Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Hey, another Call of Duty game! This is my ninth and the blog's seventeenth overall post on the franchise, which has really evolved over the last decade or more from a mundane WWII FPS series into an absurd sequence of playable action movies. And all within the lifecycle of the Xbox 360 - impressive!

I've been away from the series for just over three years, and my last post was on the first Black Ops game. I said there that "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." So imagine my disappointment when Black Ops II was more frustrating and confusing than exciting and fun.

What happened? Did the franchise somehow get substantially worse here, or did I somehow change in a way that left me feeling cold this time around? Sure, I was 24 then and 27 now - married, with a house, and all that - but I really don't want to pin this one entirely on "growing out of" the Call of Duty series. I mean, I've been playing Halo 5 a lot this fall and I have no complaints at all.

Something about the way Black Ops II unfolded just left me without any investment in the story or the characters. There are eleven total missions in the game, taking place in either the late '80s or the year 2025. There are also a few special "strike force" missions that you can play. I tried one and had no idea what was going on, failing miserably. They seemed cool in concept - top-down tactical battles where you had to deploy units and assign them to defend or attack or whatever - but in practice I had no idea what was going on and my forces were immediately overwhelmed.

It turns out that these missions, along with some choices you make in the main campaign, will significantly alter the story and its ending. And hey, why not? It was 2012 and alternate endings were all the rage thanks to BioShock and Infamous and others. But where those games pulled off the idea of karmic storytelling with tact and heart, this is Call of Duty we're talking about. Decisions often boiled down to things like "kill this guy or that guy" and "spare this prisoner or don't." None of it felt like it mattered, and the story suffered accordingly. In the middle of the game there was a mission where I had to prevent a guy from kidnapping a woman from a posh island resort. It was one of the most memorable missions, but when it ended in a successful kidnapping, I thought nothing of it; these things happen in movies and Call of Duty games all the time. Only after the game ended did I remember that woman and wonder what happened to her and why the game had never revisited that particular character or plot point. It turns out that I actually could have saved her, and that doing so would have allowed her to stop a massive cyberattack, drastically changing the ending. But I had no idea I could even save her! And once she was kidnapped, she was never mentioned again - presumably killed, I guess. Who knows?

That's the level of "decision making" that Call of Duty: Black Ops II allowed. Another big turning point came when I was told to shoot a prisoner with a sniper rifle from a long way off. He had a bag over his head. I shot him in the head, because that's what you do in these games - and also in real life. It turns out that if I'd shot the guy in the arms or legs instead - critically wounding him, rather than killing him swiftly - I'd have been rewarded with a more touching post-game cutscene. Wait, what? For being shittier with my aim?

Worst of all, in one mission late in the game - in which, by the way, the enemy has infiltrated a U.S. aircraft carrier by parachuting down onto its deck (don't get me started!) - you briefly take control of the game's primary antagonist, Menendez, and you have to make a decision bout whether or not to shoot the admiral in the head. This isn't good storytelling! Let the antagonist's motives and personality be established for me, the protagonist. Don't let me role play as a bad guy and ask me to make story-altering decisions! Naturally, as a "bad guy" I chose to shoot the admiral in the head. I'm not sure what it accomplished. As the "good guys" I always chose to spare prisoners and captives when in the same situations. Why am I role playing? Why am I controlling the antagonist? If I had killed myself, as Menendez, right then and there, would I have been given a checkpoint reloading screen? Probably! Even though, logically, well, I've just subdued the threat and the game should end two levels early with a minimal loss of civilian lives. Ugh.

Story aside, this was the most frustrating Call of Duty game I've played since Call of Duty III. Three separate times, I was forced to restart the level I was playing - once due to a freeze, once due to a disc read error, and once due to a faulty checkpoint trigger. In that last case, holy shit, the game just kept reloading me into a situation where I was already in the middle of being torn to shreds by drone fire, instead of reloading with me safely behind a wall or something. Bad! Broken!

There were also something like 50 different weapons to choose from - half of them futuristic and science-fictional in nature - which meant I never really had any understanding of what I was using or how I should use it. And the grenades! Oh man, the grenades. Half of my many deaths came when grenades were thrown in my direction and the "grenade indicator" on my HUD didn't show up. Blech. Just so damn frustrating.

Three more Call of Duty games have been released since this one, and I just don't know if it's worth it for me to continue. They're all on the Xbox One and PS4, so at least playing one of them would offer me something new in that respect, but... yeesh. I just really didn't enjoy this experience, guys.