Hello everyone. I hope your holidays were holy with a nice dash of jolly. I must say, time sure does fly. To quote Steve Miller, “time keeps slippin’ into the future”. It’s amazing how pop culture that took place in the future would eventually catch up in the present. Just look at films such as Back to The Future in 2015 and Blade Runner in 2019. With the new year, we can add another to the list, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Taking place in 2025, Black-Ops 2 was the first COD to shift to a speculative future narrative. This was a title that really wanted to take the series in a new direction. For better or for worse, it certainly made its impact known.
The year is 2025 (it was released in 2012), the sociopolitical landscape is tense and unstable, igniting a new Cold War. The US led JSOC, is attempting to stop the spread of the Chinese dominated SDC led by rogue Chinese general, Tian Zhoa. Meanwhile a 3rd faction known as Cordis Dias, led by the ruthless Raul Menendez, has their sights set on watching both sides burn and the entire system down with it. The narrative was penned by none other than David S. Goyer, the acclaimed writer of The Dark Knight. The campaign however, seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. As if they weren’t sure if they wanted to keep the series historic or go futuristic. As that classic meme once said, “why not both?”. Missions will have the player jumping from the Civil War in 1980s Angola, the Soviet War in Afghanistan and then to Burma in 2025. Seeing as it takes place across so many locations and points-in-time, attempting to splice these together as one timeline is pretty clumsy. While the narrative is woefully absurd and disjointed, one thing it’s not, is boring. In terms of pure entertainment value, this is one of the best campaigns in the entire series. When is riding a horse against a giant doomsday tank not awesome? What about playing as a coked-up cartel leader on a violent machete rampage? BO2 was the first in the series to feature multiple endings, giving the campaign a bigger sense of replayability.
Gameplay doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does try to add some innovation. Being a futuristic setting, characters will have access to gloves that enable scaling a mountain, glide wings, invisibility jackets, and my personal favorite, Ziggy, the spider drone. However, half of these are only used exactly once. Making these feel pretty tacked-on. Another feature, in between campaign levels, are Strike Force missions. You will be given a team of combined forces, ground troops, drones and armored machines. You can either control the troops or machines in conventional first-person-mode or move them around from above in a tower-defense style. While it’s good to see they wanted to add variety to the gameplay, it does admittedly affect the campaign’s pacing. Not to mention, while they are optional, they have a direct impact on the game’s outcome. Skipping is not recommended if you want a good ending.
Multiplayer is enjoyable but run-of-the-mill standard Call of Duty. You can jump into team deathmatch, free-for-all or zombies mode , whatever suits your fancy. One complaint, which might be more of a nit pick, are the multiplayer factions themselves. There is nothing wrong with what’s here, but rather what’s missing. The campaign has some stellar settings, Angola, Afghanistan, Panama etc. The fact that none of the historic locations or factions are playable is a huge missed opportunity.
Black Ops 2 is a bombastic, over the top, beyond absurd installment. Some would even go as far to say it was the last game in the series’ golden age. As I said above, for better or for worse, this game had an impact. We talked about the better, now let’s talk about the absolute worst. It’s not so much the game itself, but rather the motion it set for the rest of the series. A path that threatened to destroy the entire franchise. While BO2 is set in the near future, it still looks and feels like COD. The preceding titles would go from near to VERY futuristic. Being virtually unrecognizable, erasing any identity it had in favor of being a generic sci-fi FPS. Advanced Warfare had you fighting with cybernetic enhancements and jump packs. Black Ops 3 would go into a deep dive of a matrix-virtual-reality simulation angle and Infinite Warfare basically threw all their cards on the table and said let’s go to Pluto. Let that be a lesson, going into outer-space is rarely a good route to take.This could have been the final nail in the series’ coffin. It wasn’t until COD:WW2, boots on the ground would again be the standard,(lets just pretend Black Ops 4 doesn’t exist). That being said, Black Ops 2 is great but what it led to was not. Enjoy BO2 for all its worth and just skip right to COD:WW2 or the Modern Warfare Reboot.
Happy 2025,
Fil Zahnko
Verdict: 8/10
Sacralised
Great review Fil, thank you.
C
Great review! This game was fantastic I miss the days playing it