Need to know
What is it? Near-future aim down sights shooting.
Release date: November 14, 2025
Expect to pay: $70
Developer: Treyarch
Publisher: Activision
Reviewed on: Ryzen 7 7700, RX 7800 XT, 64gb DDR5
Steam Deck: Unverified
Link: Official website
It only takes a single mission in Black Ops 7’s atrocious co-op campaign to figure out what the scheme with this year’s entry is: welding together the campaign, multiplayer, Warzone, and Zombies modes, so as to streamline the asset generation pipeline and drastically cut down on the requirement for one-off assets and complex scripting.
The premise of the campaign itself is complete nonsense: after being dosed with the Cradle bio-weapon from Black Ops 6, Alex Mason’s son has to retread the memories of his father (and, confusingly, his father’s squadmates) through shared hallucinations. When Black Ops 7 does wander back onto a somewhat familiar path, it does so to retread the lives of series arch-protagonists Woods and Mason, remixing iconic locales and series highlights in the way that Disturbed covered “Sound of Silence”.
Identity crisis
If Black Ops 7 has any identity of its own, it’s from these setpiece moments, and they are far and away the worst parts of not only Black Ops 7, but the series as a whole. From Woods getting transformed into a Little Shop of Horrors-esque Venus flytrap to Harper getting blown up to kaiju-size to throw down easily dodgable shockwave attacks onto the deck of Black Ops 2’s “USS Barack Obama”, these gaudy Excision visuals-turned-boss fights are monstrously tedious, barnacle scum dredged up from the lowest rungs of the Destiny 2 barrel: shoot the weak points, wait until the boss deploys a shield, kill the adds as they filter into the arena, and then shoot the glowing weak point a million times more.
Black Ops 7’s campaign awkwardly transplants most of its mechanics straight from Warzone: armor plates, weapon rarities, and a bafflingly long time-to-kill that degrades most encounters into a straight DPS race. Encounter design is particularly poor, and most often I was racing towards enemies hoping that their AI would bug out or get distracted so that I could mag-dump the contents of my light machine into their face.
I was no fan of Black Ops 6’s campaign, but only a few hours with Black Ops 7 had me begging for the forced stealth sections and helicopter boss fights of old. Filling in for bygone campaign conventions like the classic helicopter door turret section is the ability to pick up and deploy multiplayer killstreaks, sporadic acts of mercy scattered around combat arenas that see fights end that much quicker. While cutting the tedium of these miserable encounters short is an appreciated relief, the result is a campaign that feels, more than anything, cheap.
Bereft of any unique encounters and devoid of the series’ staple production value, Black Ops 7’s gaudy hallucinogenic death march marks a brutal franchise low—one that other modes don’t make up for. I played this in co-op across two monstrous sessions, streaming it for friends while playing with some randoms, and the silver lining here is that there is almost a “so bad its good” factor at play here.
My online co-op partners were all mic’d up and equally dedicated to putting this beast to bed as fast as possible, and the frequent moments of shared frustration, bafflement, and genuine shock that they could release something this bad led to more sanity-unravelling screaming than anything Alex Mason was subjected to vis-à-vis the Numbers Program.
The aesthetic weaknesses of the campaign aren’t a compromise that allows for a boldly stylish multiplayer—across the board, Black Ops 7 is hideous. The near-future Call of Dutys have never been my favorites in the series, but one doesn’t have to look too far back to find levels and maps that feel leagues more inspired than anything Treyarch is offering now.
Black Ops 7 is Call of Duty at its loudest and most obnoxious, made all the worse by sweeping usage of generative AI. The taint of this stuff is across the whole of the game—victory screens, calling cards, weapon skins, and even textures occasionally have that smeary Grok look placed front and center. For a game that already feels like a barebones production compared to the usual CoD spectacle, having to look at assets that resemble straight Grok outputs with zero cleanup makes the whole package feel shockingly cheap.
Never be game over
Upon wrapping the campaign, Black Ops 7 unlocks the endgame mode, a co-operative PvE exploration mode that takes place on what is absolutely the newest iteration of Warzone’s map update. Dropping into the Mediterranean township of Avalon, you’re left to awkwardly meander between PvE objectives, opening crates, looting gear, and choosing perks to up your odds against the increasingly difficult (read: tedious) combat encounters.
What really undermines Endgame is some brutal weapon and enemy tuning that leaves anything short of Legendary gear drops feeling all but unbearable in the hand. The campaign’s issues with enemy AI and positioning are massively exacerbated in an open world space, and to compensate for how quickly enemy AI will break upon the exertion of the slightest pressure, the lowliest grunt to the most frail zombie has been given boosts to damage and health, requiring sustained full-auto fire to the head to put down. It’s beyond exhausting, and with a map that fails to string together any of its zones in an interesting way, I can’t see myself ever returning to Endgame.
Endgame’s casual competitive counterpart, Skirmish, also failed to hold my attention. Even the sweatiest 20 vs 20 gunfights fail to evoke a fraction of the chaos of the most casual 16 vs 16 Battlefield 6 lobbies, mostly due to the decision to again jam Warzone’s armor plating system somewhere it does not belong. The essence of Call of Duty is dead sprinting straight out of spawn and going on an insane kill or death spree. Where Warzone’s high time serves as a safety net, Skirmish just feels like a waste of time, demanding greater precision and accuracy with a whatever arsenal of laser accurate recoilless weapons.
I’ll cop to being a bit of a military otaku with an eye for accuracy, so this year’s near-future arsenal update was already fighting an uphill battle for my approval. Even still, there was nothing here that gripped me—I appreciated the handling parallels between the AK-27 and the AK-47 of earlier entries, even down to the slim profile of the iron sights, but otherwise, BO7’s arsenal feels like a real step back from last year’s, nearly indistinguishable slabs of iridescent electronics and polished gunmetal. It’s a dry roster in contrast to BO6. Even after twenty odd hours and fifty plus levels, the only gun I could name is the AK-27.
Better off alone
BO7 doesn’t shore up its singleplayer deficiencies with a strong competitive offering, either. New mobility options in the form of wall jumps do little to complement maps that seem fundamentally at odds with an increase of vertical mobility. After 40-plus levels grinding out the mosh pit playlist, the only real utility I could identify for wall jumps was in some clever lane-switching to get up to the solar panels on the map “Raid”.
Moreover, despite promises to reign it in, BO7’s aesthetics are already compromised by the baffling decision to marry together the cosmetics of the Zombies mode and the regular multiplayer. At present, there are robots running around draped in human flesh and zombie hunting time travellers swan diving onto the decks of futuristic mining platforms—it looks nakedly ridiculous, and I was constantly gawking at how gaudy BO7’s overall presentation is.
Zombies, is, near as I can tell, very nearly the same as it ever was. The addition of driveable vehicles is cool, but it feels like little more than a way to awkwardly transit from one overlong gunfight where you kite bullet sponges to another—and really, that description feels like it fits most of BO7.
Equal parts obnoxious and exhausting: All I could think while playing was, “God, was it really always like this?” And even if it feels like it sometimes, after years of these games hammering both your wallet and your senses, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t. And with that perspective, BO7 becomes all the more irritating, and entrenches itself as a content ecosystem I desperately want to escape from.
