And with that, I'm all caught up on the Call of Duty franchise. You know just in time for this holiday season's Black Ops II release. I'm left without much new to say about the series, but I definitely enjoyed the hell out of this game. Too many other games in the series - and I'm talking about both the earlier ones and the Modern Warfare ones - don't spread the action out enough into different environments. Sure, in Modern Warfare 3 I got to play in New York City, London, Paris, Berlin - but those are all heavily urbanized cities. In Black Ops, I fought in the Arctic Circle, Vietnam, Cuba, the Gulf of Mexico, and Siberia... in addition to several generic compounds and stockyards, of course. Black Ops also told what was probably my favorite story of any Call of Duty to date, blending Cold War espionage paranoia with historical fiction to create in interesting and often-changing plot. There were references made to World at War, the previous game in the series made by Treyarch (and the first one I had ever played), that gave satisfying closure to some of the character arcs in that game. Black Ops even ends on a huge teaser for things to come, but I won't get into it for fear of spoilage. Since these games have been just fun as hell for several years now, what it takes to set an FPS apart from the pack is, in my mind, a good story and memorable characters. Black Ops has both, and as such, it just may be my favorite Call of Duty game ever.
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