The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 campaign is one of the biggest steps backward I can recall seeing in Call of Duty. They’ve always varied in success, with some of the low points being Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 3, while personal highlights include Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, World at War, and Black Ops 6. The latter did some very interesting things mechanically, leading to a refreshing take on mission structures and what a Call of Duty campaign looks like, or needs to be. Unfortunately, Black Ops 7 takes all of those learnings, lines them up in front of a firing squad, and shreds them to bits.
In Black Ops 7, you play as any one of four members of Specter One, a squad led by David Mason (played by Milo Ventimiglia), son of Alex Mason, the protagonist of the first Black Ops game. Narratively, it’s set 10 years after the 2025 events of Black Ops 2, with that game’s antagonist — Raul Menendez — seemingly returning from the dead. Much like Black Ops 6, which is set in the early ‘90s (bear with me), the focal point is around the psychochemical weapon known as “Cradle,” heavily implied to have been eradicated in that game. Surprise: It’s back, and it’s doing some funky shit.
It may sound like an odd complaint, but there isn’t a single non-hostile NPC in Black Ops 7. Of course, most NPCs you encounter in a first-person shooter are those you’re meant, well, to shoot, but the best entries in the genre punctuate those setpieces with moments of downtime where you interact with characters who aren’t trying to kill you. These crowds of regular people go a long way toward helping a game world feel alive. Even Black Ops 6 accomplished it with innovative levels set in political galas and military base camps, for instance.
With Black Ops 7, the entire game almost feels like a wave-based mode, going from one location to the next, with a very loose story attached. The lack of other characters, even just civilians in the more urban mission settings such as Tokyo or on the enormous Avalon map (which, by the way, the game doesn’t actually give you an in-game map for), means it all feels fake and superficial. When all you do is shoot people, without any “real” people to see, it makes one wonder: What is all the shooting for?
To help explain why this may be the case, it’s important to know Treyarch is pushing this as specifically a co-op campaign, rather than a single-player one. The problem with that is that it means it must forego everything that has made those aforementioned Call of Duty campaigns great, in favor of mission structures that support multiple players. (For context, I was not able to play Black Ops 7 cooperatively before the review embargo.)
You’d think then, that if you’re playing solo, you’ll still have AI-controlled squadmates alongside you, right? Wrong, for some baffling reason! It’s a very lonely experience playing solo, mowing down room after room of enemies, before the rest of Specter One decide to show up just for cutscenes. Oh, the result of this co-op campaign focus means it’s always online too, so there’s no pausing, and if you quit, you must restart that level from the very beginning rather than having checkpoints. And did we mention there aren’t any difficulty levels this time around, and instead it scales based on the size of your squad?
There is one mission in Black Ops 7 that presents something very interesting, reminiscent of other Call of Duty campaigns: “Suppression.” During “Suppression,” you’re — as you will be throughout a lot of the campaign — under the hallucinogenic, nightmarishly trippy effects of Cradle, and you must sneak through Vorkuta, where Alex Mason was imprisoned in the original Black Ops. There are demon-esque inmates everywhere, and you have nothing more than a knife and decoy grenades. It’s this style of innovative, linear, atmospheric level that historically has helped Call of Duty campaigns thrive, but Black Ops 7 is devoid of them everywhere else.
Alongside bipedal demons, spiders and enormous, spitting flying monsters are also present in a number of missions, almost reminiscent of modern-day Doom enemies. Visually, it looks fantastic, but it’s so nonsensical it’s a struggle to get onboard with the direction the Black Ops series is going.
However, Cradle does create an excuse for some fascinating boss fights, which are the only other highlight in Black Ops 7. They’re a touch easy — I didn’t realise how much I’d miss difficulty settings — but from the tree-like, multi-headed boss in an Angolan jungle, known simply as “The Nightmare,” to a titan-sized, drug-fuelled version of one of your squadmates as he pounds the ground and spews toxic gas everywhere, the campaign takes a much more gamified approach than most other games in the series.
Unfortunately, that’s not really what I want from a Call of Duty campaign, though. Iconic moments throughout the series — such as assassinating Zakhaev in Call of Duty 4‘s “All Ghillied Up,” methodically cleaning out Camden townhouses in Modern Warfare (2019)‘s “Clean House,” or even completing the safehouse piano puzzle and investigating the basement in Black Ops 6 — are distant memories here. The campaign throws foe after foe at you, with barely time to breathe, and declines to offer a single emotional moment with these characters we’ve known for some time, especially David Mason.
Every other mission takes place on Avalon, which is the map for Black Ops 7‘s Endgame mode. Endgame is essentially a DMZ meets Warzone meets Zombies mashup, with endless objectives on the map and up to 32 players in one session. From what I’ve played, it’s missing any soul or charm, as you wingsuit from one location to the next, capable of sprinting straight past most enemies if you can’t be bothered to fight them. It hasn’t grabbed me yet, though as Endgame is intended to be an evolving component of Black Ops 7’s live-service offerings, there’s a chance it does as I continue to play more.
But everything up to that final mission doesn’t inspire confidence. There’s no curation here. The whole campaign mode feels like an afterthought. There are likely many reasons for it: Treyarch had a number of years to develop Black Ops 6, but with this coming just 12 months later, time must’ve been short. Maybe more focus went on multiplayer and zombies this year, as those modes are replayable and, frankly, the reason most players buy a Call of Duty game in the first place. Whatever the reason, Black Ops 7 is a serious low point for Call of Duty campaigns.
