Call of Duty: Black Ops ... the action ping-pongs between Cuba, Russia and Vietnam
It's right about the time you're shooting a well-known communist leader in the head that it all clicks into place. Here we are in Call of Duty land again, where insane Boy's Own battle action and precise historical detail weirdly conjoin. This long-running series of million-selling military shooters is essentially the Inglourious Basterds of the gaming world a strange, ridiculous, entertaining, fanciful and bloody celebration of man's interest in violence. And it still works. By some considerable margin, Black Ops works.
For the campaign mode, you play almost exclusively as Alex Mason a special operations veteran caught up in the Bay of Pigs invasion and then cast into a covert war that quickly descends into a fraught psychological odyssey. As the action ping-pongs between Cuba, Vietnam and Russia, an interesting tale plays out concerning dodgy CIA dealings, Nazi experiments and communist expansionism, all bubbling beneath the accepted "facts" of the era. It's similar to the Modern Warfare titles in that it actually boils down to a classic manhunt in the end, but while some elements get lost in the rush, this is easily the most cogent and well-constructed story we've seen from this franchise in a number of years. Although it's not quite the time-travelling psychedelic drug orgy some were expecting, there are several well-handled plot twists that make Modern Warfare's narrative battering ram look even more brutish and incoherent.
Splattered across the game's expansive Cold War canvas is a very familiar Call of Duty experience. Once again, we're shooting our way along linear paths, more often than not following a lone indestructible character as he barks out orders. Navigational options are kept to an absolute minimum, a straitjacket that feels almost suffocating at times, especially when we're shown astoundingly rich and detailed environments like Vietnamese jungles and the inner chambers of the Pentagon only to be told we can't go anywhere.
But this is the CoD way, and operating within the constraints of the series, Black Ops is a master work. Whether you're busting out of a hellish Russian prison camp or creeping through Viet Cong tunnels with just a flashlight and a revolver, Treyarch knows how to grapple the drama and spectacle out of every choreographed encounter. What this game is, in fact, is a ceaseless barrage of brain-pulverising set-pieces. There is Hue City on fire, with US choppers strafing overhead like monstrous dragon flies; there is the raid on the Russian launch site, its towering rocket looming beneath a sickly orange sky; and there is the shootout on the rooftops of Kowloon city, with jumbo jets scorching close overhead as bullets fly. Black Ops doesn't so much capture your attention as bludgeon it into bruised acquiescence.
Within the cacophony of each mission, you will find the usual buffet table of interesting weapons. There are the faithful regulars of course, including the M16, the FAMAS, AK47 and Skorpion machine pistol, but Treyarch has also trawled the archives to find some fascinating contemporary rarities, including the box-like G11 and the powerful but slow H510 shotgun. Enemy AI is decent, too, especially the Russian spec-ops forces who roll and leap around the screen like circus athletes but circus athletes with semi-automatic rifles. If they get close enough, they'll rush at you with savage speed and purpose, a rare behaviour for computer-controlled fighters and a welcome respite from the usual peeking-out-from-behind-cover behaviours.
Part of the success of the game, though, has nothing to do with its relentless action: the comparatively authentic characterisation is vital. None of the people in Black Ops are as interesting as Modern Warfare's astoundingly moustached Captain John Price, but at least the lines are punchily delivered and sometimes even move beyond gritty military doublespeak. Treyarch has also made agenda-setting use of full performance capture (when an actor provides motion capture, facial capture and dialogue simultaneously), to provide genuinely expressive virtual thesps capable of glowering with anger or cowering in fear with something approaching humanity. We're not out of the uncanny valley yet, but we can at least occasionally glimpse the upper slopes on the other side.
At the same time, this game is chock full of cinematic references which, as Rockstar discovered via GTA's endless pop culture recycling, adds bags of credibility to the script. Our first experience of Vietnam is so fecund with clichés from the topless soldiers laying out body bags in the sun to the trippy southern rock soundtrack it's like mainlining every 'Nam movie ever made in one three-minute mega-fix. And then we get more precise allusions to the likes of Apocalypse Now, Platoon and The Deer Hunter, the latter skilfully pastiched in a nightmarish Russian roulette sequence. There are also references to Lost, 24 and countless other conspiracy dramas. Most importantly, the writers have learned from TV structure, constantly reminding players where they are and what they're doing in this savage globetrotting adventure; and that's what Infinity Ward failed to do with its at times incomprehensible Modern Warfare sequel.
Largely, apart from an overly simplistic Lockheed Blackbird sequence, the title's forays into alternative game mechanics are successful. There's a brief air combat sequence in which you pilot a Huey as it blasts ground forces before taking on a couple of Russian copters; there's also a decent enough boat section, where you whiz down a jungle river, shooting stuff up. The controls are pretty cumbersome and the effect rather shallow and inconsequential, but these asides add a little variety and certainly don't outstay their welcome. Indeed, with the whole campaign coming in at around six to eight hours of gameplay,
nothing outstays its welcome though Black Ops does at least put up more of a fight than the spectacularly brief Medal of Honor.
The multiplayer component is, as you would expect from this series, skilfully constructed and breathtakingly expansive. There are 14 maps, designed to explore and support a range of playing styles. The standouts, at least in terms of visual style, are "Jungle", with its winding paths, tree houses and hanging vines, and the brilliant, "Nuketown", designed to resemble one of those simulated neighbourhoods constructed in remote locations by the US military to test the effects of nuclear weapons. There are eerily authentic fifties houses and vehicles, and the streets are lined with spooky shop window dummies. The level was apparently inspired by the nuclear explosion scene in Indiana Jones 4 though it also feels a lot like the scary test zone featured in Alexandre Aja's Hills Have Eyes remake.
Elsewhere, there are military industrial complexes such as "Launch" and "Radiation", and dense urban settings such as "Villa" and "Havana". All offer decent combinations of cubby-holes, sniper vantage points and open assault arenas though there's a greater emphasis on claustrophobic, close-quarters choke points than previous
games. Add in some interesting new equipment like the camera spike (which lets you plant a spy cam anywhere on the map so enemies can't sneak up on you), decoy bomb and motion detector and you get a game that's really exploring the strategic depth of the multiplayer experience.
Amid the usual collection of deathmatch and capture-the-flag variants, the new "wager" modes, which let you use a virtual currency to bet on the outcome of themed bouts, are the stars of the show. "Gun Game" and "Sharp Shooter" are both gripping variations on an entertaining theme: getting players to use as many different weapons as possible within a single match. In the former, you're given a better gun after each kill, and the action ends when one player succeeds with all 20; in the latter, each player is given the same weapon type, and this is swapped randomly every 45 seconds. With both, your whole tactical approach has to remain fluid as you constantly switch between, say, inaccurate machine pistols and unwieldy sniper rifles. The result, especially when a bunch of players find themselves in an enclosed space just as the weapon type changes to rocket launcher, can be much hilarity. These are just great party modes.
The other two are more demanding. "One in the Chamber" gives you just a single bullet per kill, plus melee attacks, and each player has three lives in which to fight it out. Matches are tense and guarded, with lots of creeping around interspersed with sudden explosions of impulsive action. "Sticks and Stones" could well be the cult favourite, giving players just crossbows, tomahawks and ballistic knives with which to do battle.
Again, this one's all about technique and accuracy as players learn to squeeze the absolute most out of the unique properties these weapons offer. The crossbow could well be the most inspired addition to the FPS armoury since the sniper rifle. If you hit someone with an explosive bolt, there's a five second delay before it explodes, so your victim has to suffer the indignity of waiting for their messy demise. However, they also get the chance to leg it toward an enemy and take them out too a guiltily satisfying achievement. Together with the tomahawk, which can be bounced off the ceiling to take out enemies hiding behind cover, it's going to figure heavily in the game's amusing Theatre mode, which lets you replay, edit and share favourite gaming moments.
And then you have zombies. Treyarch has taken the unlikely co-op "horde" mode it bolted on to World at War and made it even more of a compelling laugh-fest with new weapons, enemies and traps for your undead prey.
POSSIBLE SPOILER: But the piece de resistance is the unlikely cast of playable characters: you're not fighting as anonymous soldiers, you're controlling ex-presidents and politicos like John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro, all of whom spout familiar sound bites as they hack down staggering Nazi aggressors. It's a neat, knowing inversion of the campaign's serious Cold War setting, and it nicely recalls Patrick Swayze's bank robbing gang in Point Break with their over-sized president masks. There's also an extra mode named Dead Ops, a dual-stick top-down shooter in the style of Robotron: 2084 or Smash TV in which you fight through a series of single-screen locations, competing for cool power-ups like flame-throwers and rocket launchers. Awesome fun.
Call of Duty: Black Ops quite probably represents the pinnacle of the linear military shooter experience and you wonder where the sub-genre can go from here. Treyarch's game is exhilarating and beautifully orchestrated, but it feels like a full-stop, it
needs to be a full-stop, because toward the end of the campaign, bombardment fatigue begins to set in. As CoD players we have travelled the world, killing people, following orders, hunting down madmen
many of us have had enough. Call of Duty should go out on a high, or at least come back totally re-invented. Perhaps that's what we'll get with Modern Warfare 3. But for now, and for the next two-years of multiplayer engagement, revel in this game's mastery of its well-trodden domain.