The Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign’s mandatory co-op makes for a grim time

Call of Duty Black Ops 7’s campaign already felt weak with hokey writing and uninterested delivery from its voice actors. However, the focus on the always-online cooperative aspect of Black Ops 7 has added whole new layers of problems to Black Ops 7’s storytelling. This isn’t the first Call of Duty to have a co-operative campaign, but its implementation in Black Ops 7 has far more downsides than upsides.

You can play the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign solo if you prevent the game from adding other players to your lobby, but it’s not designed to be a single-player campaign. Black Ops 7 might scale the number of enemies, meaning difficulty should adjust accordingly, but the missions are definitely designed as a four-player experience, with anything else feeling lesser. 

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• Call of Duty Black Ops 7’s campaign is always online and heavily encourages co-op play, creating new problems.
• You can technically play Black Ops 7 by preventing other players from entering your lobby, but you’ll have issues either way.
• Emphasizing online co-op leaves Call of Duty games open to a myriad of issues surrounding idle players.
• Combined with lackluster storytelling, this makes the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign a tedious slog.

Solo or co-op, there’s no winning in Black Ops 7

During my time with the campaign, I never once had a single player try and communicate on any of the missions. The campaign gets the worst of both worlds, as solo players don’t get to work on their own pace, and groups will be unable to engage with complicated mechanics.

You’re tasked with completing mind-numbing objectives, like shooting nodes to break down barriers impeding progress, which are, themselves, often hidden across mazes that provide no hints. 

This not only provides unengaging gameplay as players just run around until they stumble across their target, but also ensures that any solo players are saddled with a miserable time. Running around to press buttons past uninteresting enemies is already a snooze-fest; trying to do it by yourself sounds like a nightmare.

Black Ops 7’s bosses become microcosms of this issue every time they pop up. They can’t have complicated mechanics because people won’t be communicating, but they can’t have overly damaging attacks because otherwise people would constantly be in a loop of reviving, so they’re just uninteresting damage sponges with glowing weak spots. 

They often become a looming giant or an obvious plane because they must be easily targetable, leaning on waves of enemies to liven things up.

What’s more, the AI is too brain-dead to make any mission feel any fun, no matter how many there are, as they barely even know how to take cover. You’re damned whether or not you choose to play with other people. 

You can’t idle, but everyone else will

It’s almost helpful that Black Ops 7’s campaign is so short, because you can get kicked if you idle too long. You had best hope nothing draws you away from each 20-minute or so segment of the game, otherwise your character will be standing around like a lemon until the always-online campaign decides to send you back to the lobby, forcing you to start again, even if you’re the only one playing.

It’s a painful wait when another player is idle, though, as the game scales the number of enemies to the number of players. Your three-person team is now against a mission scaled for four people if one player is milling about, which adds challenge but no extra fun. 

Enemy varieties don’t get more complicated than ‘shoot them harder’, nor do you get anything from the increased challenge beyond some more XP to build towards cosmetics. I had several missions where a player would join, but only move just enough to register as ‘active’ rather than actually helping. 

This also creates pacing dead zones when you’ve blasted through your objectives, waiting at a ‘gather your party’ prompt while a player sits at the start of the map. Eventually, the game will catch on and teleport the player to keep up with the rest of the team, but a mission will have several dead points of waiting to kill any pacing in supposedly high-tension moments.

Cut scenes 

The story cutscenes unearth an issue for Black Ops 7’s co-operative focus that is likely only to get worse. The cutscenes are skippable if you’re a crowd who just wants to shoot, or wants to repeat a mission without Black Ops 7’s story getting in the way. However, they can only be skipped if everyone agrees to it, which new players are unlikely to want to do. 

This leaves new players under pressure to skip cutscenes they want to view because otherwise they risk the more seasoned players leaving the lobby and requeueing rather than waiting for cutscenes to play. This leaves the upcoming mission with fewer players and splits the busywork objectives between fewer people. 

It’s not any better for players who just want to engage with a game, because Black Ops 7 wants to inject story after every few objectives. Players who have seen it all before will be forced to wait around, and after a while, simply won’t want to come back with so many moments of waiting. 

The campaign is already on a ticking clock. As people pass through the game’s gating system, it will become harder and harder to get a full team for the story as people leak into Black Ops 7’s unlockable Endgame co-operative missions. 

There’s no winning here. Call of Duty Black Ops 7 turns the series’ traditional emphasis on a fun, gun-fueled power fantasy on its head, abandoning the fast-paced action that popularized the franchise in the first place. 

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