Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Review

Call of Duty is in the air. Or is that the Lightning Strike hitting your flesh? Either way, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 is the next installment in the CoD franchise and it's one of my favorites of these last few games. My favorite Call of Duty Game you ask? World at War!!!

Black Ops 2 has done something unthinkable, it changed the Call of Duty model that we knew of, and this is good, and bad!



Black Ops 2 has implemented new features and changed old trusty ones. First killstreaks are gone, now scorestreaks have taken it's place. Scorestreaks are the same as killstreaks except instead of getting 5 kills for this, or 9 kills for that, you have to get 400 Points for this and 900 points for that, etc.

This new model is both good and bad. You see for someone who is just a TDM (Team Deathmatch) player this is bad. For each kill you get points, well now you have to get more kills to get the same streak you would have obtained for less kills. However for team based objective games like Domination, Kill Confirmed, etc. this is great. For grabbing a neutral flag you get 50 points, well cap an enemy owned flag and get 200 points.

I believe that they should have given you the option to have it one way or the other for youy different classes, like how Modern Warfare 3 did for theirs. So instead of having and Assault scorestreak and a Support, you could have a Killstreak class and a Scorestreak Class.

The campaign (story) has gone so far into the future it's not even funny. Instead of having this game in the future, it would have been nice to know and experience first hand what happened after the end of Black Ops. With that said the story is pretty solid, I guess as solid as any shooter could be, there are some holes and gaps in it, but that doesn't and shouldn't shock anyone.

The sounds of Call of Duty are good, I wish they could have changed a few songs, like with Zombies, etc.  The sound effects of guns firing and explosions and stuff is also really good, I prefered older games sound effects, but that just me.

The graphics are really good, but I have a BIG problem with this. They tweaked the IW engine yet again, but what bothers me is that they still used the old IW 3.0 and not the new 4.0 why? Why not use the new engine and tweak is like you were going to do anyways? To me that screams lazyness and who cares what I put out.

Another big problem with this game is glitches, not Multiplayer glitches (I have yet to look for/at them) but Zombie glitches. Isn't it funny that Modern Warfare 3's survival or chaos mode does have a few glitches, but EVERY Treyarch game (W@W, BO, BO2) Zombies glitches are everywhere. In TranZit alone I know of 6+7 working glitches are of right now. With all of that aside though, they do patch them usually quickly, but still 6-7 glitches and that the ones that I know of.

Multiplayer is fun, much more so than Black Ops. The games seem better, hardly any lag from Black Ops 2 games that I've played. If I popped in Lag Ops, I would have lag almost every other game.

Now with the Scorestreaks (Mentioned earlier in this post) you must play for points, not kills,. You know they way Domination, and Kill Confirmed are supposed to be played.

Zombies is back, bigger and better than ever, well not as good as World at War Zombies, but much better than Black ops zombies. The new maps have 2 different modes, Survival (normal zombies) and Grief. Grief features two factions: CIA and CDC. The teams cannot directly harm one another but they can still hinder each other. Only powerups and pickups that one member gets from one team gives it to their team, the other team gets nothing from it.  The final Zombie game is called TranZit, TranZit is different from all other Zombie maps ever. It's different in the fact that it goes from one map to the others. You can take a bus or hoof it from one area to the other, so the ones you play in susvival you can play all of them in TranZit. It's fast paced and crazy, but it's filled with fun and challenge. Challenge in the form of a new boss, you can say that this boss has a very electric personality!

At the end of the day, Black Ops 2 is easily one of the best games and is way better than the first Black ops games, in both level of fun and quality of games.

I give this game an 8.9 out of 10.

I really wished that some of the maps in Black ops 2 could be a bit bigger they seem squished in. I also wished that Killstreaks and Scorestreaks could be interchangeable with one another.