“Hold X for Death Machine” – Call of Duty: Black Ops

In Who Hunts the Whale, Laura Kate Dale and Jane Aerith Magnet’s tremendously angry novel about game development, there is a bit where the executives are deciding on a feature set for their oncoming new game. They send the novel’s main character to a gaming event to scout out what’s going down well and report back. They then decide to add every single one of those features to the new entry in their Call of Shooty franchise (it is not subtle satire), practicality and cohesion be damned. In real life, the first Modern Warfare was already crammed with sometimes contradictory messages and gameplay, but for Black Ops thoughts of its fictional counterpart were unavoidable.

Activision alternating developers and settings had worked well to give Call of Duty a yearly release schedule without it blurring into one, but World at War had not been an event on the scale of the Modern Warfare games. For Black Ops, Treyarch up the ante in several ways. First is the frequency of action set pieces, with a lot of slow-mo shooting while you slide and run. In one prison escape mission, featuring a returning Gary Oldman as enthusiastic Russian Reznov because why not, Black Ops squeezes into a breathlessly short time a coal-truck cover sequence, an explosive slingshot, a harpoon, a minigun massacre, and a guns-blazing motorbike getaway. All of this is accompanied by sometimes surreal visuals, full of alien terrain, low-flying planes and absurdly gorgeous painted skies. A leap on from even the Modern Warfares, it leaves Medal of Honor for dust in the excitement stakes.

Turning the dial on their rollercoaster to maximum also fits with Treyarch’s new attitude to history. World at War put its characters into a couple of small bits of the Second World War with a nodding acquaintance with reality. Black Ops has them there for the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, for some sabotage of Soviet Rockets, for the Vietnam War, and onwards to a globe-trotting mission to avert a fictional weapon of mass destruction that leaves history well behind. Anything that can provide a recognisable thrill is in. You end up in Kowloon Walled City for no logical reason. You get a briefing in person from President Kennedy. When you think you have assassinated Fidel Castro, the man himself shows up to tell you otherwise.

All that already reduces much of the shooting action to something routine to keep you occupied while the game shuttles you from burning drama to burning drama, but there is still more to fit in. And not just the inevitable torture advocacy. The framing device for the story has the main character Mason being interrogated by unseen mysterious figures about his experiences. He hears sequences of numbers and has odd flashbacks. His loyalty is questioned and it eventually turns out he has been brainwashed twice by opposing sides, and is an unreliable narrator who has recounted events with figures who weren’t actually present.

Three years on from Bioshock, that game’s fresh central twist had already gone from something that stood out to a standard way of spicing up the biggest blockbusters. Black Ops doesn’t even make the question of its main character’s mental state as interesting as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction did, never mind better or less mainstream games. Even the more exciting moments of Black Ops are dulled by the way the whole thing is overstuffed to the point that every idea feels like one more item on an exhaustive and exhausting tick list of items of interest.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops spent a total of eight weeks at the top of the UK charts. See what was top of other charts at the time after the page break.