Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Review

Marc-Antoine Roy, author

Treyarch’s and Activision’s Call of Duty Black Ops 3 realeased about a month ago. Many people have been asking how good or bad is the game. These are the conclusions of or testing staff.

Campaign

Black Ops 3 features the first cooperative Call of Duty campaign in the entire franchise,which is definitely a nice addition, even though quite a late one. Apart from that, while playing the campaign, you now have the ability to run on walls and unleash swarms of nanobots amongst other things.

The main negative point about the campaign is that it doesn’t allow too many choices of play styles and feels more like a Michael Bay movie than an actual video game campaign. Also, the game does not allow you to really choose how you play, it forces you into one single experience.

Multiplayer

If you like Call of Duty’s fast paced modern arena shooter type of gameplay, you will most likely like Black Ops 3s multiplayer. One of its new additions is Specialists, which are characters with unique weapons or abilities that are on a cooldown. The rate at which you earn these abilities or weapons  is sped up by the amount of points you earn, rewarding players that are playing well. These abilities include a vision pulse that allows you to see scanned enemies through walls for a short time  (around 5 seconds), to run incredibly fast for a limited time or earn you scorestreaks faster. The specialist weapons include a revolver called the Annihilator, which rewards accurate players with a one shot kill. These weapons or abilities do not grant you any kind of damage resistance or immunity, meaning that you could die easily with them, having to wait the entire cooldown again. The other main addition is the movement system, it now allows you to run on walls and propel you with the help of a jetpack. This creates new ways to navigate Black Ops 3’s multiplayer maps, which are designed around this new style of movement.

Zombies

The fan’s favorite Zombies game mode is back, but in a new form in the map Shadows of Evil. The map is set in the universe the prohibition era. The map’s characters are punished for the crimes they have committed in the real world. Shadows of Evil contains many creatures such as the Maargwa,which change the usual Zombies gameplay. Apart from that, it’s the same good old Zombies shootout with Black Ops 3’s weapons and new perk upgrades.

Overall Game Performance

From my experience and online sources, Black Ops 3 runs at a constant 60 FPS(FPS is Frame rate Per Second,which refers to the number of new images that are created every second, the higher FPS a game has,the smoother it looks) whilst drops in how smooth the game is are created by a poor connection to a host or server. On the PC though , the game didn’t run as smoothly as expected on launch. Although the developers have been working on the issue and have released updates to optimize the game. Still, even with these updates, there have been many reports of frame rate drops.

To sum it off, Black Ops 3 features some innovations, while keeping the successful formula of Call of Duty. I would recommend this game to anyone that likes Call of Duty’s multiplayer or Zombies, I wouldn’t recommend this game if you mainly play video game campaigns because it is a lackluster at best due the the absence of choice and its Hollywood movie feel.