its own.
Last year's Black Ops 6 was a genuinely entertaining Cold War-era supersoldier thriller that reinvigorated the series. But Black Ops 7 is cerebral and recursive, an ouroboros of nostalgia attempting to capitalize on warm feelings for Treyarch's long-running franchise by placing old characters in wacky situations that feel like a horrible game of Mad Libs. The game is a complete misfire that doesn't understand what makes the predecessors it's pilfering from great in the first place.
There are glimmers of hope in the latest iterations of the multiplayer and zombies modes, as a handful of loadout changes and bigger maps shake up the gameplay in a real way. Nothing feels fundamentally different from last year's release, though, and Black Ops 7 simultaneously manages to feel like a rote reproduction and a step down from Black Ops 6.
I never want to play through another fear gas nightmare sequence again. Activision
For the love of god, stay away from the Co-Op Story Campaign
Call of Duty's single-player campaigns have never been high art. This is a series of video games that roleplay as action movies, full of thinly veiled American military propaganda. Occasionally, a generic army man mourns the death of another main character, and you feel something approaching a flicker of sadness (which is then snuffed out in a hail of gunfire moments later).
These campaigns often fail to connect on an emotional level, but they're reliable thrill rides through and through. It's cathartic to throw caution to the wind in order to gun down mooks, rain helicopters from the sky and take down the "bad guy of the year."
Black Ops 7's Co-Op Campaign fails on the most basic level: It's not even gratifying to blast apart baddies throughout the game's 11-mission-long story, because everything feels painfully goofy. The narrative rushes headlong into the Black Ops series' worst mistakes time and time again.
One second you're plodding through an empty open world, the next you're plunged into a goofy plant-zombie grotto. Spooky. Activision
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