And I Want to Paint it Black -- Call of Duty: Black Ops

It’s that time of year again: Activision has released a new Call of Duty game! That time when gamers come together, shoot each other for XP over Xbox Live, and swear loudly in one voice at that cheating douche who keeps using the noob tube. Some find time for the single player campaign, but those people seem to falling by the wayside in favor of twelve-year-olds that shoot you in the face and call you all kinds of bigot-y names. It is a joyous time indeed.

Anyways, this year’s entry in the Epic 2010 FPS Sweepstakes is Call of Duty: Black Ops. Developed by Treyarch (who, apart from Call of Duty, also makes Activision’s Spider-Man games), Black Ops takes place in the 60’s, and involves many of the conflicts during the era of JFK and The Who. You’ll invade Cuba during the Bay of Pigs, battle against the Russians in almost every corner of the globe, and you bet your sweet ass you’ll listen to CCR’s “Fortunate Son” while landing a helicopter in Vietnam (it’s exactly as clichéd as it sounds). They didn’t manage to work in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that’s neither here nor there.

Every Nam movie ever? Eh, sorta.

Rather than retelling major battles (although there are a few of those), Black Ops spins an original narrative about conspiracy, subterfuge, and about everything else you would expect thematically from a game called “Black Ops.” The plot concerns Alex Mason (Sam Worthington, in his Sam Worthington-iest), a soldier who wakes up in an interrogation room and is grilled about a series of numbers. Alex doesn’t know anything about the numbers, and has to relive several of his past missions in order to make sense of everything. As a plot device to trigger the game’s playable sequences, it’s not a bad concept. Unfortunately, most of the game’s between-mission scenes generally end up playing out something like this:

DEEP VOICE: Tell us about the numbers, Mason!

MASON: F@$# you! I don’t know any f@$#ing think about any f@$#ing numbers!

DEEP VOICE: We know you know about the numbers, Mason!

MASON: The numbers don’t make any f@$#ing sense! I don’t f@$#ing know!

DEEP VOICE: Tell us about that one time you infiltrated that one place!

MASON: That one time at that one place…

[play some mission somewhere]

Seriously. The story would have been more interesting if it weren’t presented in such a monotonous manner. Many reviewers have taken the time to point to the mystery in this campaign and compare it favorably to the “disorganized and confused mess” that was the Modern Warfare 2 single-player (conveniently forgetting all of the praise they had heaped on it a year before). By the time the end rolled around for me, however, I found I didn’t care about the numbers, Mason’s character, or much else that was going on in the story. Good in theory, meh in execution.

This is where most of the story takes place, accompanied by Bourne Supremacy-esque seizure flashbacks. It's riveting.

Which is a shame, because the missions themselves present several interesting scenarios. In one you command an SR-71 Blackbird to guide troops through a snowstorm, and then switch perspectives to the troops on the ground. In another, you pilot a gunboat while working your way though Vietnam. My favorite has you escaping from a Russian POW camp; with its gradual progression in guiding the player from hunted to hunter, it shows a sense of pacing and payoff that many of the missions later on in the campaign lack.

It’s this lack of pacing that ultimately hamstrings my enjoyment of the campaigns. For all Modern Warfare 2’s narrative quirks (I am a rather large fan of the MW2 campaign and all of its huge, why-is-this-happening-who-cares-it’s-awesome moments), it had a taught, super-fast pace that kept the player racing along from one enormous set piece moment to the next. Black Ops wants to have those moments, but doesn’t make them big enough. There are a couple cool spots (that I won’t spoil), but most of the time you’ll be going down a linear corridor (your allies are helpfully marked “Follow,” as though you had a choice in the matter), shooting everything that moves; none of the huge moments ever seem awesome enough to justify some of the poor level- and gameplay-design decisions that must be worked through to get to them.

There are a few water-cooler moments, like this chopper-piloting bit, but they're few and far between.

Which brings me to the biggest gaffe in the Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign: the return of the infinitely-spawning enemies. This design was eliminated in Modern Warfare 2, but is now back with a vengeance. I’ll illustrate this point with a story. There’s a mission where you play through the Battle of Khe Sanh. During the level, I took command of a stationary machine gun as I attempted to fend-off Charlie. My allies were hunkered down beside me, taking an occasional shot and shouting directions: “Up there by the trench line! Beside those barrels! Three o’clock!” All the while, the enemy kept pouring down the hillside toward me. No matter how many I shot, there were more to be found, and my squad’s incessant calls of “By the trench line!” were starting to grate at my nerves. After five minutes of shooting dudes, I realized that

a) There would be no end to this limitless supply of enemies,

b) The enemies would only stop spawning when I crossed some pre-determined line in the level, and

c) This is really, really stupid.

So I did the only thing I could do: I charged the hill and tried to hide until the game would stop spawning foot soldiers. From there on out, I lost any trust I had in the game’s campaign. I was no longer interested in planting myself in cover, clearing the enemy out one-by-one, and moving forward only when I felt safe; I knew that I would find myself in a position like Khe Sanh, where my efforts of playing smart would only result in wasted ammo and 15 extra minutes I would throw away before my inevitable respawn. In a way, it’s probably my own fault that I didn’t enjoy the campaign as much as I did, but my hatred of clown-car enemy-generation is so great that I refused to buy into the game’s fiction.

There's a calliope playing around here somewhere, I just know it.

I did enjoy my time with the multiplayer component, however. Black Ops takes everything that made Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer such a hit and adds a few of its own special herbs and spices (it also fixes many of the glitches and balancing issues from MW2; I’ll have to take the internet’s word for it, because my time with that game was relatively glitch- and exploit-free). In place of a traditional Level Up And Unlock Some Junk progression system is a system where players earn currency called Call Of Duty Points, or COD Points (no word if TROUT and HALIBUT Points are coming in a future DLC release). COD Points are used to buy guns, scopes, and camouflage once the player is at a certain level, adding a degree of customization to progression; rather than unlocking a new sniper rifle that you may not ever use, you can choose to only purchase gear that will be useful to you.

Black Ops also lets players spend COD Points to customize their characters in myriad different ways, from creating a personal emblem (built in a robust graphic editor), to choosing a new targeting reticule for a gun’s scope, to marking weapons with clan tags. Just about every facet of Black Ops’ multiplayer can be personalized, and many will while away the evening customizing their avatars for maximum cool factor and sex appeal.

You can tweak just about everything in the multiplayer.

All of the old game modes return from Modern Warfare 2, along with a few new ones in the form of Wager Matches. Wager Matches are on-the-side modes different from the regular games of Headquarters and Team Deathmatch—players wager COD Points that they will be in the top three, adding a gambling appeal to the content. Players can compete in four different match types: Sticks and Stones (which gives the players a crossbow, throwing knife, and tomahawk), Sharpshooter (which cycles through weapons on a set time interval), One in the Chamber (each person has a gun with one bullet, and subsequent kills give more bullets), and Gun Game (players start with a handgun and climb their way through 20 weapons with each kill). I spent most of my Wager Match time with Gun Game, and though I don’t think it’ll become my primary way to play, it was a fun diversion from the main game.

Where Black Ops’ multiplayer shines the brightest is in its map design. I enjoyed the crap out of Modern Warfare 1 and 2’s multiplayer, but there were always a handful of maps that I felt were just plain bad. I never got that feeling from Black Ops; there were definitely a few maps I was less skilled at, but there were absolutely none that made my blood boil the way Bloc or Estate did.

My favorite map: Nuketown. Think that one place in the fourth Indy movie, sans fridge.

All in all, Black Ops was a worthy rental, though I’m not sure if I’ll make the conversion and purchase it. The multiplayer was fun enough, but the single player wasn’t quite up to snuff for me; a few design issues and an uninteresting story dampened the impact that it could have had. Fans of the Call of Duty series may want to look into Black Ops for its balanced and satisfying Xbox Live play, but those looking for a quality, replayable solo experience may want to test the waters before fully taking the plunge.

Love is a Battlefield – Battlefield: Bad Company 2

As I've mentioned in previous entries, the original Battlefield: Bad Company is one of my favorite games. It combined solid shooting mechanics and a unique multiplayer mode with a strong feeling of levity; the explosions were enormous, the characters quipped and cracked-wise, and the experience was leisurely and pleasantly unforced. The game's quirks and unusual gameplay mechanics (the Vita-Chamber-style respawn system, the team-focused online modes, the large amount of ammo each gun could hold) gave Bad Company a unique flavor, no small order for a modern military shooter in an increasingly crowded market.

Unfortunately for me, many gamers did not share my sentiment about the game's atypical designs (yeah, it sounds up my own ass, but it's true). Bad Company was released a scant eight months after the genre powerhouse and sales behemoth Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and many gamers who purchased it expecting a similar experience received a rude awakening. For many who craved the corridor-driven, fast-paced action of Modern Warfare, this was the Wrong Way To Do It.

I preface this entry with those last two paragraphs on Bad Company only to help set up my disappointment with the direction taken by its sequel, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. This is a game that, by all means, should have been unarguably better than the first game, rather than fitfully so. Granted, many of the complaints that I have are pretty specific to me, so I don't expect many people to necessarily agree with me. I'm just explaining why, when you talk to me about Bad Company 2, I often give an exasperated sigh.

This is the box art from the first game. Notice how less-angry it looks from the box at the top. This should give you a good idea of the tonal differences in both games.

But onto business. Bad Company 2 promises more of the explosive action that helped make the first one a reasonable hit, and boy does it ever deliver. The destruction has been given steroids (the kind that help our Olympic athletes reach new peaks of excellence), and now buildings can be fully razed to the ground. The single player mode also receives a fair amount of explosive set piece moments, and the sound design continues to make sweet, sweet whoopey to the eardrums.

Multiplayer has also been expanded upon. Before there was merely one mode with eight maps (Gold Rush, a game where players take turns attacking and defending crates of gold), and DICE added in the classic Conquest mode and eight Conquest-specific maps through a patch later on. Now, there are four modes of play: Conquest (teams compete to capture bases on the map), Gold Rush (renamed Rush; we'll discuss this in a bit), Squad Deathmatch (a team-based take on deathmatch-style games, with four teams of four competing to get to 50 kills first), and Squad Rush (two teams of four play a smaller game of Rush).

The game benefits from more varied (and much more beautiful) environments than the previous one; lush jungles, harsh deserts, and the freezing heights of the Andes await.

All of this looks to make a game that is, on paper, unequivocally superior to the first one, but it doesn't take too long for a few ointment-flies to rear their ugly heads (and, by metaphor extension, wings). The trouble, for me, started when I first booted up the single player mode. After playing through the first game's campaign several times and loving it, I fully expected to be thrust back into the mix with Sarge, Sweetwater, and Haggard, wrecking things and chatting about Truckasaurus Rex. Imagine my surprise when the game starts in 1944 on some Japanese-controlled island, where you have apparently been tasked with some gritty, espionage-y mission to find a scientist (though my cynical side says that they just wanted to reuse assets from 2009's Battlefield 1943).

The gritty, espionage-y stuff doesn't stop once you leave Japan and arrive in the present day. Oh no. Because many players were put-off by the corny jokes and antics of the first game (including, notably, Morgan Webb in her 2008 review), DICE decided to change its tack and go for a more serious, dramatic story. We rejoin Preston Marlowe and crew (with no attempted explanation of what happened after they supposedly left the army with a truckload of gold at the end of the first game) as they attempt to track down a missing super weapon that is being sought after by Russia (who, according to the loading screen for the mission, have managed to simultaneously invade Europe, South America, and East Asia; you'd think this would be a point of discussion). We're treated to a Clancy-esque tale of drama! suspense! betrayal! sacrifice! The results couldn't be more generic.

Grim, military faces. Get used to them, they're not going anywhere.

Some gameplay tweaks also detract from the first game's light, sandbox-y fun. The Vita-Chamber respawn system has been replaced by the industry-standard Reload From The Last Checkpoint system, which is fine in theory, but gets fairly aggravating. Unlike Modern Warfare, it's generally pretty hard to get an idea of how many bullets you can take until you croak, which lead to a couple moments of experimentation that had me waiting (and waiting!) for my game to reload; I eventually stopped wanting to take chances, and instead chose to grind through the corridors in a slow, safe, partially-dull manner. The under-barrel grenades that made the first game such an explosive playground are back in much shorter supply as well (the control scheme has also been reworked to make them more of a Strategic Option instead of an Oh Hell, Why Not). The upshot is that the single player is significantly less fun to play than the original.

Thankfully, the multiplayer picks up the slack significantly, though not enough to truly be declared the winner in my eyes. The small tweaks are enormous: players can now spawn on individual squad mates instead of a generic "Spawn On Squad" system, the classes have been rebalanced and play nicer together (particularly the Medic, transforming the game into one my roommate calls a First Person Healer), and the destruction makes for different crate-defending tactics. Bad Company 2 cleans up a number of flaws that its predecessor had, and makes it a fairly streamlines experience.

Multiplayer is back and still fun, but there are a few elements that keep it from being all it can be.

But then it also introduces a few flaws as well, most notably the presence of lag EVERYWHERE. Even with some recent patches, it always feels like there's a disconnect between the controller and my character. I thought that the difference was all in my head until I fired up the original Bad Company and found the game to be much more responsive (and even that's pokey compared to Modern Warfare and Halo). Map repetition is also a drawback; Bad Company 2 launched with only five maps in the main multiplayer modes. As someone who likes to play this game nightly, this is WAY too few to prevent a certain feeling of redundancy from setting in; by the time EA rolled out some DLC that increased the number to eight (which is how many the first game came with out of the box), I was so sick of the initial five that I played ad nauseum since launch day that it was too little, too late.

I'm being harder on this game than it deserves. It's ultimately a good product, with a robust multiplayer component, an ambitious single player game, and DICE obviously gave their all to create the best game possible. I'm also willing to acknowledge that many people who buy a Battlefield game will do so for the multiplayer, and won't event give the single player a second (or ever first) look. That said, this is a game that I find difficult to enjoy on the same level as the first. Perhaps I set myself up for this one, but is it too much to expect for a sequel to build on the strengths of its predecessor? This is one of those games where I can't wait for the next one to come out; not because I want to play more (although I do), but because I can't wait for the developers to get it right this time.