Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 review-in-progress: "I respect Treyarch's attempt to go bonkers and make the weirdest Call of Duty possible"

As someone who holds Black Ops 2 in the highest regard amongst the Call of Duty pantheon, Black Ops 7's return to the near future, this time in 2035, is an exciting prospect after a blast from the past with last year's Black Ops 6. Right from the first mission, gunfights feel as slick as ever as my co-op squad mates and I immediately disregard stealth and go loud.

But then, after a mishap with a mind-altering bioweapon, suddenly giant machetes start raining from the sky and I'm locked in an honest to goodness shootout boss fight with David Mason's old nemesis Raul Menendez while nightmare creatures attack relentlessly – Black Ops has always been weird, but am I even playing a Call of Duty game anymore?

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is unquestionably ambitious, both in its commitment to a narrative experience that's radically unique from its predecessors and in its attempt to jam so much in across the campaign, multiplayer, Zombies, and PvE-only extraction mode Endgame that it almost makes my head spin. For the most part, it's a polished experience that draws on Black Ops 6's bones while infusing it with the DNA of Black Ops 2, making for a Call of Duty game that isn't afraid to experiment and get truly wild. But, in aiming at so many so many targets, Black Ops 7 doesn't always hit its mark.

Guilded age

Set 10 years after 2012's Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 sees David Mason being called back from retirement because (in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker fashion) somehow, Raul Menendez returned. The arms-dealer-turned-populist-revolutionary-and-social-media-legend is back from the dead with a threatening video message for a world left vulnerable by the anarchy caused by his Cordis Die group in 2025 and beyond. But the Guild – a tech giant built from the bones of the criminal organization of the same name that featured in Black Ops 6 – is ready to step in with the promise of peace.

It's an interesting premise that nicely builds on the fallout from Black Ops 2, even if it does now force a canon set of choices for that game, but it's unfortunately backed up by some flimsy and economical storytelling. The intro cutscene just about gets the ball rolling with Mason meeting the now elderly Troy Marshall for a quickfire discussion about Menendez and the state of the world in 2035. Oh, and that the Guild is running a psy-op at its Mediterranean Avalon HQ that might (somehow) be linked to all this.

20 minutes after that, Mason and his team of mentally scarred veterans, known as Spectre One, are introduced to Emma Kagan (Kiernan Shipka), the Guild's CEO who wastes no time letting them know how moustache-twirlingly evil she and her company are. Obviously, there was no doubt that Kagan was the true villain in this story, but I didn't think the façade would drop so quickly, leaving her and the Guild as classic world domination types.

I expected there to be more poking around and trying to uncover any dirt on the shadowy Guild first, and by not doing any of that, or even explicitly showing Menendez's video or the previously mentioned fallout from Black Ops 2, the setup for Black Ops 7 feels entirely glossed over. The idea that the Guild wants to maintain peace in the face of Menendez's resurgence is something that feels entirely relegated to the game's marketing.

The first mission then caps off with Kagan unleashing the Guild's fancy fear gas on Spectre One, which sees them plunged into a shared hallucination of a twisted version of Menendez's Nicaragua mansion – the first of several psychological encounters in the campaign. But once you're out the other side, you'll find that the explosives Mason detonated earlier have led to an Avalon-wide leak of this mysterious toxin. That's far from ideal, but the fact that it's contained within Avalon (thanks to the Guild's desperate cover-up), and that Spectre One is seemingly immune to its most dangerous, berserker-rage side effects means the threat level isn't felt much.

Cap this all off with a couple of weightless plot twists, and that Kagan is barely present until the final act when her plans are close to being thwarted, and the stakes of Black Ops 7's co-op campaign feel decidedly low. The final mission is an exciting finale but it's not enough to wrap up and redeem all that came before, especially when you consider that the story continues in Black Ops 7's new Endgame mode too. For what was billed as a mind-bending campaign, my mind felt quite unbent by the end.

Rock 'em, JSOCk 'em

However, despite the weaknesses of the story, I can't deny that the developers at Treyarch had a clear vision of what they wanted the campaign to be and went all out. While Black Ops 7 doesn't quite deliver on the twists and turns that the Black Ops series is known for, it does at least allow itself to get really weird with its psychological premise.

The campaign's twisted memory levels set in various locations from Black Ops history (mainly Black Ops 2) are certainly engaging and pack some great visuals and set pieces – giant machetes falling from the sky, plant monsters, and physics-breaking Los Angeles Highways to name a few.

Unfortunately, these set pieces become off-putting during boss fights, most of which are unfortunately quite mechanically dull and feel like they belong more in a Destiny 2 Strike than Call of Duty. As an example, one mission in Avalon sees Spectre One under fire from an elite Guild sniper. Naturally, you must track her down and then engage her as she teleports around several rooftops. My co-op team quickly figured out that this boss fight came down to just spreading out across the rooftops to watch all angles and then shooting her in the face until she died. And because she's a boss, she has a superhuman constitution that allows her to take a brain-melting number of headshots before finally keeling over.

Completing these set piece moments often results in all players getting set upgrades that bolster health, armor plating, and movement speed, as well as gun workbenches that increase the overall power and rarity of any weapon you find from that point on. By the end, Spectre One is essentially the JSOC Avengers, capable of manoeuvring at absurd speed while firing guns that can spew an unprecedented amount of lead.

While that might not sound too bad – power fantasies are generally fun after all – the problem is that all enemies scale up to meet your elevated power too. Even the most basic Guild infantry enemies become relative bullet sponges, with the most durable of Guild drones and monstrous manifestations of fear itself requiring a team effort to topple.

Again, it feels like Black Ops 7's campaign is verging on Destiny or even Borderlands territory, and as someone who has put over 2,000 hours into Destiny 2, I'd rather not be reminded. But one aspect that those games and Black Ops 7 have in common is that they are enjoyable with friends. I'm yet to properly dig into Black Ops 7's campaign solo for a true comparison, but cutting about Avalon and battling the Guild and shambling nightmares with a squad makes most of the shortcomings of each mission more tolerable. Ultimately, while I think many of the more experimental aspects of Black Ops 7's campaign miss more than they hit, I still respect Treyarch's attempt to go bonkers and make the weirdest Call of Duty setting possible.

Many chambers

While Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's campaign is a bit of a misfire then, much of the rest of this huge game isn't. Multiplayer is, unsurprisingly, very well-refined, as you'd expect from developers that have been iterating on industry-leading online competitive play for nearly 20 years at this point.

Going into my first match, I was concerned that the addition of wall-jumping would be a big shakeup that goes against the general desire felt across mainstream FPSs for grounded gameplay, but that just isn't the case. Instead, wall jumping fits in nicely with the existing improved Omnimovement mechanics, allowing for enhanced map traversal without feeling difficult to pull off. However, there are clear opportunities for mastery here which, so far, don't appear to be problematic – but I'll have to see how this system fares in the hands of the public.

Elsewhere, custom loadouts have a couple of new options to bear in mind, helping you customize your class to a ridiculous degree. The most notable addition is that every piece of tactical and lethal equipment, Field Upgrade, and Scorestreak now has two unlockable upgrade nodes, letting you apply one to bolster your loadout and funnel it towards a certain playstyle even more – you might want to make your EMP grenades hit a larger area or reduce the score requirement to earn a UAV, for example. Add that to the new hybrid specializations that build on Black Ops 6's perk specializations system, and the existing gunsmith options, and you've got a custom loadout system that is packed with depth and freedom but is also right on the edge of overcomplication.

Overall, combat feels slick and fast-paced without being absolute carnage and impossible to follow. Its 16 launch maps lean on Treyarch's typical three-lane standard, which continues to prove a winning formula. Blackheart, Toshin, and Den have so far proven to be my favorites when it comes to leaning into Black Ops 7's newest features, accommodating wall-jumping nicely. Revamped versions of Black Ops 2 classics, meanwhile – like Raid, Express, and the still-excellent Hijacked – are great anchors that effectively help Black Ops 7 feel like it's celebrating a real FPS legacy, maybe even more so than the campaign.

While there are plenty of the usual suspects when it comes to modes (Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed, and plenty more), there is a new capture the flag-style mode called Overload which can be a lot of fun and highly competitive. There's also the larger 20 versus 20 Skirmish mode, but I didn't get on with this as well as regular multiplayer, the spaces feeling too large and empty for a moveset that otherwise champions mastery over denser spaces – for me, larger-scale warfare is best left to Battlefield.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is inarguably the biggest Black Ops game there has ever been, with a huge array of activities and modes that can all be enjoyed with friends – many of which I've not mentioned in this review-in-progress as I want more time with them before passing judgement (stay tuned!). Pair that with its bizarre campaign and it's also arguably the wackiest Call of Duty out there too. While there are design choices I respect, many of them I can't get behind fully, showing that while pushing the boundaries of what a Call of Duty game is an exciting prospect to keep things fresh, there are perhaps some aspects that should stick to a safer approach. Bigger, after all, doesn't always mean better.

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