Despite being the seventh title in the Black Ops franchise, this year's title, co-developed by Treyarch and Raven Software, sidesteps last year's title and is instead billed as a direct follow-up to a title that launched back on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 centers around the return of the antagonist of that story, Raul Menendez, back once again and threatening to burn the whole world down.
With Raul Menendez, the overarching antagonist of the second Black Ops title, seemingly back from the dead, a new security contractor/paramilitary force known as The Guild has risen up to protect the world against this terrorist. Even though Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is linked directly with the second title, players get a crash course on the events of a game that was released more than a dozen years ago, yet still futuristic in its timeline (the second Black Ops title was set in 2025, while Black Ops 7 takes place ten years later in 2035). Even if you have never played a Call of Duty title before and know nothing about the task force and various characters, the game's flashy set pieces and nonstop action will draw most players in.
While Menendez is the face of Black Ops 7's campaign early on, this spectre of a bygone era is little more than a boogeyman than an actual threat. No, it should come as no surprise that this up-and-coming security force known as The Guild is the real threat this time around. Led by a millennial woman who channels her inner Elizabeth Holmes in public, this faction is one of Call of Duty's least effective villains. Their main driving force is in the creation and testing of an experimental psychoactive drug that makes the victim hallucinate or lash out in rage. It's a somewhat low-tech solution for a paramilitary company that bills itself as a leader in robotics and AI.
In an era of deepfakes, bringing Raul Menendez back from the dead to make a public threat does little to push the narrative forward beyond digging up painful memories for the lead character and his crew. At no point did Menendez feel like a credible threat during the campaign beyond the collective psychotrips that Mason and his crew endure on a regular basis. I daresay that beyond all of The Guild's scheming and desire to build and test a new chemical weapon, this is overall one of the lowest-stakes campaigns to come around to Call of Duty in a while. The Guild rarely feels as powerful and imposing as its figurehead Kagan would lead the public to believe, even with their technology and fancy toys, and the eleven chapters of the co-op campaign lead up to a rather weak confrontation on the battlefield.
Early on in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's co-op campaign, Mason and his crew are subjected to the psychoactive substance that The Guild has been cooking up, and due to the convenient plot device of having the team share a neural link, they can all go on a collective trip into the deep reaches of each protagonist's repressed trauma. For Mason, it's revisiting Nicaragua to chase down Menendez while massive machetes rain from the sky. For others, it's breaking out of a Russian prison or revisiting 2025 Los Angeles in the midst of a terrorist attack. These set pieces offer something dynamically different from the rest of the narrative, removing the grounded sci-fi military narrative with metaphysical threats and horrors twisted to that character's state of mind. With how the narrative keeps jumping between chasing down Kagan and The Guild in the real world and another psychoactive trip in the next chapter, it can be difficult to keep track of what's going on without the whiplash of jumping between one narrative and the next. Throw in a single mission set in Japan with a different military faction, and you've got one messy timeline to follow along (if nothing else, this mission helps to justify the return of fan favorite multiplayer maps like Raid and Express with a Japanese makeover).
Following up from Black Ops 2 is a tough order for Treyarch and the numerous development studios that worked together to release Black Ops 7 just one year after the sixth numbered sequel. Black Ops 2 introduced significant innovation to the campaign's narrative and flow, most notably through branching storylines and Strike Force missions. Both of these are omitted from Black Ops 7's co-op campaign, instead focused on a rollercoaster that takes players from the televised return of Raul Menendez to the fall of The Guild and lingering around Avalon to clean up the remains in the separate Endgame mode. Instead, the real innovations to the campaign storytelling this time around come by way of the ability to play through the entire shooting gallery campaign with three other friends and a progression track that feeds into the overall leveling up and unlocks for the other two core multiplayer modes. A lack of proper drop-in-and-drop-out matchmaking missed the opportunity to jump into a game with friends during the review period, unless we coordinated to try and meet up before queueing for a specific mission.
From beginning to Endgame (counting a single successful extraction), players are looking at around six to seven hours for the co-op campaign and not much reason to play the first eleven missions unless you missed a collectible (thankfully just one per mission) or the occasional achievement in certain chapters for pulling off an exemplary task. The few campaign missions that take place in Avalon during the latter half of the campaign lacked the sense of urgency and direction that the rest of the chapters had, instead feeling more like a brief tease for the open world map for the final chapter.
Endgame is indeed something unique for the Call of Duty campaigns, but might not feel too distinctly different from some of the other multiplayer offerings beyond the core multiplayer and zombies in earlier entries, namely Black Ops 4's Blackout and the likes of DMZ and MWZ. Players group up in squads of up to four and venture out to level up their chosen operator by completing repeatable missions all across the map of Avalon. As players level up, they'll pick up three different skill tracks out of a possible six, with each level providing a random boon to either their core stats or a skill unique to one of those three tech trees. Not all of these skill trees are created equal, as I found myself gravitating towards the Gunner track for faster reloads and Bulldozer for its immunity to self-inflicted explosions at the highest tier (a launcher was almost always part of my core loadout for Endgame).
Avalon is home to a variety of activities scattered throughout the map, but there isn't a sense of randomness to events across the map. For the most part, the majority of events are available on the map for players to pick off in any order they choose. With Endgame being exclusively a PvE mode, there isn't the excitement of running across an enemy squad like there was back in the days of DMZ. Instead, encounters feel almost like busy work as you replay them for the dozenth time because your operator died in the last match and you're having to start back up from zero. In just a few hours' time, I had a pretty good rotation of events to work with and quickly get my level up to where I could venture into at least the second-tiered zone early on and pick up a higher rarity weapon. Even as rival squads can lay claim to an activity on the map, let enough time pass, and players can come back to do it all over again for more loot and power XP.
Unlike MWZ, there aren't interesting pieces of loot like weapon blueprints or hidden quests to be discovered. Forget scavenging around foot lockers or duffel bags for unique drops. All of the gear that players will come across is either part of their loadout when they spawn into the match or acquired through quest rewards and supply drops. Because of how the weapon attachment system works for Endgame, it's often best to bring in a weapon that you've been leveling up in the core modes, complete with attachments and all, then use the various upgrade machines in each tier to boost the rarity of the weapon and its damage output. What attachments come on a field acquisition weapon is dictated by its initial rarity: base green tier (uncommon) weapons are limited to two, rare weapons three, epic four, and legendary weapons have five attachment slots.
There were also unique weapons that could be uncovered. Still, because I had barely scraped the surface of the highest difficulty tier in Endgame, I'm leaving that out of the campaign review. Instead, I will include it in our separate multiplayer review, which will be published soon. I've already had a sneak peek at what's to come in the first major content drop for Endgame, including some massive dinosaurs and bosses that are far more interesting than the basic Guild grunts and zombies littered around Avalon.
The strengths of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's campaign rally around three pillars new for this year's entry: playing with friends, shared progression, and integrating the open-world mode into the campaign. The first two are features that I hope remain a constant in Call of Duty moving forward, but it's tough to recommend Endgame as the main reason to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 when previous modes like DMZ and Blackout offered a far more interesting set of challenges. These inclusions alone help bolster a campaign that otherwise felt like one of the lowest stakes a Call of Duty task force had ever had to shoot their way through. Whether you're here to see the continuation of Alex Mason's story from a decade ago or are just here for more of Michael Rooker's one-liners, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 shines through when you experience it with friends.
[Editor's Note: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Review code and advance access to Endgame was provided by the publisher, but was also accessible after completing the campaign prior to publication.]
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