Call of Duty: Black Ops III Review

Operating in the comfort zone?

Call of Duty has seen a few rough spots over the console transition, before last year’s Advanced Warfare got things going again. Do Treyarch continue to be the standard bearers of this venerable, or are standards slipping?

Story:

Like Black Ops 2 before it, Treyarch’s latest game jumps well into the future from the previous game, dumping the near-future technology for nano-bots, robot soldiers and genetically enhanced soldiers with a ‘DNI’, or Digital Neural Interface. Which basically means you’ve got computers in your brain! This future tech allows for numerous little gameplay enhancements, but otherwise the story can be both confusing and a little generic.

Black Ops 3 also has even less to do with the previous game than its predecessor, to the point where I’m not even sure why it’s still called ‘Black Ops’. But, that apart, the cast of characters, including your team of Hendricks and Kane, and good-guy-gone-bad Taylor, are more interesting and nuanced than previous games have managed.

And for anyone worried that some slower moments might ruin their game, Black Ops 3 still has an explosive, action-packed campaign for the vast majority, with its fair share of memorable moments and huge explosions. The only other area you could criticise is the fact the story is a little bit less ambitious than Black Ops 2 – this time out, don’t expect any branching story paths or deep moral choices to be made as you blow up half of the world around you.

Gameplay:

Whilst the story may be less ambitious, the same can’t be said for the gameplay, which makes enough subtle enhancements to really mix up the play style. Firstly, many of the levels feature some much larger areas which allow you to choose your path forwards. Whilst you’re not as mobile as last year’s Advanced Warfare, you can still double jump and wall-run early in the game, and many levels feature pleasing amounts of verticality and alternate paths through small sections. On tops of that, there’s a huge number of cybernetic abilities to choose from, tailored to your personal style. Would you prefer to hack into robots, disabling them? Or perhaps sneaking past them by cloaking? Or turn them to fighting for your own side? All of which can be possibilities depending on the upgrades which you choose over time.

What everyone gets though, are two different visual modes. One acts as a thermal imager, which isn’t particularly useful beyond a few canned situations. The other, however, presents a tactical overlay over the battlefield, and is much better than any other implementation of a similar system that I’ve played. It was incredibly useful having huge amounts of data on screen. Enemy types, numbers, weak spots, distances and so forth are seamlessly integrated into your HUD, and it’s all presented in a supremely usable fashion that I got used to almost immediately. It’s a huge help, especially on the higher difficulty levels, and genuinely makes the game feel different from other shooters.

The 11-level campaign is also (somewhat) more generous than Call of Duty has become known for. Some of the levels last for nearly an hour, and I’d say even the best players would take 7-8 hours to get through on the normal setting, although, as ever, most of the achievements are linked to playing on hardcore, veteran, or the new difficulty, realistic, where a single bullet will see you restarting at the last checkpoint.