Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 Review

It's November so that must mean it's Call Of Duty time again. It's Treyarch's Call Of Duty so you will be getting Zombies mode, and trust me Zombies in Black Ops 2 is awesome but all that and the campaign review will come later. Like my Halo 4 review I am going to review Black Ops 2's Multiplayer/online modes first because of how big online is to Call Of Duty. Let's see if Call Of Duty Black Ops 2 is worth a purchase or if it should be on your "Do not get" list.

When you get into the main online menu you will have a list of things to do. In the list you will see Public Match, League Play, Custom Games, Theatre, COD TV and Barracks. The first part of online I will talk about is the Public Match. In the Public Match menu you will get to choose from four different playlists and these are Core, Hardcore, Combat Training and Party Games. Core is just the normal COD you are used to, Hardcore has different gameplay variants like no HUD and Limited Health, Combat Training is so you can test your COD skills before you go online as their is no stats carried over from Combat Training and finally there is Party Games mode that has free for all games that are just for fun.

There are 12 different game modes that can be played in Black Ops 2's Multiplayer with old classics returning like Team Deathmatch and Domination as well as new game modes brought over from Modern Warfare 3 like Kill Confirmed. There have been some changes as well to some of the modes that I played. Domination now has a 2 round format which means there will be 2 games of Domination played in one game of Domination and everything that happens in the first round will be carried over to the 2nd round this includes Scorestreaks (Talk about this soon), kills and deaths.

Talking about changes to the game Killstreaks have now been changed to Scorestreaks. Scorestreaks can be earned for different kind of things like capturing a flag, getting a kill, confirming a kill, UAV assists and normal assists. You will notice a bar that you will need to fill up in order to receive each Scorestreak reward as each reward has a score requirement for example a UAV will require 350 points to be used. You are allowed up to 3 scorestreak rewards in your loadout. Some of the best rewards I managed to use in the game was Dragonfire and Lightning strike. Dragonfire lets you operate a remote controlled kind of helicopter that has a lightweight machine gun attached to it, and while using the Dragonfire I got quite a few kills with it (8 being the most)  Lighting Strike lets you call in bombs that can placed in 3 different places which got me 5 kills at the most. There is 22 Scorestreak rewards that can be used in Multiplayer and most of them will have to be unlocked by using unlock tokens that you get by leveling up.

After leveling up a few times you would want to start creating your own custom class which means you can choose many different things you want in your loadout, and this includes your primary and second primary gun, attachments to each gun, up to 3 perks, lethal and tactical weapons, personalize your knife and wildcards. Each loadout is limited to 10 different items so that means not every slot can be filled. Attachments are the different upgrades you can add to each gun so if you want to add things like laser sight or better bullets you can. All these different attachments will increase your guns stats like Fire Rate and Damage for example. Perks are also upgrades that have an effect on your own personal character this means you can add a perk so he doesn't get damage for falling or you can add a perk to earn Scorestreaks faster. Lethal and Tactical weapons are weapons like different grenades, a combat axe and a mine.

While on the subject of customizing there is the Barracks were you can edit your playercard, check your rank, change your clan tag and much more. The first thing you will see when selecting the barracks  is the option to edit your emblem. Each custom emblem is allowed 32 layers and there is a wide selection of items to choose from you can use different shapes, Black Ops 2's Ranks logo, letters and all can be customized with your own color. In the Barracks you can check your progress on the huge amount of challenges to do. Challenges can be things like getting a certain amount of kills with a certain gun or getting a number of headshots with a certain gun. While in the Barracks menu you will find a part which will tell you your own Black Ops 2 stats like how many kills you got, how many deaths you have had, your online level and your kill/death ratio.

In Black Ops 2 you're allowed to create your own custom game. Each custom game need to have map and game mode of your choosing but here is what makes it different you are allowed to choose the games rules so this means you can add what time and score limit you want, how teams are allowed and if the match is on Hardcore settings or not. You are also allowed to edit how many point certain things get so you can make it only 1 point per kill or 25 points per kill. There are tons of different options to choose from in the menu and will give you plenty of alternative ways to play your favorite game modes in multiplayer.

Now you have an idea what content you are going to be getting online I will talk about what Black Ops 2 online gaming is like. After playing a few games online I noticed a major problem with players spawning right behind me after being killed. It was near impossible to reach them in time and just about the time you noticed you was being shot by a spawned enemy you was dead. Now it wasn't like this all the time but it was becoming a common problem after a few more games to point were the enemy team was spawning in the same area as our team was spawning.

The maps in multiplayer were pretty well done some felt a little too small at times. One of my personal favorite maps in Black Ops 2 is Hijacked which takes place on a luxurious yacht that has a few different levels to go through. There are also many other maps that take place in different parts of the world like Panama, LA, China, Yemen, Singapore and Pakistan to name a few. There is a total of 14 maps in the game. Online gameplay was fun altogether and was very addictive so I couldn't put the controller down at times. It helped that Online didn't suffer from many connection problems so games felt smooth and didn't take you out of the game experience.

Now we got all that Mulitplayer out of the way I am going to talk about the zombies mode next. Zombies mode has 3 different game modes are they are Tranzit, Survival and Grief. Tranzit is the story mode of the whole zombies mode while survival is the classic survive as many rounds as you can until you die and a new addition this year is the grief mode which allows 8 people/2 teams going up against the zombies while the two teams aren't allowed to kill each other you can set traps and cause the other team grief which is were the name comes from, and don't forget only one team can survive this mode.


Zombies mode is still really fun like in the other games. You will come across more than your typical Zombies in this years Zombies mode. There will be enemies that can actually jump on to you and scratch your face until you need to be revived, and trust me these monsters can get real annoying fast. Going around in a bus trying to keep Zombies out was a really interesting and fun twist to the mode, and it won't be the only cool twists and changes you will find in Zombie which I am going to let you find yourself. You can also create Zombies highlight using theater and also make your own custom Zombies mode with your own person twists like headshots being the only way to kill Zombies.

Then there is the campaign mode to go through as well. Before each mission you will start at a mission briefing menu were you can customize you loadout similar to the online ones I mentioned earlier in the review. You can also check your career record and your main objective for each mission in the mission brief menu. Unlike past Call Of Duty campaign this campaign will have actual replay value (Except from completing on harder difficulties I guess) as the story is branching and will require multiple playthroughs if you want to see the different paths you can take in the game. I can't go in to much detail about the campaign due to spoilers but I will say it was fun to playthrough, and with COD being a big multiplayer game I hope campaign gets a little noticeable this year. I completed the campaign in about 6 hours which is kind of short but the multiple pathways in the campaign will up the total time spent in campaign.

The Final Verdict

Black Ops 2 surprised me to be honest. I didn't think it was going to be this much fun. I really liked the online and I liked how killstreaks have changed to scorestreaks as well as the awesome scorestreak rewards you can use in the game. I didn't have many problems but the spawning is pretty bad and needs to be fixed if it can because it was getting ridiculous at one point of the game. Zombies is still awesome, and should entertain you for hours like in the past COD games. Campaign was the big surprise as I wasn't a fan of the other campaigns in COD games but this one was pretty good. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 is a 100% buy.

+ Online is fun and addictive
+ Lots of customizing
+ Zombies mode is awesome

- Enemy team spawning behind players

Final Score

8.5/10