Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Call of Duty Black Ops 3: My Review

Hey guys, I know its been forever since I posted. But, I wanted to at least get back into posting some reviews for you guys to mull over in case you aren't sure you want to go ahead and buy a game or not.

So, without further delay, lets get into it a review of Call of duty Black Ops 3!






Call of Duty Black Ops 3 is the current version of Call of Duty being played. There is story mode, multiplayer mode, zombie mode, and a arcade game called Dead Ops available to play.

Story mode can be played as a single player game or with friends in a multiplayer way. The game starts you off infiltrating a base to rescue a high priority hostage. It plays like a typical Call of Duty game. A team of enhanced specialists, led by a man named Taylor, assist you and your partner during the mission, displaying some of the abilities added to the game. At the end of the mission, you get left behind and are critically wounded and pass out. You awaken to find that you have been given cybernetic enhancements like the specialists who assisted you in the previous mission. In fact, your partner willingly undergoes enhancement to be able to continue working with you. The next few missions are you learning your new abilities.

After learning the basics, time jumps forward five years. You are investigating a base in Singapore that has gone silent. You learn that Taylor's team attacked the site. The rest of the missions from here until the end consist you you and your partner chasing after Taylor's team, and fighting members of it and taking them down, until you face Taylor. However, apparently its not really Taylor doing these things, it is an advanced AI that took over Taylor's and his team's neural enhancements. At the end, the AI almost has complete control over your body as well, but Taylor, having been fighting the AI the whole time, arrives and assists you in stopping the AI. You purge the AI from your system. When asked what your name is, you answer "Taylor" and the game ends.

I'll be honest, Zombie mode is hard for me to understand as I have only played it a couple of times and each time I play people want to rush through what needs to be done without explaining the story or why we need to do the things we are doing. Killing zombies is fun. Upgrading yourself or your weapons with perks and such is fun. Turning into a monster temporarily (why do we need to do this?) is fun. I just wish I had more knowledge of the story and more motivation to play it without being rushed through everything by people frustrated I don't understand whats happening or how to do certain things.

The arcade mode is a mini game named Dead Ops Arcade, which lets you play as a character clearing out zombies from a level. You have unlimited ammo and power ups and gold show up as you kill zombies. The game plays like an old school arcade game, as in you look down from above and see the level area with a small representation of your character on the screen. Some power ups will put you into first person mode, and sometimes that is a bad thing in this game as some maps have random things such as cows running through the map from multiple directions that are easy to avoid in the normal view. Playing this with friends is fun and challenging. It adds a little extra to the game overall.

The most played part of pretty much every Call of Duty game is its Multiplayer. The last version of the game, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare had terrible multiplayer as far as I was concerned. It was less about being tactical or intelligent in how you navigated the map and more about who could play on the highest sensitivity the best. I'm happy to say that many of the things I intensely disliked about advanced Warfare, such as the exosuit jumping, is resolved in this game. While you do have enhancements that let you double jump and wall run and such, they do not dominate every game type like they did in Advanced Warfare. Instead, they let you double jump and wall run. You can slide further, but sliding has been in the game for a bit and its not a huge upgrade really.

Another change is Specialists. Instead of everyone basically being the same type of person, you can now choose from a list. Each specialist has a weapon based ability you can play with, or a more passive ability. For example, one specialist, Battery, lets you either use a War Machine ability to kill people when its charged up, or you can instead play with an ability that gives you bonus armor to your character for a short time. Another specialist, Nomad, lets you either use an ability that lets you place traps, called hives, that will attack any enemy that gets too close and kill them. his other ability you can play with is called Rejack. It basically lets you come back to life exactly where you died if you choose to do so.

Create a class lets you customize your class however you want based on having 10 slots for items, perks, weapons, weapon attachments, and wildcards (which let you have extra perks, more weapon attachments, or more lethal grenades for example) total.

Scorestreaks, Specialists, and weapons you can use unlock at specific levels. to actually be able to use one of these once they are available, you have to spend an unlock token (gained by leveling up) to unlock the item of your choice. Once unlocked you can mix and match what you use as you wish. Weapon attachments are tied to weapon levels, similar to how the others are tied to multiplayer level.

Playing matches earns experience and a currency called Crypto keys. Crypto keys are used to purchase common (10 Crypto keys) or Rare (30 Crypto keys) drops. You can also spend COD points (purchased with real currency) to get Rare drops. These have chances to give you common, rare, legendary, or epic level unlocks for your Specialists, Weapons, and Emblems. These items include emblem symbols, weapon camos, weapon attachment variants, specialist outfits for their body or head, and more recently added, new weapons. While I am perfectly fine with the supply drops giving cosmetic only items, I dislike the addition of weapons to the drops. The weapon drop rates are incredibly low, and it is basically a cash grab by the Publisher (Activision) since it encourages Youtubers and Twitch streamers to spend large amounts of money to get COD points to try and get the new weapons quicker to make videos reviewing them or using them. I have personally watched a few videos of this where a Youtuber will purchase 50 dollars worth of COD points and still not get one of the new weapons in the supply drops. Frankly, the new weapons should have been tied to the Season Pass DLC being offered for Multiplayer (an additional 50 dollars this time!) like previous versions of the game did. That is a big negative in my eyes and we are likely to see more and more of this as time goes on because even though its dumb, if Youtubers or Twitch streamers do not do this, they lose their viewers to someone who does.

Overall, this is a much better version of Call of Duty than the last one was. Its better than Ghosts as well. Some of the basic multiplayer issues, but those will continue for as long there are networking issues.

My Score: 85/100.

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