Call of Duty has become a strange animal. Bouncing between three different studios on a three-year cycle, consistency is often a problem. On top of that, more often than not it feels like the studios are in a constant battle to one-up each other, which has seen varying levels of success.
After last year’s Advanced Warfare I found myself racking my brain to figure out how the next entry would evolve from the game-changing mechanics introduced. Traversal alone was a huge step up from other entries, and it would be incredibly jarring to have such great mobility and then go crashing back to running with boots on the ground. The robotic exo-suit made everything so much better. So what was Black Ops III‘s next logical step? Take the robotic enhancements from being on the outside and focus on the robotics within.
The game’s plot primarily focuses on the reaction to attempts to deal with the ethical concerns of introducing mechanically enhanced cyborg soldiers sporting various metal limbs and the Direct Neural Interface, a system linked right into the brains of said supersoldiers.
From the opening scene the animosity between natural soldiers and enhanced ones is palpable, and certainly heavy-handed, to the point where it feels almost like a parody of the modern military shooter right up until it goes full RoboCop and what’s left of our player character is retrofitted with some new limbs and a DNI of their own.
That all said, the game’s story is fine, and I admire Treyarch for trying to make it more than a bunch of grizzled dudes yelling at each other angrily; they get about halfway there by trying to tackle big ideas (like what it really is to be human in a world diving headfirst into transhumanism) but it feels like a hollow attempt most of the time. Without spoiling things, I will say that the main campaign goes into some truly crazy directions, and it’s without a doubt the weirdest entry in the entire series, which I really appreciated.
The change in focus to things like transhumanism and mind control put it right up there with the numbers station mind-fuckery of the original Black Ops, and is absolutely worth checking out just for that.
The game’s campaign has a slightly different structure than past iterations as it now accommodates four-player co-op. It was really strange to hit a story mission and see a lobby pop up, but those same screens let us modify our multiplayer-style loadouts and dig into the game’s fiction via emails or the in-universe wiki and the like. Said wiki (aside from a few throwaway references in mission dialogue) is one of the only ways in which the game directly ties in with the events of previous Black Ops games.
While I preferred to play the campaign solo, I often found myself dipping my toes into co-op play as the game incorporates an incapacitation state that enables other players to run up and revive a la Borderlands and Destiny. The incorporation of an easy revive makes it so that in co-op I rarely found myself wiping and ending back at a checkpoint, which almost made up for having to deal with letting 3 other randos into my game.
It’s worth noting that for the first time we can create our own player characters for the main campaign. Normally, this would be exciting, and it certainly had the potential to make things more interesting, but it falls short. We can choose a base model for a male or female, but unless our ideal player character is a white dude with various stages of facial hair growth or a white lady with or without a headband, we’d be less than satisfied with the creation aspect. It’s strange to see a feature like this be so fundamentally flawed in a modern AAA release, especially with the increased push for diversity and inclusion in video games that we’ve been seeing in recent years.
As far as gameplay and controls are concerned, it’s more or less what we’ve come to expect from a Call of Duty game. We’re quickly introduced to a fairly robust suite of various cybernetic abilities and HUD modes that offer different advantages along the multiple branching upgrade paths, allowing us to specialize in hacking, dealing damage and confusion. It’s an interesting idea, but once I unlocked a swarm of nanobots that would attack enemies and set them on fire, I really didn’t end up exploring many of the other options because honestly, why would I need anything else? It’s nanobots. Setting enemies on fire.
In terms of competitive multiplayer, it’s also exactly what we have come to expect from the series. The new cybernetic abilities and tactical HUD elements from the campaign don’t carry over, but all of the movement stuff does.
Multiplayer class customization is par for the course, but now we have a new option for a specialist ability that charges on a cooldown timer. Each specialist character comes with two abilities for us to choose from, and we can unlock new ability combos, weapons, wildcards, attachments, characters and standard perks by spending the unlock tokens we obtain as we play.
As someone who plays these games every year, I feel like the map quality in Black Ops III is a bit lacking. As was the case in Advanced Warfare, the game touts a level of verticality: we can climb and run on walls, boost jump and the like, but the places we can actually reach by using these abilities feels woefully inconsistent. There are plenty of places that look like we should be able to easily get to and take point on, but they’re bound by invisible walls. We can run on pretty much any wall, which is great when we want to chain jumps and wall-runs together for shortcuts, but some walls are by ingress points that feel like we should be able to get to, but for some reason we can’t. On the flip side, we can wall-run on damn trees, which makes no sense at all, but hey: go nuts.
Ultimately, Black Ops III is a very competent shooter that looks good and plays even better, with a story that tries to tackle some greater themes to ill effect. It’s a solid game in its own right, however I couldn’t stop thinking about how Advanced Warfare was one hell of a game, and unfortunately Black Ops III doesn’t come anywhere close to filling those big shoes.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game for the Playstation 4 sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Tom is a veteran Call of Duty player, and has a high level of experience with the series.
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