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Coming in the wake of Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders, this year’s two standout shooters, Call of Duty Black Ops 7 feels desperately out of touch. Here, we have a game that looks like the perfect FPS in the year of our lord 2025, that is, if you ask a publishing exec: a live service feast stacked to the rafters with fodder for meta-crazed ranked disciples, menu after menu of skins and camos, and, of course, giddy but ultimately meaningless head-clicking fun.
No matter, we can rely on a solid, easily digestible solo first-person shooter campaign with thrilling set pieces and syrupy spy-thriller intrigue, can’t we? Can’t we, Mr Activision and Mr Treyarch? Not to be the bearer of bad news, but the campaign is as enjoyable as getting your haunches stitched up without an anaesthetic. Call of Duty Black Ops 7 (BLOPS7) is the worst CoD in years, and that says a lot for a series known for its hot and cold relationship with quality.
Feverish nonsense
Sliding into CoD canon as a sequel to Black Ops 2, BLOPS7 has you reprise the role of David Mason, boorishly brought to life by Milo Ventimiglia. A group dubbed the Guild has concocted a hallucinogenic toxin called The Cradle with the intent of sowing chaos across the globe: provide a cure and you get not just the problem but also the solution, and, you guessed it, big bucks in your coffers.
Mason and his gang wingsuit into Avalon, another of CoD’s fictional countries, to thwart these nefarious plans. The catch is that this toxin does funny things to Mason and co.’s embedded C-Link tech, causing vivid hallucinations.
Got all that? It’s all drab, insubstantial nonsense, so don’t worry. This isn’t alt-history for entertainment but reality-eschewing slop that’s taps new peaks of exaggerated guff even for a series known for flirting with nonsensicality.
Much of your time is spent in these hallucinations: enormous caustic plants, comically large knives raining down from the sky, towering giants more at home in a Kojima game, a twisted LA, and zombies, so many zombies.
Treyarch clumsily plunders events from the long-running Black Ops lore to frame and populate these best-of feverish visions, another symptom of the series seemingly running out of fresh ideas. It’s a Hollywood popcorn munching take on the supernatural that lands, at best, as comical. It distinctly lacks the cinematic spectacle and choreographed qualities CoD is typically known for.
Most of us can excuse a lousy story if the moment-to-moment action is there. It’s not. But first, there’s the biggest issue with BLOPS7: it’s not a solo affair, but a co-op campaign as proudly showcased in the main menu. Yes, you can play alone, but even the pre-game lobby is designed for co-op. You wait for matchmaking when playing solo.
Why? Beats me. Those three companions that pop up in cinematics? Vanished, ghosts of the players you could have had at your side if you’d played as Treyarch wanted you to. Worse, you can’t pause, and if your internet connection peters out for even a split second, you’re booted out, forced to restart the mission from the start.
The campaign’s action isn’t designed for solo play, either. Enemy health bars are ballooned for three players to pummel, leaving you lodging entire clips just to take down a single goon down solo, not to speak of the hordes of armored robots you’ll come across.
As a consequence, gone is CoD’s signature snappy time to kill: punchy, lethal, and satisfying. There are no difficulty settings to mitigate the issue. To make matters worse, most levels are staged as glorified shooting galleries with little in the way of meaningful level design, forcing you to plow through wave after wave of enemies to hit the next objective.
Aside from the on-rails hallucinatory levels, the campaign unfolds in Avalon, an open-world map that feels plucked out and recycled from Warzone. Most of it is empty space, running ground to trudge through to the next objective or repetitive gun fight with the sum total of half a dozen different enemy types for the entirety of the campaign. Jarring doesn’t do it justice.
The BLOPS7 campaign isn’t an on-ramp to multiplayer like the middling Battlefield 6 campaign, but straight-up multiplayer. There’s absolutely no incentive to play solo. On the contrary, everything is telling you not to. It’s in stark contrast to what I presumed would always be the two immovable pillars of the CoD formula and legacy: multiplayer and a solo campaign. And, again, you can’t bloody pause.
Multiplayer as you know it
As for multiplayer, it’s very much par for the course: a buffet of uninventive, yet familiar competitive modes that, when examined beyond perfunctory, surface-level objectives and gimmicks, play out the same: kill or be killed.
Skirmish is the standout, a frantic, supersized deathmatch shored up by a labyrinth of open buildings, vehicles, daring wingsuit plays, bait sniper nests, and objectives to claim or defend to score points. It’s silly and messy, fodder for those with short attention spans who like to gorge on fast and giddy fun.
Zombies mode is what you’d expect, swelling further and further away from its roots as the tawdry lovechild of a loquacious rush hour radio show host and the vulgar spittle of boomer shooters like Duke Nukem. It’s excessive and ornamented with arcade-y dross that makes me yearn for the simple thrill of World at War’s zombie mode. Devotees will lap it up, though.
Beyond that, we have Endgame. Best described as a low-stakes PvE co-op spin on an extraction shooter, it has you drop into an open-world permutation of Avalon post-campaign to shoot goons and zombies while ticking off challenges and objectives.
Hold an area and fend off enemies, commandeer an enemy vehicle, take down a hulking mech that emerges steaming from a shipping container, or clear out Guild goons from petrol stations – that kind of thing.
Mine your cranium for imagery when I say PvE Warzone, and you’re pretty much there. You can see the logic: squeeze more value out of the development dollars sunk into the campaign by morphing it into an underseasoned soup of a map that sucks up hours like a live service Succubus. Taken as a very casual, rainy afternoon distraction, it’s fun enough, but more space to mess about with guns and gadgets doesn’t count for much when most of it is barren filler.
I’m not convinced of Endgame’s long-term prospects, despite Activision peddling it as a live service alternative for those indifferent to the traditional multiplayer offering. It has all the viscous, vulgar language and drip-fed reward systems designed to plunder your time with little in the form of meaningful returns. The more I muse on it, the more icky it seems.
Call of Duty Black Ops 7 is a rough oddity. On one hand, it’s a further on-brand degradation of whatever Activision’s flagship shooter is nowadays; on the other, BLOPS7 is a curious and ultimately ham-handed attempt at innovation in the form of the co-op campaign flip.
At its core, BLOPS7 is a game devoid of any sort of heart, that formless magic that elevates a game beyond just being a product. It’s a smooth blob of a game, acutely aware that hordes of reverential fans will splash out for a copy no matter what. More worryingly, this sets a precedent, a pattern to be replicated next autumn and beyond. It’s never been more apparent that CoD is no longer what it once was.
Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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