Time for a proper review of Call of Duty: Black Ops’ single player. (If you've read my other posts, you've probably figured out that I don’t do multiplayer.) Following my illogical and somewhat off the rails outburst in the previous instalment on the subject I feel compelled to advise my loyal reader base, however depressing a sum total that might be, that I did not in fact jam up my computer’s fan with a donut as punishment for it refusing to run aforementioned game properly and in fact have subsequently had the opportunity to do a complete run of the story mode. And I would just like to note at the outset that I did almost forgive the game its shortcomings, upon which I shall soon expand, for the line, “Your president needs slugs!” delivered by the dev team’s resident JFK ghost-writer in the post-credits zombie mode. Timeless.
All the standard-issue set-piece cinematic “wow” moments that have defined the high points in the Call of Duty franchise are there, as you’d expect, and similarly it’s during these that Black Ops has its finest moments. Pelting parkour-style across the virtual rooftops of Hong Kong, dodging sniper fire on all sides is as breakneck-exciting as it sounds. But it’s when the game stamps its foot and locks you into doing something an FPS isn’t designed for, like driving a motorbike while firing a sawn-off shotgun (Terminator-style) or hammering open a submerged helicopter door, that problems begin to arise. These scripted events are occasionally somewhat haphazardly or awkwardly implemented (one section where you guide a stealth bomber off the runway is particularly abstract/pointless).
Moreover, you can’t shake the feeling that there are basically just too many of them. The game seriously tests the boundaries of interactivity by yanking you unceremoniously out of the action every five minutes, whether it’s to impart some new tidbit of knowledge unravelled by your mysterious interrogators or to ask you to press Space to abseil down a cliff. This naturally leads to the overall impression that there’s not really actually a great deal for you to do in this game. It’s like showing up to audition for a movie on the second-last day before filming wraps, and rather than strike you off altogether they somewhat grudgingly re-write the script to include an extra character who, I don’t know, has to push the button to detonate the bomb or something. The outcome is already pre-determined; you’re just required to press the button as a token gesture to interactivity. Because of the sheer number and implementation of its predetermined scripted sequences, I’m leaning toward the interpretation that Black Ops is not so much as a game as it is first-person cinema masquerading as a game.
The game also has some pacing issues. After a gleefully enjoyable first couple of missions the campaign was let down by a run-of-the-mill midsection and especially lacklustre finale littered with clichés. See, after watching the fairly excellent 21 Grams the other day I was growing attached to the idea that it wasn’t actually possible to make a nonlinear narrative that was boring.
But in Black Ops the back-and-forth mission structure that allows Treyarch to take us on a heavily stylized highlight reel tour of the various historical conflicts and flashpoints of the Cold War also works splendidly to defuse any narrative tension that ignites more effectively than an automated sprinkler system at a pyromaniac convention. Before we can actually muster up any inclination to care about whichever life-and-death cliffhanger situation Mason and his pals have been left… erm, hanging in, we’re whisked away to a different time and place either years after or before where we have just been biting our nails into nonexistence. Annoying and then some.
See, this mightn’t have been such an issue if the various character sub-plots (i.e. Mason, Hudson) had been taking place simultaneously within a localised time period and had progressed in something approaching chronological order, but the apparent modus operandi of jumping back and forth wherever and whenever the explosions are results in a truly migraine-tastic sense of dyslexia. Note the word LOGICAL in CHRONOLOGICAL. Are you paying attention, developers?
The entire experience reminded me of reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book where whenever I got an ending I didn’t like I’d go back to an earlier story branch and pick page 34 instead. (Always 34.) While this way meant I got to see all the different narrative possibilities (which I would have been able to do anyway if the book had just progressed as a linear sequence of events) it also meant I had to mark fifteen different pages at any given time. Thus the first casualty of the “scraping plot elements off the linoleum of the creative ether and compressing them in a Powerball machine” mode of narrative was a shortage of available fingers making the physical task of reading rather annoying. The second was all sense of what the hell was going on in the narrative or why I should care. I was just reading words.
But at least in the above example it was somewhat justified, because I was reading a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. I knew beforehand that what I was getting was a non-linear narrative, so I’ve really no right to complain. But I do have a right to complain about you, Black Ops. The time period is perhaps the most ambitious the series has attempted to cover, due to the need to create an entirely new set of game assets (textures/models/sounds etc) for each stop on the Cold War highlight reel tour, and I must admit I was impressed by the lengths to which the developers went to keep things historically on-par. But really, was it worth for a narrative structure that basically shot your own game in the foot?
Something else that nonlinear narrative done badly achieves is to completely nullify the foundation of a three-act dramatic structure. This is probably partially accountable for the game’s finale being so weak (and predictable) and the midsection having a tendency to meander a bit. The story reaches Vietnam and effectively bunks down there for the majority of the rest of the campaign, using at as a springboard to jump back and forth between time zones as you investigate further into what the Soviets are doing behind NVA lines. Sure it’s fun to appreciate the minutiae of references to various classic Hollywood depictions of Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now to name a few) but I really felt this was one of the clearly identifiable areas the pacing got bogged down.
Not that the gameplay doesn’t achieve this with flying colours on its own, as the regenerating health/autosave system the series has embraced with open arms since Call of Duty 2 naturally lends itself to replaying the same fricking area 25-odd times as you attempt to cross a wide open space without getting shot to pieces, or blasted into a low-earth orbit with that mysterious exploding bulldozer that a second ago was just sitting there innocently apparently waiting for you to advance within a five-metre proximity of it. I found myself particularly dreading the large open-area fights that were scattered at intervals throughout the level design. Nine times out of ten Mason’s reason for kicking the bucket was a stray bullet from someone I couldn’t even see.
And then there’s the super-size serving of glitches. This is the most unpolished CoD effort I’ve seen. I understand the pressure to meet release dates, particularly with a big-budget blockbuster like Black Ops is greater than ever but at the same time those of us who constitute the ever-dwindling minority of the PC gaming market would like to actually be able to play the damned thing we’ve just paid $90 for rather than just admire the pretty box with its enigmatically shadowed dual-pistol wielding Batman impersonator. Are we reaching the edge of some slippery downhill slope where it’s acceptable to ship a product which is effectively still in beta? Where downloadable patches and content become a band-aid after-the-thought for doing a shoddy job with the initial release? It’s as if the line between internal and external playtesting has blurred to the point that developers now apparently expect the players to find out what’s wrong with their game.
To be fair, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you’re likely to get a far broader indication of potential glitches when a product is released out in the community than within the limited parameters of the internal playtesting environment. But you have to draw the line somewhere. Namely, at problems that render the software unplayable, as was rather incisively documented in my previous article on the subject.
So, to summarise: disjointed and pedestrian story, clunky scripted events, occasionally thrilling gameplay moments interspersed with frustratingly repetitive gunfights and a road-train-sized truckload of bugs. What can you learn from all this, Black Ops? Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd start by giving us some consistency in narrative context. Please. There’s a reason time goes forward not backward!
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