I'M NOT ANSWERING

CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 7 is loud, tedious, frustrating and ugly

- Nova Smith

It only takes a single mission in Black Ops 7's atrocious coop campaign to figure out what the scheme with this year's entry is: welding together the campaign, multiplayer, Warzone and Zombies modes, so as to streamline the asset generation pipeline and drastically cut down on the requirement for one-off assets and complex scripting.

This drive for efficiency is felt across the whole of Black Ops 7, but nowhere more so than in the campaign, a grinding slog through the forthcoming Warzone map update and the occasional multiplayer map retooled for wave defence against mindless AI hordes.

after being dosed with the Cradle bio-weapon from Black Ops 6, Alex Mason's son has to retread the memories of his father (and, confusingly, his father's squadmates) through shared hallucinations. When Black Ops 7 does wander back onto a somewhat familiar path, it does so to retread the lives of series arch-protagonists Woods and Mason, remixing iconic locales and series highlights in the same ghastly way that Disturbed covered Sound of Silence.

If Black Ops 7 has any identity of its own, it's from these set-piece moments, and they are far and away the worst parts of not only Black Ops 7, but the series as a whole. From Woods getting transformed into a Little Shop of Horrors-esque Venus flytrap to Harper getting blown up to kaiju-size to throw down easily dodgable shockwave attacks onto the deck of Black Ops 2's USS Barack Obama, these gaudy Excision visuals-turned-boss fights are monstrously tedious, barnacle scum dredged up from the lowest rungs of the Destiny 2 barrel: shoot the weak points, wait until the boss deploys a shield, kill the adds as they filter into the arena, and then shoot the glowing weak point a million times more.