Call of Duty: Black Ops III Reviews
Black Ops III might not reinvent the wheel or even be the best Call of Duty game to date, but it is certainly one of the grandest. Even better, this one is meant to be played with your friends.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 piles on new ways to play without much concern for quality.
The campaign is great. The multiplayer is good. The zombie mode is lovely.
In a way, "Black Ops 3's" landscape of weaponry and corpses and layers of upgrades and economics signal the game's disposability, something meant as kindling in a bonfire of collective obsession and forgetting. Nothing this big and loud is meant to last, but nothing meant to last could bring this many people together.
Call Of Duty's most concerted effort to break the usual formula is unfortunately the most unsatisfying sequel in years, especially the badly flawed story campaign.
Where Treyarch's single-player struggles, the deftly tuned multiplayer soars, delivering a Call of Duty that's rich with options.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III is the most content-filled game in the entire series. While that would normally be a good thing, the problem is that none of the content is particularly interesting. From the underwhelming campaign to the disappointing multiplayer, there isn't much to really recommend playing over last year's game. Call of Duty: Black Ops III is just okay, but being just okay isn't enough to keep players entertained when there are so many better offerings available from the same series.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 a familiar experience dressed up in a way that it might feel slightly different at first, but getting into the nuts and bolts reveals not much has changed.
It reminded me why Call of Duty is one of the most influential series' on the planet, even if it didn't reflect that for a while.
If Activision's goal was to get people excited about the prospect of a prime-grade multiplayer experience, then their mission is a success. It's hard to imagine what else they could have done to make this a great multiplayer game, but that's not in dispute. Treyarch still knows how to make things happen.
In ye olde days, Call of Duty games would throw a famous quote up on the screen whenever you died, to provide a moment of reflection between attempts. Now that I've laid Blops III to rest, I've found a quote that seems like an echo of my thoughts and feelings. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
With a very predictable story and a great gameplay Black Ops III fails to excel in any particular field.
As fun as popping zombies in beautiful environments is, it's not enough to save Black Ops 3 from being just a miserable little disappointment, a cobbled together version of Deus Ex and Syndicate that can't do right by its pop sci-fi leanings or the series' run & gun entertainment. As someone who's always been an apologist for the series, it makes me a little sad to see that Call of Duty might finally be the creatively bankrupt game everyone believes it to be, unsalvageable even by the grace of Christopher Meloni himself.
How you feel about Black Ops 3 as a package will depend on what you're looking for in a shooter. If your focus is on competitive play, then this will be your favourite CoD of recent years. If you and your mates love to smash things up in co-op, Black Ops III gives you plenty of opportunity, so get stuck in. Yet it's hard to escape the nagging feeling that this would have been a better CoD had Treyarch focused less on the co-op and the extras, and a little more on delivering their best CoD campaign to date.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III offers few surprises, but even so, it's a great package. The campaign sometimes feels like it's trying too hard, but is ultimately solid and enjoyable. Zombies mode is a nice bonus. But really, it's the multiplayer that steals the show. It doesn't stray far from the usual formula, but it's been honed and polished to perfection to deliver seriously brilliant multiplayer competition.
Activision's monolithic shooter series returns with a blast of new content and features – but the cracks are showing
In the end, Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a good shooter that falls somewhere between "safe" and "chancy." It gives you great maps, awesome Specialists, a truly challenging and interesting Zombies mode, and a solid and more dynamic control mechanic. It also has a convoluted and uninteresting story and a co-op mode that doesn't consist of much more than extra enemies.
Black Ops III tries hard to freshen the Call of Duty formula, and it's clear a lot of time and money went into creating the game. But other than the online multiplayer component, which should keep the faithful occupied for a few months, it's just slick, disposable entertainment, easily consumed and instantly forgotten. Then again, who am I to talk?
The sheer length of this review should tell you that Call of Duty: Black Ops III is filled to the brim with content. While there are some low points and pacing issues, the campaign's customisation, freedom, and verticality make it excellent to play with friends. Meanwhile, mutliplayer has more customisation and replayability than ever before, and Zombies is brilliant in its complexity and difficulty. While Ghosts may have bitten the bullet, Black Ops III reloads the franchise into a new, brighter era.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a good third chapter for the Black Ops series and features a long story mode that could have been just a little better in details. The game offers a lot of content, but suffers from the balancing of weapons, abilities and specialists across all the game modes.
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