Black Ops 3 has a co op campaign so that alone makes it unique and stand out. Only two COD games have that, World at war and this one.
So right off the bat we jump in and things are odd, the premise is about a far future technologically advanced world where computers take over peoples brains and transhumanism and Deus Ex type stuff, its interesting enough at first but also gives some fears for bad things to come. I dont really come to call of duty games for super high tech fantasy things,but we'll see...
Since its co-op, we played on Veteran difficulty. It has the standard co op system of picking your friend up everytime they go down so its not super challenging or anything.
The first little bit has you going around watching a lot of cutscenes and scripted things, having the story told to you, via an NPC partner that always follows you around yelling and talking to you, then you get a first taste of the combat. Everything appears to be in order so far, its standard call of duty fighting waves of heavily armed soldiers. Right off the bat though, you'll notice that you can no longer carry two of any weapon you want. You can only carry a primary weapon, and a pistol or rocket launcher, which is not an exciting design as no longer can you constantly try out new weapons while keeping your 'main' one, it feels limiting and makes the gunplay boring as you use the same gun for most of the game.
After a lengthy introduction you arrive at the hub world where you learn this game has all sorts of crazy mechanics. First, you have a weapons bench where you can create your classic COD class system. Theres really not a great variety of weapons in the game, a couple standard categories like shotguns, SMG, assault rifle, sniper, and you'll notice right away that the guns don't look like any real counter part. It's all very blocky high tech fantasy weapons and honestly none of them look that cool or fun to use. After picking one, you can put attachments on it of course, but you have no attachments at first and the more you use the weapon, the more it levels up which unlocks more attachments. These attachments (and later on unlocking stronger weapons) really matter, because the game has a sort of RPG feel to it where in the beginning of the game you do very shit damage because your weapons/attachments suck, but towards the middle/end of the game you start to get great gear which makes you do way more damage and you no longer struggle as much against some of the enemies.
The create a class also has some perks, but nothing like multiplayer cod. The perks are very uninteresting and limited, things like "take less damage from grenades" "use another attachment on weapon" "carry another grenade" - There is one perk that stands out, and its the ability to wall run/use a jetpack, which can be kind of fun but like, what game am I playing again? you'll be asking yourself that a lot. Its also curious how you need to pick a perk just to be able to pickup enemy guns on the ground.
Also in the hub world is this 'Create your own weapon' mechanic where you can start from scratch to build a weapon, I tried to do it but It seemed like I could not really create anything different? it was just the standard guns and attachments? I was probably doing something wrong, but I didnt care enough to really try more.
And then in the hub world you have the Unlocks system. Now this is where the game takes a real "what the fuck" turn. You have three of these skill tree abilities with all sorts of jargon and skills. You press a button in game which opens up this big 'skill wheel' where you pick different abilites on the fly like a fking MOBA game or world of warcraft or something, and then you press another button to use your ability which has a cooldown. You can unlock dozens of these things from the skill tree, but truth be told I never found any of these appealing or even worth engaging with. No one has the time to be in the middle of a battle, hold a button, stare at this big skill wheel and read a ton of descriptions on what they do. Because the things they do are so asinine and pointless it doesnt matter. Its all stuff like "corrupt enemy robot gun temporarily" or like "Run super fast for a short time" "make enemies fight against eachother" I dont know, none of them were very useful except one: Theres a cloak which makes you go invisible, which as you can imagine makes it much easier to pickup your friend everytime he goes down. I eventually unlocked all of the skills on all the different skill trees, but the cloak is the only one I actually cared to use.
So thats the main mechanics in the hub world, from there you hit 'Deploy' and it takes you to the next mission. Its kind of nice that after every mission it takes you to this hub world where you can take a break/get a coffee/prepare yourself for the next mission.
So, on Veteran difficulty the challenge is just right. Playing co-op makes it so you do not fail when only one of you goes down, so being able to revive eachother makes Veteran an actual fun challenge. You dont go down in one bullet, but like 5 or 6.
Now, the thing that sets this apart from other call of duty games, which makes you ask what game you're playing, is the enemies.
You have all sorts of enemies, you have standard soldiers, you have super heavily half-robot, half-human soldiers, you have giant mechs, you have flying drones, you have even bigger mech tanks, you have robots...
Well in the first half of the game some of these enemies are a massive pain in the ass to fight, especially the robots. You'll be dumping two clips into these guys and they'll still be walking around. Your weak weapons and bad attachments early on mean these guys are just bullet sponges and it does not feel great. Youll frequently encounter rooms of these guys where you and your partner just dump magazine after magazine into them while they're still standing walking towards you. Other similarly tedious enemies are these giant mech tanks where you have to unload first into them with assault rifles, then stun it to where you can shoot rockets at it. This takes quite awhile to actually put it down, it isnt challenging or anything just a little tedious.
While these guys are really annoying in the first half of the campaign, in the second half you unlock guns like the Man o War, with 4+ attachments, which now you can take these guys out in 10 seconds as opposed to previously 45+ seconds. Its just a strange progression in difficulty. It gets easier the more the game goes on. But still, probably the most engaging part of the game was that the challenge wasn't too hard, and wasnt too easy. It keeps us on our toes, but also never really gets frustrating or annoying as the checkpoint system is very generous and having to pick eachother up enables some fun co-op and strategic plays.
What this turns out as, is that I really only used 3 guns for the entire campaign. In the first half I used some AK type gun. and breifly a sniper which was kind of useful, but then when you unlock some stronger guns we just used the Man o War the whole game which is like a really powerful slow shooting assault rifle. For a call of duty game, this is a bad flaw. Call of duty for me is all about using fun guns, constantly changing it up with new exciting weapons , but I didnt feel much of this in black ops 3. Being limited to only one primary weapon is a bad flaw and I kept wondering when I could carry a second one to be able to experiment, but it never happened. There are stations where you can change your loadout mid mission, but you cant create a class or swap out attachments or new weapons, so I never used it much.
The game has so many mechanics that it starts to be kind of a mess. For example you can press 1 to go into night vision thermal mode, you press 2 to open up all your different abilites, you press 3 to enable some visor hud which allows you to endlessly see through walls and enemy health bars and icons, which is pretty shocking, being able to see enemies through walls constantly like its Borderlands or something felt pretty antithetical to the call of duty experience. More "what game am I playing again?" moments. This mechanic alone sort of trivializes the combat, no longer do you have to make really strategic moves to try to pinpoint your enemy location and try to keep track of where they are, now you can just endlessly see their exact location through walls.
Theres really not much to say on the level design or objectives. A lot of levels are just generic city street battles, warehouse buildings, everything looks the same and the graphics honestly are not that impressive, even earlier cod games had more impressive visuals. Everything has a flat dull yellow/brown tone and filled with all the robots and flying drones and multi-colored futuristic gadgets you really forget its a CoD game. Some notable level locations is this one area where its like a brain simulation, and you look up into the sky and the whole village is in the sky turned on its side and you cant tell if you're down or the place in the sky is, its really trippy and surreal. Theres other areas where you go through dream states in some frozen mountian area fighting WW2 soldiers (?) this was an odd but welcome variation to mix things up. But yeah other than some things like that theres really nothing memorable or exciting going on with the objectives. All the objectives are simply go to this next area/press F on this thing/blow this up. Thats it really.
In standard COD fasion there is a ton of scripted events, people talking to you, cutscenes, a lot of handholding and exposition. But unfortunately the story is not that interesting or even makes any sense. The story quickly becomes into this super fantastical high-tech nonsense where people turn into flying fairies and angels, controlling simulations, I don't really know what the story was. Theres this woman that talks to you the whole game and you're not sure if shes on your side or not? that was kind of interesting. I really dont know what to say about the story other than it was a convuluted mess that quickly made no sense and went way too 'beyond fiction' fantasy world stuff. Though I will say that they really do shock you with tons of gore and vile scenes, people having their face burned off, limbs cut off, being exploded into bits, eyes poked out, they really dont hold back on the random gore in the cutscenes which is really strange because the actual gameplay is not very gorey at all. In combat, the enemies dont have viseral reactions to being shot or having limbs come off or giving big blood sprays, they are pretty tame in reaction.
Since its one of the only cod games with a co-op campaign, at 10 hours long, that really helped it. If it wasn't co-op, it might be one of the worst cod games. But being able to play a cod campaign with a friend made it pretty OK. The combat is decent, but it sucks that you dont use that many weapons, or that none of them are that interesting to use, the levels are totally forgettable and the story is asinine, but the challenge felt just right and kept us engaged.
6/10
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