Call of Duty: Black Ops III (PS4)
For a game series with yearly releases like Call of Duty, it’s important to find new twists to add to the first-person shooting action. While the series was once a grounded military shooter, the pursuit of innovative new ideas to spice up the gameplay lead to Call of Duty: Black Ops III pushing ahead into the future. Soldiers in the year 2065 are given cybernetic enhancements that greatly expand their capabilities on the battlefield, these adding simple but important changes to movement like wall runs and thruster jumps that impact how you evade and target other similarly enhanced players. Already this step would have given new life to the multiplayer gameplay, but this concept of mixing man and technology was fairly close to the previous year’s Call of Duty game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Thus, the idea was taken even further in a campaign that aimed to go beyond a linked together series of battles. Not only are a new slew of cybernetic skills available for use in the story, but the plot itself becomes a mind-bending adventure where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what you see can sometimes be more artistic abstraction than the true state of the battlefield.
In Call of Duty: Black Ops III’s vision of the future, much of the world has been devastated by the ever-evolving tools of war, but the consolidation of world powers into two alliances has lead to a period of less drastic military action. However, in areas devastated by the previous skirmishes and advancements in military technology, battles still rage on with advanced new options like fully robotic soldiers. Assuming the role of a mildly customizable male or female black ops soldier along with up to three other human players, the player soon finds themselves in a mission gone awry where their character needs major reconstructive surgery to survive. Not only are they given mechanical limbs to replace those they lost, but a Direct Neural Interface is implanted in their head that essentially gives them a computer and uplink to assist on the battlefield. The DNI provides plenty of assistance on the battlefield, able to mark visible targets for easier tracking and giving you a suite of customizable technological powers, but this isn’t just a way to give the player a new host of nifty tools to play with. The DNI opens up the story to a surprisingly complex and sometimes intentionally confusing plot that toys with the idea of this new part of the human experience and the corruptive influence it can have on the human mind.
On one hand, the DNI opens up the shooting action to a lot of new and interesting battlefields. You can enter a simulation of an event that your character did not directly experience to try and figure out what happened during it, and with others in control of the simulation they can even bring things to a halt, reverse them, or edit them into something that is a huge break from reality. Fighting in a world that crumbles around you or facing foes that would be impossible even in the science fiction future this game creates allows the story to already shift away from simple gun fights with other human beings, but the plot itself already seemingly had that covered with the places you visit. The robot armies of the future feature a few different models from basically glorified gunmen to more durable Overlords that take a lot of punishment before breaking or the wheels that roll in almost like mobile grenades to kill you quickly if you don’t destroy them first. Waves of regular gunmen spread out across large areas or cramped into tight quarters you need to push through have their own weapon variety of course with ones utilizing automatics, sniper rifles, and grenades, but the walking robot tanks are a bit of a drag to face thanks to a system where you need to weaken a shield, shoot them with rockets, and repeat in a less than thrilling battle loop. However, the spaces you explore in the story include some interesting locations, a visit to a decimated Singapore not only including a ruined city and a robot-filled underground facility but the Supertree gardens that you cross for an interesting high altitude change of pace. Dropping by Egypt will have you fight in the sandy streets only for a simulation after to yank you to a cold battlefield from the past in a way that surprisingly fits snugly into the procession of events.
Where things can get confusing is when it does become clear there is more going on then simply doing your job as a Black Ops agent. You begin with an investigation in Singapore but soon learn of a set of rogue agents with the same tech as you that you need to track down and eliminate. A somewhat charismatic group with a leader who becomes more intriguing as you hear how others describe his reasoning behind things, its clear the opposition is in the wrong and some shifts in character behavior can be strange until you realize the tech in your head is having its own issues. Glitches alter how you perceive the world and your tech can start to obfuscate reality with unusual sights, a seemingly straightforward battle suddenly having an explosion bloom into a surprisingly artful burst of ravens. There is clearly a talented art team being allowed to get abstract with how they depict things at points in the story, mission briefings sometimes featuring kaleidoscopic or metaphorical images of the topic rather than dry military descriptions. Questions of where man and machine begin when they share the same head begin to push into the plot and the technology that helps you become a capable warrior in this bleak future reveals its price over time. Unfortunately, the game does try to throw some curveballs at you that seem designed for confusion rather than interpretation. It is useful to get the player thinking about some sights and situations so they can start to pick apart the underpinnings of this increasingly complex plot, but it can feel like it’s getting convoluted without spending the time to provide you some grounding information. You can actually still get through much of the story with a baseline interpretation before the end starts getting more indulgent with its storytelling approach, but one of the odder choices is where the truth can be found. Rather than just leaving the plot up to interpretation and discussion to figure out some of its twists, the pre-mission load screens actually contain a huge block of text that goes away too quickly to read. Contained in these are the actual events of the plot without any DNI trickery obfuscating the truth. Stripping away the mystery does make the campaign feel a touch less meaningful without adding the kind of incredible revelations that having such privileged info should provide, but it doesn’t tear it down completely either as the events still hold weight and serve their role well in providing action set pieces.
The cybernetic systems at play in Call of Duty: Black Ops III mean that your gun of choice is only a small part of your options on the battlefield. In the campaign players are able to equip Cyber Cores that include abilities you can unlock with credits earned through progressing in the adventure. These abilities come in a variety of flavors that can serve wildly different purposes on the battlefield, the Martial, Chaos, and Control cores all having different abilities under their umbrella even though you can only bring one core into a level at a time. Chaos focuses on damage and danger, these cybernetic powers able to do things like detonate an enemy robot in a large fireball or guide a swarm of small robotic drones to harangue enemy soldiers. Martial gives you options that assist with survival like being able to turn invisible for a period, disable enemy guns, or speed up your firing for a bit. Control has some pretty self explanatory purposes like when you can take control of robotic turrets or drones to turn them against the enemy or simply add them to your squad as a friendly ally until they break or the power ends. The better the skill the longer it will take for you to be able to use it again but you can also unlock expanded versions of these abilities or passive ones. These extra powers on the battlefield can lead to drastic changes to how you approach a combat encounter, and if you play the campaign cooperatively you can start figuring out roles or ones that help you better assist other players.
Guns also include a pretty wide range of customization options both in the story and the multiplayer modes. An automatic is still likely your best bet for consistent success in both modes, although a card system can allow you to bring up a back up sniper or shotgun for more situational advantages if you invest in it. Having a pistol as your secondary gun isn’t glamorous but oddly enough rockets can be set as secondaries with little cost and special melee options can as well. A rocket is a bit slow and unwieldy to whip out in the game’s often fairly quick gunfights where a few regular bullets is enough to put a player down so its incredibly high explosive power isn’t actually strictly better than a fast firing pistol, and in close range smacking someone with your gun will lose out to someone who brought the knife’s more lethal strike. Quick kills mean that the system where you regenerate lost health if you avoid fire is just the right level of impactful, able to let you walk away from a fight but it doesn’t make you so durable it drags out conflicts. Many of the guns on offer can have a range of attachments added to them to better fit what you want out of them, things like sights that help you line up your shots or identify targets better or special grips to reduce recoil allowing you to offset the differences that otherwise define certain weapons. Of course, a gun with naturally less recoil can instead invest in something like a bigger ammo clip or even aim for a quieter shot so that you’re harder to locate in a multiplayer match, and with death coming so quickly when against human players it’s often smart to avoid detection however you can. The single player campaign makes things more about large fights where it’s basically you against a large group of enemies that can include special robots that take more than a few bullets to end, but the multiplayer component also gives you the thruster jumps and wall runs so that mobility can make encountering another player not always end with whoever pulls the trigger fastest winning.
One interesting element of the online multiplayer though is the Specialist system. Essentially you play as a character who has a special cybernetic power unique to them, the player able to unlock more specialists with more play as well as being able to pick between which of two special abilities to bring in to the fight. These can include some simple but effective ones like the Vision Pulse that makes enemies visible through walls to unique battle tools like Rejack that lets the Nomad specialist spring up after a death and potentially surprise his killer. None of them are too game changing as they are often brief small advantage and some less flashy ones like Combat Focus that double any points you earn for a small period of time can end up better than new techniques due to their potential pay out. There is definitely potential for a power gap between players who have invested more time or money in Call of Duty: Black Ops III than newer ones though, the ability to better customize weapons a big part of it but the scorestreak bonuses a bit of intentional imbalance. Earning enough points doing things like killing enough players without dying in a Deathmatch or completing objectives like protecting and taking areas in Hardpoint, stealing flags in Capture the Flag, or doing essentially the inverse of Capture the Flag in Uplink will eventually earn you special options. Some of these like the UAV reveal enemies on the mini-map so it’s a small but helpful edge, but you can unlock options like robotic assistants or aerial bombardment that can help a team or player that is already doing well do even better. It is an incentive to play more carefully and luckily the movement options and solid map layouts mean that hiding and trying to pick off targets too cautiously is hard to execute so matches don’t boil down to constant scorestreaks allowing a winning team to win more, but Call of Duty: Black Ops III isn’t afraid to reward players who put in more time or were willing to roll the dice on lootboxes to get better battle options.
In addition to the ambitious campaign and enjoyably fast paced if a little skewed multiplayer there are zombie modes available in Call of Duty: Black Ops III, although a fair few of them are DLC only options. Included with the game though are three major zombie-focused ways to play that are all quite different. Nightmares is a twist on the main story where you play through the campaign levels but with undead foes and a bit of a new story albeit one that isn’t trying to be as meaningful or complex as the main one, this more like a difficulty mode rather than a truly new experience. Dead Ops Arcade 2 on the other hand is a big departure from the main adventure, the first person shooting set aside for a top down action experience where you shoot at waves of enemies and utilize power-ups to hold them back in a simple but satisfying little amusement. Shadows of Evil is essentially the taster for the game’s truly realized Zombies mode where a lot of the maps are paid downloadable content, but Shadows of Evil itself shows off a fairly robust mode separate from the cybernetics of the main game. Set in a 1940s city overrun by the undead, this cooperative mode has players trying to survive waves of zombies that at first seem simple. Starting in a little alley against reanimated corpses, things gradually expand as more of the city becomes available and new powers and options are given to the player. Flying parasites will soon spray acid on you, but find the right power-up and you can become a tentacled beast that can move around the area and zap zombies with ease. Three-headed Margwas ask for you to shoot them in the right spot to even hurt them, but finding special perks from soda machines or bringing in special ones to start can help you attack faster, respawn sooner, avoid zombie attention, and many more little helpful edges as the city becomes more available to you. It can actually feel like a little too much to track at times and it’s easy to lose track of important details in the mix, and in a way that’s how the overall experience can be. Connections between different modes exist but also can lead to moments where you feel the absence of a system from the other modes. You’ll usually be pointing down similar weapons to shoot down foes who die quickly, but how you do it shifts around quite a bit between modes and a bit more unity would allow for more interesting things like the Cyber Cores in multiplayer or better movement options in Zombies to make for a generally exciting experience rather than a mix of ups and downs.
THE VERDICT: There are a glut of modes and customization options in Call of Duty: Black Ops III that give the game a good amount of depth and content even if it’s not an entirely cohesive package. The campaign’s sometimes obtuse examination of a blurring line between humanity and technology provides creative battlefields and cybernetic powers, Zombies mode has a variety of systems at play to ensure blasting apart the undead doesn’t get stale even without the DLC, and multiplayer’s maps give you room to use movement abilities to spice up the sometimes all too quick encounters with enemy players. Each mode has its enjoyable elements even though sharing some ideas across the experience like the Cyber Core system could have added more depth than trying to cook up new ideas exclusive to the other modes, a more focused vision possibly what the game needed to even out the ride of exciting highs but occasional confusing lows.
And so, I give Call of Duty: Black Ops III for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. Perhaps it is just the nature of the beast that a Call of Duty game needs to preserve certain elements to avoid potentially scaring the audience away, but with Zombies mode going for an entirely different aesthetic where the futuristic tech is nowhere to be found makes this feel more like a team trying to throwing in a disparate set of ideas atop the gameplay basics that need to be present. The ambitious direction for the story is an interesting touch even if it can’t stick the landing in some regards, the overall adventure still benefiting from well constructed battlefields and the interesting options provided by the DNI and Cyber Core systems but not always thriving when it tries to put a more artful or thoughtful foot forward. Multiplayer’s Specialist system includes a few of the Cyber Core ideas locked to a singular character rather than giving you the playground to truly embrace them in a competitive setting, but the enhanced movement abilities and ability to reshape a gun into something more fitting to how you play gives this more energy than running around and trying to shoot the other players first. Zombies also succeeds with its fundamental ideas like the gradual expansion of what you face and how much area is available to you and the top down variation is a fun diversion, but the systems at play in Shadows of Evil can be a little arcane or too detail oriented for something so fast paced. Call of Duty: Black Ops III has a lot of technical depth to plumb if you invest a lot of time into unlocking everything but while it is enjoyable to put a fair amount of hours in every mode, getting to that depth means you can start to feel the limitations placed on you. Gradually working up to new content can be satisfying but not if the drip feed locks you into similar styles of play for too long, experiencing the full breadth of the game’s offerings requiring a bit too much time or too much real world cash.
The fundamental experience of Call of Duty: Black Ops III is still able to provide a good amount of fun despite its barriers to more expansive play and the campaign works to maintain its variety well, but some greater cross-pollination across the modes could help it shake off the feeling of limitations a bit better. Having wider options that could be tinkered with to be more specific would benefit the modes more than slowly doling out incremental improvements, but solid and well-catered to action means that there is a lot of content upfront to play that can be thrilling before you start hitting any walls. It’s certainly not just another Call of Duty, its many modes making it a little hard to pin down any way to describe the totality of the experience. Each one does enough well within its own space to ensure they’re all worth trying, but perhaps devoting itself to one great core idea would have availed it better than packaging together a few good ones. It already decided to take risks with its brain-bending plot, taking it further and reshaping the entire mold instead of splitting the FPS heart into three differently shaped offshoots could have helped it be much more than another well done Call of Duty.