Black Ops 7's Endgame can't decide if it wants to be Destiny 2 or Call of Duty, and it's a muddy addition that makes me miss simpler co-op campaigns

Black Ops 7 wants to be an interconnected social hub unlike any previous Call of Duty. Alongside the returning online staples of multiplayer and co-op Zombies, there's a co-op campaign – the first since Black Ops 3 – to shake up the usual single-player explosion fest and Cold War-inspired paranoia that the Call of Duty sub-series is known for. It's an understandable change made to meet these social goals but, as a sucker for online co-op, it's also a welcome one – until you start playing.

Playing the co-op campaign with pals can be quite fun, in spite of its bizarre hallucination set-pieces and lackluster gunfights against both the bellicose Guild and ravenous nightmare creatures. But that doesn't distract from the levels that are obvious mashups of ready-made assets and ideas lifted from other co-op shooters, like Destiny 2. Then, after a first credits fakeout, you're unceremoniously dropped into even more Black Ops 7 and you find out where it's all leading. You thought always-online, no-pausing, no-checkpointing, health-bar-chipping action was annoying? You ain't seen nothing yet, soldier.

On patrol

The ultimate expression of this design philosophy is Endgame, the final mission of Black Ops 7's co-op campaign. It's effectively a replayable PvE-only extraction mode, featuring all sorts of random objectives and events to complete. Each challenge you overcome helps you get better gear and useful scorestreaks for added destruction, but also bolsters your Combat Rating – a score that determines your overall power and unlocks upgrades, letting you more competently battle foes in the higher-tier zones of Avalon. If you die or fail to extract within the 50-minute time limit, you lose your Combat Rating, upgrades, and guns.

Broadly, it's just a combination of almost everything you've seen already in the campaign set on the full Avalon map with a new progression and upgrade system slapped on. It doesn't help that, by large-scale battle royale map standards, Avalon is quite unremarkable, largely devoid of standout landmarks, and the escalating difficulty of each zone makes it hard to see and appreciate much of it. To me, Endgame feels less like a nail-biting battle to clear out the Guild for good with everything on the line and more like a slightly intense version of patrolling a planet in Destiny 2, completing small missions and public events, occasionally bumping into other players along the way.

The higher the tier of the Avalon region you're in, the more bullet-spongey the enemies are. Every upgrade you get makes you feel more like a superhero, rather than a covert soldier. Although, I can't deny that getting access to the full sandbox of campaign gadgets and gizmos for your base loadout is nice. Using the grappling hook and wingsuit to glide great distances feels extremely slick and satisfying – much better than driving an armored car – but it's not a good sign that my favorite part of the extraction shooter mode is flying around.

Successfully extracting means you get to keep your power leve– erm, Combat Rating – alongside accrued gear and perks for your next deployment. The idea is that over a period of successful runs, you'll grow in power and seek greater challenges in the more dangerous regions of Avalon, until you're able to tackle the ultimate boss, the nefarious Dr. Falkner. You'll hopefully remember him as being an almost comically weak villain earlier in the game but he's far from a pushover in Endgame, relatively speaking.

My first clear of the final boss was as part of a high-level trio, seeing us riddle enemy after enemy with bullets for about 14 minutes. Confusingly, Dr. Falkner appears not as a single man as you saw him earlier in the story but as a series of apparently unending, ghoulish minibosses, requiring all their health bars to be eroded into dust before you can confirm the kill. That then leads into an underwhelming finale that really doesn't reinforce the campaign well at all, setting up Mason and the rest of Spectre One for an unending villain-of-the-week, Guild-whacking loop that I'm not sure will hook anyone.

Endgame is perfectly fine for casual NPC blasting at its low-level entry point. But the intensity and difficulty of the mode's own endgame, deep into Zones 3 and 4 of Avalon, reduce it to an unrewarding slog. Sure, being able to zip around with a squad makes Endgame it all more tolerable, and there's even a nice enough feel of camaraderie in an online Call of Duty mode as you haphazardly team up with other random players. But it's a far cry from a true co-op campaign, a la Left 4 Dead, or the social experiences of Destiny 2, or even Arc Raiders. It makes for a largely inoffensive but also not especially interesting mode.

This wonky experiment only makes it clearer that the more experimental aspects of Black Ops 7's campaign miss more than they hit. Everything about this year's campaign feels like a misfire, even if, at times, I admire the attempt to hit its odd choice of target - with Season 1, those targets are only going to get more weird as world events involving giant robots and manifested VTOLs hit Avalon. That's not to say I don't think a co-op campaign itself is a bad idea, but it needs serious time and effort dedicated to it to be worthwhile, and I can't help but feel like Call of Duty is really beginning to suffer from off-years between its larger scale releases.

Check out the best Call of Duty games for ones you could play instead!