The Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign is a miserable fever dream

Call of Duty Black Ops 7’s campaign is ambitious to a fault, collapsing under the weight of its broad roster of game design objectives. While it’s disappointing for Call of Duty to have dropped the ball so spectacularly, the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign is bad in some fascinating ways. We couldn’t resist vivisecting this overdesigned and bloated offering. 

Black Ops 7 tries to have its cake and eat it, using the campaign as both a quick lead-in to its endless replayable Endgame content and an attempt to present itself as the most electrifying Call of Duty story to date. This attempt to carry the legacy of successful single-player campaigns from the series’ past, while also onboarding players for Black Ops 7 multiplayer, creates a fatal tension.  

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• The Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign is filled with problems.
• The weight of legacy bulks down Black Ops 7, as it tries to connect old stories to a modern audience.
• Black Ops 7’s Zombies mode leaks into the main campaign, eroding the mode’s novelty and what little gravitas the campaign had.
• The bosses throughout the campaign are disappointing, paper-thin encounters.
• The mind-bending maps of the Black Ops 7 campaign could have been a highlight, but their tiresome design shows they shouldn’t have bothered.

The Black Ops legacy hangs heavy

Call of Duty Black Ops 7 positions itself to try and hit as many nostalgic beats in its campaign as possible, acting as a direct sequel to Call of Duty Black Ops 2. It follows David “Section” Mason and puts his own personal drama and trauma at the centre of the story’s heart. 

However, Black Ops 7 also borrows its story beats and villains from Black Ops 6, and pulls whole sequences from the first Black Ops. It leans heavily on knowledge of Black Ops 7’s predecessor and tries to make players care about David’s connection to characters that are given almost no time in Black Ops 7 itself. 

The campaign has no interest or time to establish the pieces of the story important for Black Ops 7 to work. This is bewildering, oversaturating you with themes. David’s family drama, new teammates’ dynamics, and villain plots are all squeezed into an uncomfortably short 11 missions.

A different kind of zombie infestation

Black Ops 7’s zombies mode was given equal, if not larger, emphasis in the game’s marketing material than the campaign. It’s no wonder, as there are swarms of people more excited to play on the new Ashes of the Damned map than engage with Black Ops 7’s story. It was inevitable that these zombies would break containment and leak into other parts of the game.

As part of the campaign’s central plot, the main characters are made to hallucinate new enemies rather than just the brain-dead guards and robots of The Guild. However, the new additions of zombies, spider zombies, and floating mages absolutely tank the tone and lead to an arcadification at odds with Call of Duty’s traditional commitment to grounded military action. 

Immersion has never been lower than when you’re disarming bombs on a dock, and suddenly you’re being mobbed by zombies. In the same fashion, your ability to upgrade weapon rarity on a bench in a zombies mode-like way while in a hallucination proves just as jarring.

The game even feels fit to shout at me that I’ve unlocked slightly faster movement while supposedly running through a gauntlet of manifested trauma. The overflow from mode to mode cheapens both sides. It’s indicative of a worrying attrition to Call of Duty’s more serious output.

If you can’t make boss fights, don’t bother

Multiple bosses are strewn across Call of Duty Black Ops 7’s campaign to try and liven things up, but the game struggles to make these features work. A boss fight is meant to represent some kind of skill check, or better yet, show off that you’ve mastered certain mechanics. In Black Ops 7, where generic enemy AI struggles with doorways, these bosses aren’t fleshed out enough to justify their existence.

They’re here because Black Ops 7 wants big setpiece moments for players to share. Treyarch has achieved this, but less in a “that was cool” way and more in a manner that makes you wonder what the hell you just watched. They’re obviously intended to be memorable spectacles, with the most impressive being a giant looming human and a plant kaiju, but not only do they kill immersion, they’re just a waste of time.

The answer is always the same. Giant human? Shoot it. Plant kaiju? Shoot the weak spots, then shoot it. Sentry turret? Hit it with a grenade, then shoot it. The climactic fight is just against the same mech ‘boss’ three times in a row, and they don’t change up the mechanics each time. Rather than creating ‘woah’ moments, Treyarch has just created ‘ugh’ moments.

Mind-bending or mind-numbing?

Missions in Black Ops 7’s campaign are split between real-world locations and hallucinations that are meant to be part of your character’s processing of some past trauma. These hallucinations use broken-up maps to try and change the game fee. However, even though they primarily do end up becoming excuses for linear corridors, they do switch it up.

That said, Black Ops 7’s confidence never feels lower than when you’re in one of these hallucination sequences, and it often feels completely at a loss for what to do with itself. It tries to be interesting by including things like jumping puzzles, sending you through mazes, or depowering you to try and sneak past enemies, but all of these feel like diversions at best.

At worst, it feels like the game is flailing to keep you interested. In one real-world mission, you’re sent off to Japan and told to climb and jump to reach a roof for extraction, and the game makes good use of the omnimovement system to make it as seamless as possible. 

Whenever the game tries this in these broken-up maps, the directions are never clear, and it feels like the visual design got in the way of the game design.

In Black Ops 7, hallucinations are primarily used to justify poor map design and to make you dodge LA traffic in what feels like a bizarre military-industrial take on Frogger. With these sequences, as with most of Black Ops 7, it seems the vision never got beyond a basic impulse to provide spectacle. The Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign reminds us that, unfortunately for Treyarch, excellence is not in the conception but in the execution.

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