Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 First Impressions – The campaign is Mason’s mind on nightmare fuel

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 runs the risk of being too much game, as Treyarch’s penchant for taking Easter eggs and modes from yesteryear and building them out further comes to its latest form. There are, of course, the campaign and the multiplayer, which are the two main pillars of any COD, but then there’s the annual Zombies mode, there’s the return of the top-down shooter Dead Ops Arcade, and the campaign is playable in co-op and with a bespoke Endgame multiplayer mode. It’s…. it’s a lot to take in.

We’ve had a little headstart on the game’s launch today, dipping a toe into a bunch of the game’s modes.

Starting with the campaign and, somehow, Menendez has returned, a new message from him defying death and calling for more global uprisings confirmed by a military tech giant, The Guild. Something about that doesn’t sit quite right, so JSOC sends in David Mason and his team as a blunt force data extraction in the city state of Avalon. Fighting through waves of robots and human soldiers alike, they get trapped in a dead end, and then things get… weird. A hallucinogenic gas gets released, sending the team tumbling into David Mason’s nightmarish memories and scenarios, occasionally coming back up to investigate the next step of the story within Avalon.

On paper, it’s a fan-pleasing set up, calling back to some of the most popular games in this franchise, and there’s always a bit of a draw to being able to play in co-op, but in practice, it’s all just a bit confusing. For some reason, Black Ops 7 returns to the well of 2023’s Modern Warfare 3 for inspiration, creating a big open world map for Avalon which then plays host to a number of missions through the campaign. You just go from point A to B, battle the white clad Guild goons along the way and when you get there, and maybe there’s something daft like riding on the back of a hijacked VTOL to follow a signal – hilariously the voice over tells anyone that didn’t make it onto the VTOL to try and follow on foot. And then you’re sucked into a new hallucinated level with stages made out of floating chunks of land, battling horrible creatures, and mad bosses.

You do get some fun abilities through this, including an augmented jump, grapple hook and wingsuit to speed up getting around Avalon and the necessary movement to get through the dreams. These carry through to the Endgame mode that follows the campaign, returning you to Avalon for more freeform extraction shooter missions – they’re just PvE, though, so all 32 players in a session can collaborate. In this mode, you can work your way up through four areas of difficulty. You’re dropped in, run around and find points of interest with some kind of objective to beat, find gun and gear caches, and then extract before time runs out. As you play, you level up, gaining power to be ready to take on more challenging zones, and build up to more significant challenges, but if you die? That operator’s specs and loadout are all lost.

You might be getting flashbacks to the open world Zombies mode from Modern Warfare III. It’s mostly Guild enemies in regular areas, but there are also plenty of reality-bending moments. Clouds of gas that are home to roving groups of zombies, fun little mini missions, like a portal where that zips you up into the sky to wingsuit and chase after butterflies, or a random little game of Prop Hunt with a monster. There’s fun surprises here, and there’s plans to add more higher level Endgame events and missions through the seasonal content, but I’m not sure that people would load this up instead of heading into Zombies for their co-op fix.

Speaking of which, while I haven’t tried the initial Zombies map and mode, the initial map promises six interconnected regions, a truck that you can drive around in to visit different locations. Despite this, it’s still a round-based Zombie mode, and a main quest will drag this Dark Aether narrative forward. Alternatively there’s Dead Ops Arcade 4, with its top-down twin-stick shooter missions, again offering more co-op.

Now, I’ll be honest, I’m not the greatest connoisseur of Call of Duty multiplayer. Each year brings its particular tweaks and changes, loadouts have different schemes for construction with points or slots, there’s the catalogue perks that come in and out of favour, kill streaks and all the rest. Fundamentally, after a couple hours with a mosh-pit playlist of the core modes, Black Ops 7 feels like Call of Duty to me.

The biggest change in the moment-to-moment gameplay is really the addition of wall jumping, which can be chained together a couple times to let you bridge a handful of deliberate gaps in the level design. On Den, the Japanese feudal castle turned Guild fortress, there’s an outer path on one side of the map that goes over some rooftops that you have to jump between, but there’s also a little wall-jump opportunity to get to a smaller inner path as well, allowing for a flanking move if this route feels locked down. Of course, this is less fundamental on a remake map like the superyacht Hijacked, but it’s a curious addition that feels like it’s a little nod back to the multi-jump, wall-running action of Black Ops 3.

While the 6v6 multiplayer is always going to be Call of Duty’s bread and butter, Skirmish is the latest experiment with something a bit bigger. This objective-based 20v20 mode is a madcap rush of objectives and, presenting you a large-ish map and a steady stream of capture, destroy, takeover and escort missions to race to and complete. It might sound like a riff on Battlefield or previous combined arms modes like Ground War, but since you wingsuit in when you spawn and can just zip to pretty much anywhere on the map, it’s close to being pure infantry. It is absolutely manic because of this, with no sense that any overlook or defensive position won’t just have enemies dropping in behind you, or wingsuiting straight through open windows to combat roll right into the thick of it.

From around 8 hours play, Black Ops 7 is a bit of a head-scratcher in places, and a Modern Warfare III style misfire at its worst. The multiplayer is a solid and dependable evolution, and I’m looking forward to jumping into Zombies properly, but the opening hours of the campaign and the co-op Endgame mode are a jumbled mess of horror shooter and open world that is missing the mark. This might be the biggest Call of Duty ever, and all of it can be played together with friends, but you’ve all got to want to for that to work.