Friday 8 February 2013

Call of Duty: Black Ops II Campaign Review (PS3)

"You can't kill me!"


Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012) is the highly anticipated sequel to Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and ninth overall game in the Call of Duty series following Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011). The quote I used to open this review may be recognised as a memorable quote from Sergeant Frank Woods, a main character from both Black Ops and Black Ops II but I really intended it as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the juggernaut that is Call of Duty. Yes, once again, my review is late but as with Warfighter, I wanted to put the game through its paces. Plus, with the new features of nonlinearity and multiple endings, I had to go through multiple play-throughs to be able to write a comprehensive and factual review. 

SPOILER WARNING: There will be spoilers ahead.

Campaign


Story
Black Ops II takes place in two distinct time frames, one set between 1986 to 1989 in the dying days of the first Cold War, and the other set during a new Cold War taking place in 2025. The game follows David "Section" Mason during the 2025 timeframe and occasionally time jumps to the 1980s where you primarily play as his father, Alex Mason. Apart from their familial relations, the two timeframes are connected by a Nicaraguan narco-terrorist named Raul Menendez, first encountered by Papa Mason and later serving as the antagonist to Mason 2.0. The 1980s portion of the game charts his rise to power while providing the backdrop for his actions and motivations in taking down the United States and China as well as his obsession with making Section and Woods suffer. Fast forward to 2025 and Menendez is the head of Cordis Die, a worldwide political movement seemingly inspired by the Occupy movement (and completely unaware that they are just pawns for a completely different objective, much like the Occupy movement).

Partly written by David S. Goyer of The Dark Knight fame, Black Ops II tells a fairly compelling story regarding families and revenge that spans across two Cold Wars. However the campaign does suffer at several points due to some questionable plot points and an over-reliance on action movie clichés. The main gripe I had with the story was with the inattention to continuity. While the last Black Ops hinted that Mason, Hudson and Weaver were being hunted by the CIA for going rogue, Black Ops II shows Mason and Hudson happily working with the same organisation that tried to kill them. In addition to that, there is no mention of Weaver or whatever happened to him. Furthermore, within the continuity of the game itself without considering other games within the universe, there is also a distinct lack of explanation of where Alex Mason has been for thirty years if players chose not to kill him in a particular mission. While it does make sense to withhold the fact that he survived that encounter for a stronger effect during the reveal, the writers should have at least explained during that scene or in another post-credits scene what he had been doing up to that moment. Nor is there a clear explanation as to how Mason, Woods and Zhao survive their time in the Afghan desert following their betrayal. 

Overall, the plot rests on shaky propositions at various points in the game but that can be forgiven since most books, movies and games require an extremely specific series of events for the plot to progress. However, there are a few points that I wanted to raise as they kept nagging at me as I played through the game. 

First of all, there was no explanation as to how Menendez built up such a sizeable fortune to be able to afford secret manufacturing facilities, the ability to purchase schematics for what should be classified military material and managing to build up an army that can basically take on the Chinese and Americans without any sign of exhaustion. I know that for convenience sake, the writers just made Menendez a billionaire/trillionaire but it'd be nice if they provided some explanation to his wealth. Furthermore, at no point does the game actually explain how the Celerium device works. Is it a supercomputer capable of hacking military networks? Is it a hard drive that contains a virus capable of infecting the system? The closest we get to an explanation is the scientician that claims that is has more processing power than the combined power of the US military network. Then again, at various points of the game, it is referenced as the Celerium worm. How does a worm have processing power? Are they the same thing or are they different components? I must say, I'm terribly confused about the whole thing. 

Third of all, there's the issue of Chloe "Karma" Lynch being the only person in a world of approximately 7 billion people (a rough estimation of the global population in 2025) that knows how to stop the Celerium device/worm. Sure, it's to make the situation more tense and place an emphasis on the possibility of multiple endings based on the player's decisions and actions throughout the game, but still, it's a little far-fetched. I'm probably being pedantic with this query but what was with Mullah Rahmaan, the leader of the Mujahideen forces, being secretly allied with Menendez? It does help to make Menendez seem more influential but realistically, an Afghan freedom fighter like Mullah Rahmaan would probably not ally with a communist sympathiser like Menendez considering the communists put Afghanistan in that whole mess to begin with. Lastly, I'd like to point out that the protagonists of the game have got to be the worst operatives in the history of special operations. If they don't get their cover blown by walking into traps, they run into situations gun blazing when they could easily sidestep the enemy or take them out slowly and methodically. Then, there's the glaring example of Woods and Mason, two highly trained and highly experienced operators, handing their prisoner a pistol (with magazine removed to taunt him) without doing a brass check to see if there was one more round in the chamber. Needless to say, it comes back to bite them in the arse, rightly so in fact. 

If disbelief is suspended however, Black Ops II gives a fairly compelling story, possibly the best in the series so far (which isn't saying much though). The characters, although representing the stereotypical action hero badasses on the American side and representing the typical maniacal villain that has serious issues with dealing with grief, are very well fleshed-out and represent a major step forward for Call of Duty. The voice acting, however, is more of a hit and miss. To be applauded are Kamar de los Reyes as Raul Menendez and James C. Burns as Frank Woods who totally deserve recognition for their brilliant work in bringing their characters to life. Rich McDonald, Michael Rooker and Tony Todd were neither excellent nor terrible as they brought fairly standard performances as Commander David Mason, Mike Harper and Admiral Tommy Briggs respectively. On the other hand, Sam Worthington as Alex Mason and Michael Keaton as Jason Hudson gave substandard performances for actors of their calibre. Worthington sounded like he honestly couldn't be bothered about the whole thing and didn't even try to disguise his broad Australian accent for what is by all accounts an American character. The change in voice actor from Ed Harris to Michael Keaton was a step-down in my opinion since Hudson sounded and acted a lot younger than he was in the previous game. Furthermore, in moments of intense emotional narrative, Keaton came across as over-acting or under-acting, failing to deliver the subtlety or strength required in the particular situation. 

Gameplay
Despite my general loathing of the Call of Duty series from Modern Warfare 2 onwards, I'd be hard-pressed to deny that the gameplay has always been fantastic. All the games in the series feel like an interactive action movie, reminiscent of most of Michael Bay's works. Black Ops II is no different with its excessive explosions, frantic firefights and series-standard setpieces. As usual, the controls are tight and intuitive, letting gamers jump straight into the battle with no need for tutorials or reading the manual. Most other elements of the gameplay are also reminiscent of previous Call of Duty games, with the guns sounding just a little too similar to each other, copy and paste jobs of a lot of weapons and scenery, recoil being virtually non-existent and the same basic variety of missions. There are some new takes on old elements like the inclusion of drones as a replacement of airstrikes, artillery and tanks which do add to the fun of the game. 

However, there are some new features in the form of a load-out screen, branching storylines and the brand-spanking new Strikeforce mode. Now, I'm going to be honest, I love load-out screens. Especially when I'm allowed to customise my weapons before going on a mission. It makes me feel more like an individual, in that I can create my own version of a weapon and play the game my way. While Black Ops II does allow you to customise your weapons and perks, unfortunately, the gameplay forces you to engage enemies head-on, which sort of kills the point of giving you the choice of a stealth-optimised load-out. Arguably, there are some missions that feature stealth but these are few and far in between and really, there's no freedom for players to get through a mission on their terms. On the topic of freedom, a welcome change to the series is the introduction of branching storylines which does make the game feel less like a corridor duck shoot and really give the player a sense that whatever they do has an impact on the game. Unfortunately though, the freedom the game gives you only comes along once in a while and only major points in the game have a tangible effect on the outcome of the game. The writers and developers did write and program in minor events that can be changed but these have no real effect other than maybe a trophy/achievement or two. While I do welcome the inclusion of branching storylines as a means of providing a sense of freedom and choice to the gamer, the effect is diluted by the fact that the rest of the game plays out almost exactly the same. In my opinion, a better way to incorporate choice into a game would be a holistic approach where every little thing creates a ripple effect that changes the environment as you go along. For reference, I'm talking about a system implementing freedom and choice similar to the one used by Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 

On the other side of the spectrum, Strikeforce mode is a very unwelcome addition to the series due to how shockingly bad the controls and friendly AI are. On the harder difficulties, I literally could not beat  the missions without jumping in and taking over one of the soldiers or drones as they would stand around and get shot instead of doing anything useful when ordering them to cover an area or capture an objective. Couple that with the fact that the controls when in the Overwatch screen (RTS) are really counter-intuitive and barely covered in the tutorial section, Strikeforce mode comes across as a needlessly tacked on feature so the marketing department could claim that the game is innovative. Yes, Treyarch should be applauded for their decision to branch the series out and add a new element of gameplay but when it's implemented as terribly as Strikeforce mode is, they should have left it out or taken the time out to fix it.

Keeping on the topic of bad things in the game, the enemy AI in Black Ops II is ridiculously simplistic with enemy combatants standing out in the open or strafing rather than finding cover. Ratcheting the difficulty up does little to alleviate the simplicity of the AI as the harder difficulties only feature the same AI albeit with much better aim. At one point in the game, I saw one of the Yemeni security forces shooting at and killing his teammate who I was attempting to melee. While it was hilarious at the time, it is symptomatic of the poor artificial intelligence programmed into the game. Friendly AI is slightly better in that they actually attempt to take cover but they spend most of their time missing targets, leaving you the burden of killing hundreds of unimportant and trivial henchmen in your quest to bring down Raul Menendez. Then, there's the vehicles sections which I thought were poorly thought-out, poorly handled and ultimately a gimmick. The horse-riding section wasn't too shabby but the lack of clear borders meant I kept running out of the battlefield and dying, the driving section in Pakistan was such a confusing mess that I didn't even know where I was going and how I actually finished the mission and finally, the flying section was almost impossible because the controls were so heavy that running into buildings became a normal occurrence and the borders were once again undefined, leading to a lot of unnecessary death apparently caused by leaving the combat zone.

Graphics
Um, yeah, graphics. They're nice, I guess? Lots of big and important sites tell me that Black Ops II runs at 60 frames per second and apparently that's very good. Honestly though, I don't get the current obsession that gamers have with graphics. What difference does it make if it were running at 48 frames per second or 30 frames per second? Sure, the rendering won't be as smooth and the visuals might be less defined but what makes a game isn't just the graphics, it's a combination of narrative, plot, gameplay etc. That said though, Black Ops II does look quite good, my only complaint being that it feels very been there, done that because of a lot of re-used textures and designs literally copy-pasted from the previous Black Ops. According to a quick internet-search, it's because they've been using updated versions of basically the same engine since Call of Duty 2. That's some mighty poor effort. Yes, using the same engine has let them master the game and gain that awe-inspiring 60 fps, but as a muti-billion dollar franchise, don't you think some of that money could be used to really innovate and maybe build a new engine? Or at least conduct massive update and improvement program?

Another thing that did irk me, graphics-wise was the horse animation in the Afghanistan mission where my horse would, on occasion, disappear into the ground or be magically floating a few centimetres from the ground. It's probably because the horse was clipped to a certain height and the developers forgot to compensate for the rugged terrain. I mean, it's a guaranteed billion-dollar game, take some time out to fix the little things. Continuing with little things, in the very first mission, when I have Woods leaning on me, I realised when I started shaking my right analog stick a lot, that Woods didn't actually have a body, he was just a torso and a head. Look, I know this is pedanticism, but couldn't the guys at Treyarch invest just that little bit of time just to build a full body. I mean sure, it's extra work but  if you're going to copy-paste stuff in, maybe put in some effort elsewhere. 

Although I am no fan of the electronic music genre, I do quite like the Black Ops II soundtrack because it is just such a good score as well as being incredibly well-suited to the setting and gameplay. Jack Wall demonstrates his musical genius as usual and Trent Reznor does a stellar job composing the main theme as well. The excellent blend of fast-paced action and emotionality reflected in the score really accentuate the experience of playing the game and I recommend people who don't even want to play the game to give it a listen.

Conclusion:
Black Ops II is Call of Duty at its absolute best and worst. While it takes steps to innovate and invigorate the stale gameplay through numerous good and bad additions, it is ultimately the same action-movie thrillride we've all come to expect. A case of one step forward and two steps back. 

Pros:
Interesting plot.
Branching storylines.
Fantastic voice-acting by James C. Burns and Kamar de los Reyes.
Excellent gameplay.
Brilliant music.
An attempt to improve the series.

Cons:
Many plotholes caused by incompetent protagonists.
Lacklustre voice-acting by everyone else.
Strikeforce mode.
Boring old cliches and action-movie stalwarts.
Lack of effort by the developers exemplified by the copy and paste of way too many things from weapons to textures.
Terrible AI.


Campaign Score = 35/50

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