Call of Duty Black Ops III Review

You by now have read all of the reviews for Call of Duty Black Ops 3. We won't act like we are the only one you have read. So with that being said, to save us all time, lets be efficient here.

In a vacuum, BO3 is an exciting, action-packed shooter that looks like Michael Bay on cocaine. Is that good or bad? Well lets explore.

If you played BO2, then you have played BO3. Many of the same mechanics are here with additions of more futuristic mind-control and chaos creating abilities. Parkour is taken to another level as well.

I, for one, do not like the futuristic warfare. Its hard to follow any story in the campaign, the abilities are hard to keep up with because every button does something and playing online multiplayer is like a quick twitch battle that is very difficult for casual players to adopt. Loved Medal of Honor first, then thought Call of Duty Big Red One was superior all the way up until World at War. Since then, the futuristic stuff is not my favorite. That is of course an opinion, but why you are here.

This iteration of Call of Duty is, for the first time, meant to be played with others, multiplayer competitive and cooperative. Online multiplayer modes have been the calling card of COD all along but emphasis has been put on cooperative campaign and zombies mode (which is back). If you plan to play this alone, save the online competitive multiplayer, maybe you won't like this. The campaign is very dull, grinding and story is hard to follow. It doesn't feel that way when you're rolling four deep with your buddies, turning robots into walking fireballs and making human combatants vomit up their breakfast with your techno-magic abilities. But when you're playing solo, it's a chore, hard to explain really, but the repetition of levels and sounds of gunfire weigh on you.

There are two missions that break the mold for a bit. One sees you bounce back and forth between dogfighting in a jet and battling enemies on foot while the other plays up the games big novelty and has you hack into someone's mind and fighting the memories of a long-past battle. Other than that, run here, shoot that, in a frantic pace that doesn't let you take in much of the atmosphere that Treyarch creates. The missions are too dark, unclear and disordered. Also, why do you go to this room after each mission? Just get me to the next mission and let me play with loadouts and other stuff during the load screen. 

Multiplayer is mainly unchanged with the exceptions of the addition of the abilities mentioned above. If you are playing on a PS3 or X360, thats all you get because it was announced before launch that The Black Ops 3 PS3 and Xbox 360 versions will feature Multiplayer and Zombies gameplay only, not Campaign. They said that "the ambitious scope of the 1-4 player coop Campaign design of the PS4, Xbox One and PC versions could not be faithfully recreated on old generation hardware." So, there you go.

With some early bugs, like all games, the multiplayer had its loading issues and many issues finding games to join. Most of that seems cleared up now. Multiplayer is still fun but again, unless you are a quick twitch freak on the controller, the COD community has gotten really good online and you might need to catch up.

The game feels forced. Almost like what many people say about sports video games. Another year, same game with different jerseys. In this case, same game, different tech. Didn't really win us over. But had some fun.

GRADE: 
C+