Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (XB360): A Torn Review

As many of you know and have heard from previous reviews, I am not a fan of first person shooters. I never have been. I liked Wolfenstein 3D because it was it was the first FPS game I'd ever played. Then I got to play Doom and Doom 2 and those were excellent. But from there on I just kind of faded away from the genre.

Pretty much for then on that genre did zero for me. There were a handful of good shooters that managed to hold my attention like Bioshock, Resistance 3, or Left4Dead but ultimately the genre as a whole bores me to tears. They all feel the same to me so I typically don't waste my time and money on them. However, in an effort try to broaden my horizons I stepped way the fuck out of my comfort zone and Redboxed the unstoppable juggernaut of the FPS genre....

CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 2: (XB360)

Now if there is anything that bores me about FPS games, its the same old stodgy military ones. You'll note the titles I mentioned above do not fall under that archetype. Because of this, I'm probably going to do a very bad job of explaining the story here but I'm gonna give it a crack.

From what I gather, the story jumps between alternate time lines between David Mason and his father Alex. David leads a special forces unit in pursuit of Raul Menendez, the leader of the populist movement Cordis Die. We learn in the Alex chapters that Menendez chapters that his current war stems from the death of his sister who was inadvertently killed by Alex's partner Frank Woods (who narrates the past chapters) because Menendez's group captured woods and tortured him.

The chapters as Alex depict war from 1986 and cover the rescue of woods, the murder of Menendez's sister and the subsequent chase. The David chapters are modern in 2025 and frankly all I know is that they are still chasing Menendez. Menendez uses cyber terrorism to cripple the Chinese stock exchange and it causes a ban on the the release of rare earth elements and Alex basically works covertly in this new era cold war between China and the US. All of this eventually leads to gaining control of the US unmanned military drones and robots to be turned against the US.

Woods narrates the 1980's chapters and is your support during those missions

Shitty explanation? Well that's about all I understood from it. The game after one cut-scene immediately dropped me off in the middle of a desert battle with gunfire flying and shit blowing up constantly. Clearly, this game was not intending to hold my hand while I tried to figure shit out. I also find it difficult to sympathize with any military protagonist because I can't stand that Jarhead mentality. I'm willing to support em when their fighting to keep me safe, but they tend to be the biggest douche in a bar.

Really, out of all of the characters shoved into my face in this nonstop rush of military rhetoric the only one that I found genuinely sympathetic was the villain, Menendez. Does some bad things to try to care for his sister, she gets killed in a conflict she has nothing to do with, and he seeks revenge for it. Simple, easy to understand.

Seems to be the only guy in this game with any legit justification of his actions.

The controls for the most part seem intuitive enough, but then again there are is really little strategy to a game like this. There are really only 2 buttons you need to know in order to really play this game: the Aim and the Trigger. Pretty much everything after that from what I found is useless. Maybe you can duck behind some cover, or if you are as impatient as am I am learn that the L3 button dashes. But what this game instilled in me is if you aren't running and shooting you aren't doing it right.

Speaking of being patronized the game has a pretty shitty level of respect for your intelligence as well. Lots of games will give you checkpoint markers or small instructions. But COD:BO2 really seems to go out of the way to remind me that I don't know what I'm doing. "Follow this asshole, blow this up, go this way, no not that way stupid, boom." The second I deviate from where it is it thinks I should be going that's pretty much the moment a cheap kill hits me.

There was one desert scene where I was supposed to follow two guys on horseback. My first 4 attempts I followed them outright and it resulted in me getting shot to shit and restarting the mission. My next two I tried to slow down and fight who were shooting at me, but if I did this for longer than 5 seconds the game screamed at me for not keeping up with them and failed the mission and made me restart. I tried to maneuver in other directions and it failed me for not following my team. The game was pissing me off.

I hated this mission so much

Not to mention if you aren't active military or you spend your evenings masturbating to NRA magazine, the weapon load outs are going to make you feel retarded too. I can identify the following guns maybe: An M16, an AK47, a Desert Eagle, and maybe an UZI. But the guns in this games could be barcodes for all I know. So when I am presented with like 30 weapons with names such as "SDFK1269869" or the ever sexy "Mpoumhasedhi14789632KSUN41" just put the fucking word AUTOMATIC on the top of the screen for the uneducated idiots like myself so I can just get to the fucking game already.

Despite all this, there were a handful of things that I did like about the game (which kind of surprised me). The first thing that grabbed my attention is how smooth and clean the graphics looked. Maybe its because the xbox has a better frame rate, or the makers of Call of Duty are really good at producing their product, but I literally marveled at how smooth and clean the graphics looked. It really did go a long way in slipping into the immersion of the game. I'm usually one that says graphics don't make a game but they certainly helped here.

And for a guy who doesn't like first person shooters or basically anything military related, I found myself getting more into this game than I figured I would. Pretty much from the moment I sat down with it I was able to crank out 4 or 6 hours of it without ever really noticing the time passing. Once I got the controls somewhat  down, I found myself flying through the missions and slipping in and out of iron sight aim like I've been playing FPS games my whole life.

The zombie mode was pretty fun as well. It has a survival mode which was simple enough but I tried the Tranzit mode and the only thing I can really complain about it is doesn't really explain what the fuck you are supposed to be doing. I came to find out that I was supposed to pick things up so I could build something to open a door, but it doesn't really explain how to use it or what my ultimate goal was. I definitely think that COD:BO2 probably has some of the worse conveyance I've played in a game, which is pretty impressive considering it tries to hold your hand but still doesn't manage to tell you anything.

I've played enough zombie games. When you headshot, they fucking drop.
They don't in this. I call bullshit.

However, this cheeky change of pace did bring up one major issue. Something I didn't want to do. The reason this game is as huge as it is, is because of its multiplayer. So I decided if I was going to be as objective as I can about this, I have to play all its aspects. So I used one of my one month cards to renew my gold account and I logged into the multiplayer. Decided to start off with something simple and jumped into a team death match. This is exactly what happened the first time I tried to play an online match:

-Finding game.... Game found. Entering Lobby.

-CannonMan: Hey everybody. How are we doing tonight?
-Shitdick12 year old: (Screaming) THIS GUY IS FUCKING LEVEL ONE. SOMEBODY KICK THIS NIGGER JIZZ BUCKET.
-CannonMan has left the game.

If I was a judge, Child abuse cases would have much lighter sentences
if the term "Xbox Live" showed up in the case. I hate children.

Xbox Live and its community can go fuck itself. It is hands down the worst community of people on the face of the planet (which is impressive considering how shitty the Gunbound community was). I don't give a shit how good some players are, and I don't even mind a little bit of smack talk when you play a game. But I will tell you something that I constantly told the parents who would shop for games when they come into buy their kid a game like this: There is absolutely nothing a developer can put into their video game that is more offensive then the entitled trolling little shit dick kids who play these games. 

Go and log into YouTube. You will find hundreds of videos of kids and teens saying saying some of the most disgusting vile shit I've ever heard in my life, and this is coming from a guy who says the word fuck a lot. They just ruin the game for me. The constant screaming, the constant swearing, the constant racism and sexism. Where the fuck are the parents of these people? It is completely intolerable.

So seriously, I've said this before and I'll say it again that two things need to happen. One, Xbox and PlayStation need to put on age filters one profiles so I have the option to not play with kids. Two, whenever you hear a kid screaming obscenities for no real reason. Do not engage them, Report their name, try to get everyone in the room to do so as well. Start banning these fucking accounts.

Alright, got that out of my system. So after removing my headset and changing the audio settings, I tried again, this time only playing a regular death match. I found immediate aggravation because in these games you don't have regenerating health. Oh the game says you do but its bullshit because if you get shot once, its too late. You are already dead. My first game went embarrassingly poorly. It was a lot of me running around looking for something to shoot and being put down almost immediately.

But I started to get the hang of it. While I feel having some medium of a life bar is better for games like this, being able to put someone down quickly did work a little to balance the game for me. I never could break out of the bottom three of each death match I played, but my kill count generally rose with every game I played. I do feel its kind of stupid to give all the best players the best gear. Yes its a reward for leveling up, but it just makes the new players that much more at a disadvantage.

I will say however, it was very nice to see that I was able to log into the game and play the multiplayer without the need of a "Season Pass" or an "Online Pass". I understand companies like EA don't like not getting a cut of the used sales, but I really think nickle and dimeing the player is going to just hurt the gaming industry more than help it. Make us pay for maps and DLC, the online should come with the game new or not.

I picked this game up with the full intention of going off about how right I was, and that this game is stupid and is right to be called Spunkgargleweewee. But god damn it, it really wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. It did confirm most of my suspicions for me. Military does nothing for me in story or game play, the online community pretty much deserves a massive genocidal purging, and that this game is strictly designed for its fan base.

But I do find myself unable to call it a bad game. I want to hate it, I really do. But the fact is I was able to sit down with it and was able blow a whole day off playing it. Of the multiplayer games I've played, I really did kinda get into this one. Would I buy this game? Fuck no. But if a group of friends were getting together to do like a Black Ops 2 lan party, I would probably show up to participate. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was its chance to try to sell me on the genre and this franchise of games. It failed to do so, but it did give me somewhat of an understanding of why its so popular.