Wow, I thought I was harsh on this game when comparing it to COD4, W@W and MW2 (which I considered to be great games), but you guys take the cake.
I wanted to enjoy this game but just couldn't. It was a disjointed mess which they handwave by saying that's just the sequence Mason remembers things. The ending did a half-hearted job of salvaging it but having predicted most of the plot twist from the opening scene there was no wow factor or shock value to be had.
The inclusion of Reznov's pointless flashback mission was especially frustrating - it felt like a waste of the character I'd come to admire from W@W, especially considering the ultimate truth about Reznov's presence - which I'd predicted long before they started dropping the really obvious hints. Then reiterated about five times to make sure all the dummies really got it.
Combine the poor storytelling with frustrating checkpointing, poor mission markers and uncooperative (sometimes frustratingly obstructive) friendly AI, and the handful of legitimately good action sequences (the zipline and rapelling window-entry room breach and clear sequences were probably the coolest parts - but lasted all of five seconds each) and Black Ops comes up well short of the par I've come to expect.
I just want Modern Warfare 3 to be done so I can dust my hands of this series.
Having spent a little more time with the multiplayer I can see how it will serve the purpose of filling the void until COD's next annual installment but there's nothing memorable here at all. I do like the combat training mode where you can play multiplayer against bots of dynamically improving difficulty (populated with names from your friendlist) because there is a LOT of attention to detail in the way people play online - camping, cheap snipers, co-ordinated nade-spam, spawn-killing, and it does a lot to prepare you for the online as long as you're playing on at least regular or hardened difficulty.
The zombie mode feels a bit uninspired, because they've just carried forward what people liked about Nazi Zombies and added new settings - playing as JFK or Castro is amusing but once again not enough to make it memorable. I understand this though, it's just the next annual installment of Call of Duty. It doesn't need to be groundbreaking, it just needs to be the next thing everyone is playing.
I won't blame it entirely on hype, but my expectations were higher.
Edit: Oh, one more thing! What was with the long breaks the game took? Not only did it interrupt you with sequences where you had to stand around and wait for a dialogue to play out (firgivable) but it also had moments where you're sitting around with your thumbs up your ass, waiting for NOTHING to happen before you're allowed to continue.
Sitting around at the end of the level where you're escorting the tank and calling in air strikes. You get to the pit and then nothing. You sit aorund for about a minute until an enemy tank shows up, then it's another minute before the game lets you call in air support (which was the only logical thing to do). Then it makes you wait a little longer before telling you we're waiting for a boat to come pick you up. It really threw off the pacing. Another part was when you're infiltrating the facility with Reznov, which was a half-decent stealth sequence... but you're hiding in some industrial elevator and nothing happens, NOTHING for about three minutes. reznov is done blabbing on about shit, there's no immediate threats, but you sit there kind of bouncing off the walls until the game arbitrarily tells you to open the door and stealth kill some guy.
Maybe I'm just impatient.
Edit 2: I'm probably going to return my copy, depending on how I feel about it after giving multiplayer another crack this weekend... but I'm also going to have to give Dead Ops Arcade a try. That was a ton of fun. I know it's just a redoing of Smash TV or even Zombie Apocalypse, but it was enjoyable. However I won't keep a $79 game just for a game which would otherwise be 800 MS points on the XBL arcade Marketplace.
