Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Review: This is the Campaign I've Been Waiting For

It's that time of year again for another installment in the Call of Duty series. This year, it's Treyarch's turn to show us what they got. Usually thought of as the B team, Treyarch, has stepped up and delivered what I think is one of the best campaign experiences in recent FPS and the best in the Call of Duty series. Unfortunately the multiplayer doesn't live up to that. This was so close to being the best Call of Duty in the series.

Campaign

Treyarch has finally made a campaign in the Call of Duty series that I really enjoyed. After hating playing Call of Duty: Black Ops' campaign I was a little hesitant when I first started playing the campaign. In recent years the campaigns of these FPS' have been confusing, having you play as multiple people, following multiple story lines and trying to connect everything together too fast and entirely too sloppy. In Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 you follow a simple antagonist, Raul Menendez, and and play as essentially two characters, David Mason and his Dad, Alex in two connecting timelines.

The story takes place in 2025 as David Mason questions his Dad's former partner, Frank Woods on the whereabouts of Raul Menendez. During the questioning you learn about past missions, doing so you play as Alex Mason, during the 1970′s & 80′s. The campaign transitions between timelines easily, allowing you to follow the story without confusion.

The biggest thing that I noticed that really made me happy, was changing out the loadouts for each campaign mission. Another big plus in favor of the campaign was the choose your own ending. There are five total endings depending on the actions you choose and how well you did during the Strike Force missions.

I played the campaign on Veteran and the only Strike Force mission I was able to accomplish was the escort mission. The other three are impossible on Veteran and you only get so many tries to completed them. That frustrated me the most about the campaign.

Also, what's up with that animated music video at the end of the campaign?

Zombies

I'm terrible at Zombies. I die all the time, can't find the best spots, never make enough money to buy the cool guns then I die. Cycle continues. I still play it when I have people to play with though. For me it's more of a social thing with friends, than trying to jump on and find some randoms to play with.

They introduced a new play style called griefing where you play on two separate teams and you can either help each other kill zombies or you can kill each other. Imagine how that went? Not like you are thinking. As soon as we were given the signal we all started shooting each other but no one died. Zombies came out and we then started killing the zombies instead of each other. For some reason the match kept replaying even though everyone would die. I don't know, check out our video here. I would choose Survival Mode from MW3 over Zombies any day.

Multiplayer

Just like I said with Modern Warfare 3, this is the bread and butter of the game. People buy the game at the midnight release and prestige by morning. So how does the new Black Ops 2 multiplayer fare over last years MW3? Too me, it's about the same but without the ego boost. You know the one I'm talking about, the musical stinger every time you leveled up or completed a challenge. It gave you an ego boost to keep trying harder even though you suck! The new scorestreak system replaced what I loved most about MW3, Strike Chains. I loved Strike Chains because I suck at MP. Though I can get used to playing the scorestreak way.

The other big change is the Pick Ten system for your load out. Each class gets 10 allocation points to use as you wish, to a certain extent. Guns can have a max of three attachments, you can only have two lethal types of explosives, etc. This new system is a little confusing and I'm still getting used to it. I like how they are trying to improve the multiplayer experience but I jumped in expecting something similar to the previous games.

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