Call of Duty: Black Ops - Previews


	Platform PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 Genre Shooter Publisher Activision Developer Treyarch ETA November 9, 2010
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Call of Duty: Black Ops

My chief complaint of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the completely ridiculous single-player campaign. It was like one long list "Best of: Action Movie Moments" that I found really difficult to take with any seriousness. Okay, jets falling out the sky? Sure, okay. I just killed everyone in the airport? Flight cancelled. If the story had somehow engaged me (after the first hour I stopped paying attention) it might have been different. I still gave the game a high score, but I think that had more to do with Spec Ops multiplayer.

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So, the baggage and bias I brought to the demo of Call of Duty: Black Ops, might have colored my initial reaction to the game.

The small details and sound design show what a great job Treyarch will do on the presentation side, but because the demo was cut into a series of vertical slices I had to suppress my feelings of apprehension that the

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story would fall into unintelligible nonsense, which would be a damn shame considering the time and place in which the game is set.

Picture yourself in Cold War-era Vietnam flying a helicopter and obliterating bridges and vehicles (just like you'll do in the game). That part actually made me feel uncomfortable. There are two lasting images of Cold War-era Vietnam that stick with me. The first has three layers: black smoke in the background, then a rough line of soldiers, then a half dozen kids, one of whom is Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who suffered 3rd degree burns over half her body thanks to a napalm attack. The other picture demonstrates what Agent Orange does. With the level of fidelity Treyarch is working with, it felt just a little bit too real. It will be hard to disconnect that part of my brain and just have fun meting out wholesale violence from the air.

Conversely, the part immediately preceding the Vietnam location was a snowy set of mountains in Soviet Russia, elicited no such response. The start of the area focused on stealth with one of the new weapons, the crossbow. I didn't flinch; there were no images of Siberian gulags dredged up. It was just killing nameless soldiers then dropping vertically and smashing through a window and killing other nameless soldiers in slow-motion. Then the group of soldiers... outruns an avalanche. Everything else I took at face value; it's a game after all. This I rolled my eyes at.

If Treyarch sticks to this kind of sensibility, maybe things will be okay in terms of not making me want to put down the control and walk away. But if they go the other way (going from slapstick to drama) and try to top the "No Russian" mission from Modern Warfare 2... I can imagine an Agent Orange bombing run or laying siege to a village with a napalm cannon. That's something I'm not interested in.

The developers were coy about Co-op and Multiplayer details, but from my notes, Co-Op will probably be more along the Spec Ops route (of Modern Warfare 2) than a pure campaign cooperative experience.

With about 4 months until Call of Duty: Black Ops arrives at retail, from what I've seen it's in a good place from a purely technical standpoint, it really is impressive, but because of the nature of the demo I'm tentative about the title if only because of the Vietnam settings.

- Aaron Simmer

(June 28, 2010)