The effects of your choices are often evidenced in the new Strike Force missions, shorter objectives which give you control over a group of soldiers and various drones. Sometimes these objectives are a result of your decisions and performance, and they tend to have tangible effects on the outcome of your story. These tasks are worth playing because of their crucial role in the creation of your story, but the limited command controls make them less exciting. You can order your troops around the map from a strategic overhead view or via the usual first-person control, though neither is as tactical as intended. You can’t rally soldiers on your position, and your AI allies will rush to die. Each objective essentially comes down to ordering my troops to move from point to point as a huge group while I single-handedly save the mission by taking direct control and fight a horde of foes. The importance of Strike Force’s outcome adds tension and stress to the action, but the ineffective input and inept allies create an unnecessary challenge that compromises its potential success.
Shooting is as fun and precise as ever, and alongside the abundance of gigantic explosions, vehicle missions and intense firefights, it feels like the closest thing most of us will ever get to starring in an action film. In that sense, Black Ops II is the classic Call of Duty formula at its best, with an important, defining difference: The emphasis on drone warfare, the exotic-but-grounded weaponry and the attention to detail in the believably high-tech signage and architecture makes Blacks Op II feel strikingly plausible even when it strays into non-historical settings.
The team at Treyarch brings a bit of the multiplayer loadout flavor to the campaign as well. Before each mission you can now customize your character’s weapons (restrictions apply to make sure you’re not using a future weapon in the past, for instance), accessories and even give them perks. Every level also has challenges associated with it, and you can scope out the leaderboards to see how you stand up to your buddies. These are small details, but they’re important because they layer on another reason to replay the stages. If for some bizarre reason the narrative doesn’t grab you, then you still have lots of additional goals to try and achieve that are decidedly more “gamey.”
TAKE YOUR CLASS AND LOVE IT
While not as big of a departure in structure as Treyarch’s single-player, Black Ops II’s multiplayer dares to defy the modus operandi, and provides a number of new options and modes that make it more engrossing than what’s come before.
Call of Duty has shaped the way other shooters present class and loadout designs for years, and Treyarch successfully redefines the standard with the Pick 10 system. The hook of Pick 10 comes from the ability to defy the loadout rules. Each attachment, weapon, grenade or perk counts as one of your ten points, and you can swap them out at will to create a huge number of combinations. Treyarch has also added in Wild Cards, which allow you to spend additional points to break even more rules, like equipping two primary weapons or up to six perks. Pick 10 allows the creation of the most specifically tuned classes in any shooter ever. You want to have a soldier with a pistol, four perks and two throwing axes? Do it. Maybe you want to snap three attachments to a LMG, ditching your grenades to give yourself additional perks or a badass secondary weapon for close quarters combat -- you can do that too. Pick 10 accomplishes something I didn’t even realize I wanted: For Create a Class to be as exciting and enticing as it was when I first popped in the original Modern Warfare. I don’t just experiment because I want to create a loadout perfectly tailored to a specific mode, but because it’s a genuinely fun and intuitive system to use.
