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70 of 77 people found the following review helpful.
Worth the money you ask? By Jonathan R. Asleson Alright, I'm a serious COD fan and I logged almost a month on Modern Warfare 2, and a little over a half a month on all the other COD titles. You all know what the prestige edition comes with, as it is all listed above, but is it truly worth the extra money?
It's hard to say. It certainly cool and I waited outside of my local Best Buy at 9pm before the midnight release to get in line to make sure I got a copy. The ONLY thing that comes with the prestige edition that is not included in the hardened edition is the RC-XD killstreak remote controlled car. That being the only thing different-I'll go over it a bit. --It feels cheap and very light (not complaining, exactly what I would expect-I didn't expect a serious quality RC car). --It takes 12 AA batteries, 6 in the remote and 6 in the car, which drain pretty fast. (especially if the camera is on) --The car zips around pretty well but won't do well in the grass at all. --I've played with RC cars all my life and this one is a little difficult to handle. The turns are crazy sharp with the steering dial on the right of the remote, it takes a very steady hand to carefully steer the car. --The camera (as expected, not complaining) is very low quality and it is impossible to drive while just looking at the screen on the remote. The lens is faced upward and if you're driving it on the street or in the house you cannot see the ground to see where you're going, you see the top 2/3 of a level of a house. --The microphone is pretty sensetive so if it is on, you'll constantly hear the gears and mechanisms from inside the car and will come through on your remote and it sounds like a cheap $5 toy car engine sound. As far as gameplay goes, it varies, and truly, it's all depending on what COD games you like the most. I've read other reviews and I do agree with others that it feels a lot like World at War with some minor additions. The online play is not as smooth as IW's Modern Warfare 2 or even COD4. ONLINE GAMEPLAY I think the online gameplay takes some adjusting to after playing MW2 because MW2 was so fast paced and sometimes predictable. The spawnpoints on Black Ops from my experience have been all over the place. I very regularly find myself spawning behind people and saying "man I'd be pissed if I was that guy" and many times I AM that guy. The refresh rate is not that of MW2 and the graphics in multiplayer really suffer. I thought that with the popularity of the COD franchise that they would only stride to make each addition better than the last, but truly I think this one falls short. You buy all of your attachments with bets (or contracts) wagered, and that's actually pretty fun. It's like the same thing as challanges, but it puts a little more pressure on you because you have a time limit. Stopping power and danger close are gone, as is one man army. But because there aren't really noobtubes with one man army or people using stopping power and trailblazing, I find that there are MANY MORE campers in here, sitting back trying to achieve their higher killstreaks. Killstreaks do not count toward other killstreaks, so if I get my RC-XD remote controlled explosive car, and get 2 kills..that still doesn't mean I get my carepackage--I still have to shoot/knife/grenade someone myself. This was apparently a complaint of "the rich get richer/poor gets poorer." I personally think if people are having troubles with a game they shouldn't cry about it on blogs and complain to creators because they cannot personally do well in a video game-that's your own fault. Multiplayer in conclusion, not what I expected. I'm getting used to it, but I'm going to miss the pace of MW2 and the way you unlock attachments for weapons instead of having to buy them. CAMPAIGN The compaign mode is great. The graphics are MUCH better and I really wish they would have focused on making their graphics better for online play instead of stupid things like putting your clan tag on your gun and things that most people could do without. One thing I loved about World at War was the super satisfying shotgun to the legs during campaign where they blow off, and there's plenty of that here. A great assortment of weapons and plenty to do, including the use of vehicles. I really have no complaints about the campaign, it's very fun and you'll absorb it right away. ZOMBIES Of course zombies are great! I think they focused harder on zombies than they did multiplayer also, atleast as far as graphics go. Automated turrets and all kinds of fun stuff to do! Plus, with the prestige or hardened edition, you get the 4 original maps-which is a great value considering what I spent on WAW mappacks in the past. It's fun playing the old maps with the additions of the new guns. I loved playing on Nacht der Untoten and going upstairs and cornering myself in and lining up headshots with the new guns. Of course everyone will like nazi zombies. I personally think Treyarch should be responsible for COD-Nazi Zombies and release a Nazi Zombie based game with a campaign and everything. Well, that's my review. conclusion- Campaign is great, multiplayer lacks in my personal opinion, zombies are great=4/5. If you're a serious collector, go for the prestige and get your RC-XD like I did and let me know what you think of it. I really hope it was helpful to somoene, please vote and let me know whether is helped you out and leave any comments or questions and I'd be happy to promptly respond. Thanks everyone!
COD Must Evolve By 3V0LVE Great production value does not make a great game. I'll start with the good things. COD:Black Ops graphics are on-par with any top-shelf title and it has an incredibly smooth feel. The game is reported to run at 60 frames per second and it feels very high def. The voice acting is good, and clearly the production value and marketing budgets are both very high. However, graphics, and hype do not make a good game. Gameplay and immersion do. Here's why COD:Black Ops Fails utterly. 1 AI is stupid. These shortcomings remind you constantly that your playing a game, and a poorly scripted one at that. - Enemy recognition: I've seen the AI sit 2 feet away from an enemy and not shoot at them. When they finally do, they shoot it out for 10-15 seconds to score a kill on the enemy. This is ridiculous. Your allies in the field are supposed to be top-notch soldiers just like you. Why can't they do some of the heavy lifting? Why can't they do ANY lifting? - AI Movement: Once again you are expected to lead the way no matter what. AI will lead you from one battle to another with annoying "follow me you jackass" type comments (I mean you're supposedly the "very best" soldier in the US's arsenal and your squad pampers you along like you're the greenest rookie in the armed forces, but I'll hit on this later) but once you get from one battle sequence to the next, they sit and shoot in the general direction of the enemy, but do nothing, generally, to progress the situation. I want to ask the developers, "Have you played ANY other modern games with AI in them?" Because they do have a worthwhile influence on the outcome. Try playing Halo:Reach on legendary without the help of your squad mates you are FAR worse off. In that game, your squad shoots and accurately, and infinitely and eliminates enemies... For the really tough enemies you can time your shots with your AI squad mates to take down difficult targets with efficacy. This is entirely missing in BO. 2. Scripted non-sense battles: Once again the feel of a real battle is completely removed here. You can not move naturally through a level, but instead must figure out through countless, monotonous trial and error sessions what the best, and arguable only, (especially when playing on hardened/veteran difficulty) way through a section is. The fact that the story won't proceed to the next sequence until you trip the magic tripwire in the game is on par with 10-15yr old video games. Have the developers played anything but their own garbage in the last decade? I'm guessing no. - Nothing is worse in battles than seeing your buddies standing in the open taking zero fire, while you are ducked behind cover, and somehow getting magically lit up by enemies invisible to you. While I understand that perhaps some finger or toe might be sticking out of cover, why in all reasonableness would the enemy concentrate the entirety of their base of fire on such an impossible target when there are readily available targets standing entirely in the open? The fact that every enemy on the field seems to ignore all targets but you is very hard to get over. It's counter intuitive. If you see your friends moving with impunity, its natural to think, "I can go with them and NOT get shot at by multiple enemies, since they are in the open and not getting shot at by multiple enemies." Treyarch rewards this logic with untimely, inexplicable death, over and over again. = totally annoying 3. Infinitely spawning enemies - There are times when this is sensible, and there are times when it isn't. The fact that Treyarch rewards you for getting into a tactically superior position and eliminating enemies with unending waves of reinforcements is ridiculous. It's once again, counter-intuitive. While I understand the need to move, you are murdered over and over for sticking a toe out of cover, yet you are rewarded for being in cover with unending oppression. There needs to be a balance struck here where, IF you decide to take cover and use tactics to weaken the enemy force, you will get your chance to move. Maybe its simply the timing of the waves of enemies, but its seems that once you eliminate one enemy they are immediately replaced. This makes it pointless to eliminate enemies, and turns the game into a measured, Run-from-cover-to-cover type of battle where you simply hope to survive the onslaught and recover while in safety, only to do it again. Smoke grenades are the great balancer here, but they are in limited supply and that doesn't excuse how counter-intuitive it is to play a battle game without actually rewarding the player's skill and use of tactics with the ability to advance and succeed in a battlefield environment. Awful Game mechanics that are 10 - 15 yrs old, completely stale, and showing a complete inability to evolve Completely lackluster AI No rewards for player skill in a combat game Good Smooth, good-looking graphics Talented voice acting NOTE: Multiplayer is what it is, you either hate it or love it. I think its quick and addictive fun but I also greatly prefer the realism of other recent releases (MOH) Zombies is great fun, but hardly worth a 60 pricetag.
An Unfortunate Step Back By reedissleeping I had never been a fan of the franchise, preferring to do my shooting in the more Arcady Half-Life engine, Halo, Fear etc... Then I played Modern Warfare, and loved it. You felt free to act. On veteran, the game was challenging. The worlds were large, and the enemies didn't re-spawn to infinity. This allowed you to actually be creative in your strategy, instead of tunneling. You could fall back, flank, snipe, or rush. Level design facilitated all strategies and the AI responded. Some levels set up better for different strategies, but the important thing is that it felt organic. When players died, they felt they could do something different--that they had control. A majority of the positive reviews for this game focus on its numerous improvements over other Treyarch offerings, and hey are right to do so. The graphics, story, voice acting, and music are a step up (from COD:WaW), as well as the addition of some "cool moments," and extras like Zombies. However, there are serious problems that get brushed over. I feel like multi-player issues have been covered. So this review will tackle single player. While game-play seems fluid on easier difficulties,fundamental problems express themselves at the more difficult settings. My play through on Veteran got boring fast largely due to the fact that Treyarch uses infinite enemy spawns to compensate for poor, predictable level design and unacceptably bad AI. Eventually you realize that besides a few "cool" roller-coaster moments type moments--fun but there's only one track, most of the game consists of a long corridor or an enclosed "box" with predictably placed pieces of cover. Even though there are things going on outside the "box" and the graphics seemingly connect them (see the trenches in the Vietnam level), you cannot interact with them. Visually its a large world; in practice it's claustrophobic. Enemies advance mindlessly in single file from the most distant cover to your position, eventually charging recklessly from the last piece of cover. To "kill" them you need to toss smoke grenades, sprint past some imaginary line, and hunker down. If you get unlucky and the RNG pops off a couple head shots, prepare to live the last 5 minutes of your life over and over again. Lets be frank--in the early versions of COD, this was a necessity because of inherent technical limitations. The "box" existed because large interactive environments weren't possible. The endless spawns were needed because AI was terrible. It was necessary to have smoke grenades because these other compensations made certain configurations of enemies and cover frustrating. Purists might say "This is Call of Duty," but how many other games get a free pass when refusing to innovate from their predecessors? Halo got a lot of crap for repeated area designs, but at least there were multiple ways to attack each situation. As Bungie put it, it was the same "moment of fun" over and over again. Black Ops is the same moment of predictable annoyance over and over. Instead of forcing you to critically think, death in Black-Ops feels like you just got unlucky playing the exact same interaction over and over again in the only way possible to play it. Theres nothing to do differently--just rush ahead and cross your fingers again. You are bound to get unlucky and die--even doing the right thing. When you do, unpredictable load points reward you with the with the same set of identical interactions and identical solutions. And then suddenly, when things work out, the gratification isn't there. You did nothing different. If the definition of madness is "doing the same thing and expecting a different result," then I guess I was mad the whole time I played. Aiming is also problematic. I understand that real guns kick, but when you have an enemy completely filing my sights and the recoil from the last shot makes you miss anyway, you don't feel a sense of reward for aiming and you certainly don't feel a sense of realism; you feel a developer trying to compensate for poor difficulty balancing. "Throw smoke and run into it" seems like a poor mechanic after a while. In the Infinity Ward games you throw smoke to get a tactical advantage, get away, or provide temporary cover to move to a new position. In Treyarch games, you do it because its the best way to stop infinite spawns. The former feels immersive, the latter feels like band-aid for poor game design. It seems like Treyarch, in a misguided attempt to differentiate themselves from Infinity Ward and to give long time COD fans exactly what they've played over and over, actually refuses to let the series mature into a dynamic, creative, and frankly more fun experience. Yes, it is challenging on veteran with high infinite spawn rates. It's challenging that the only solution is to press forward into oncoming fire. But it was also boring and I'd like my money back. The bottom line is: if you want to romp through the game one lower difficulties or like the Multi-player, give it a shot. It looks good, and is entertaining. I enjoyed the voice acting and the story. If, however, you play through shooters at max difficulty and prefer to get your multi-player in MW2 or the new Halo offering, rent it or wait for better pricing.
Product Description
The newest installment in the biggest action series of all time and the follow-up to last year's blockbuster Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops launches on November 9, 2010.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #26 in Video Games
- Brand: Activision Publishing
- Model: 84003
- Published on: 2010-11
- Released on: 2010-11-09
- ESRB Rating: Mature
- Platform: Xbox 360
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .57" h x 5.40" w x 7.55" l, .18 pounds
Features
- Wide array of play modes including single player, local multiplayer versus and online co-op and multiplayer
- Seventh installment of the Call of Duty series, based on the live fire conflicts of the Cold War era
- Diverse variety of play setting ranging from urban air and ground combat in SE Asia, to snow combat in Soviet region and jungle combat
- Blending of traditional COD, and new first-person character scenarios designed to both retain the essence of the COD gaming experience
- New arsenal of weapons and vehicles tied to the Cold War era, including the SR-71 Blackbird and sited explosive-tipped crossbows
- And ensure constantly flowing and varied action
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Product Description
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Worth the money you ask? By Jonathan R. Asleson Alright, I'm a serious COD fan and I logged almost a month on Modern Warfare 2, and a little over a half a month on all the other COD titles. You all know what the prestige edition comes with, as it is all listed above, but is it truly worth the extra money? 550 of 717 people found the following review helpful.
COD Must Evolve 108 of 139 people found the following review helpful.
An Unfortunate Step Back 
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