Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 shouldn't work. Coming a year after the controversial Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, six years of pent-up resentment towards an irksome matchmaking system and years of increasingly abhorrent monetization, Black Ops 7 had a massive hill to climb. Despite all this, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 not only works, but vastly outshines recent Call of Duty releases.

Overall, the campaign and endgame content in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is another great addition to the franchise’s lineup, and, while it was slightly lacking in some aspects with the storytelling itself, the set design and experience of the whole campaign more than made up for it. Do yourself a favor and turn off social media for a day while you play, to avoid letting people get in your head about why you shouldn’t like it, and just give it a fair shot.

I think that Battlefield 6 has wonderful multiplayer experiences and a great new battle royale experience in RedSec. But it was pretty weak in terms of the single-player campaign story. Call of Duty, meanwhile, has mixed things up with its unique Endgame gameplay that melds the campaign and multiplayer. It has also added co-op campaign play to give players something new as well.

Nowhere else will you be blasting a giant robot in a corporate science lab one minute, and then playing a modern take on Atari’s Super Sprint the next. Value matters right now, and in this as in almost everything else, Call of Duty does not hold back. It is a maximalist paean to the ultimate, troubling truth of video game design – shooting stuff on a TV screen is a hell of a lot of fun.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is nothing short of ambitious, expanding on the classic Call of Duty formula with more cooperative gameplay opportunities and just enough nostalgia to keep things interesting. Not all of the game's "seven pillars" hold up due to light content at launch, but there's potential for post-launch seasonal content to make up for shortcomings.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is enormous, and it's fun, even if so much of it is familiar. Zombies is expansive and inventive, Multiplayer is polished and competitive, and Endgame is freeing, fun, and promising. The progression systems are the most layered the series has ever offered, and the overall mobility and gameplay fluidity benefit from meaningful Omnimovement upgrades.

A shift away from single-player leaves Call of Duty with its most lopsided and homogenous entry in decades, though what it does offer is consistently good fun when accepted on its own terms.