It takes a special kind of “talent” to deliver something worse than the Modern Warfare 3 Remake.
This time last year, I couldn’t stop singing the praises of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The “omni-movement” system, in particular, had made the gameplay feel smoother and more responsive than ever. Activision took those praises, crumpled them up, and threw them right back in our faces. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the black sheep of the franchise: Black Ops 7.
To illustrate just how broken this game is, let me give you one example—you can imagine the rest. I launched the game for the first time and went to adjust my graphics settings. I wanted to run the system benchmark test. And do you know what the game did? It started searching for a lobby. You heard that right. To test my local hardware performance, the game connected to a server and made me wait a full minute to find a “benchmark lobby.” It’s like a bad joke, but unfortunately, it’s real.
Anatomy of a Disappointment
We could tell something was wrong from the moment the game was announced. The trailer shown during the Xbox showcase threw us all for a loop. We were trying to figure out what game we were looking at until Menendez suddenly appeared, confirming it was indeed Call of Duty. The trailer looked decent in a vacuum, but it absolutely did not look like a CoD title. I was already bracing myself for something on the level of the Modern Warfare 3 Remake. After two disastrous Modern Warfare launches back-to-back, I expected the Black Ops cycle to follow suit, but I’m genuinely shocked it managed to be this bad.
Activision has taken the story of the series’ most iconic character—which concluded perfectly in Black Ops 2—and completely trashed it. The game takes place 10 years after the events of Black Ops 2. I’m about to drop a spoiler, but honestly, the story is so abysmal that I’m probably doing you a favor.
The narrative is cliché, the characters are devoid of personality, the dialogue feels artificial, and the gameplay loop feels like it was designed by toddlers.
Not Story Mode, Torture Mode
What is the core appeal of a Call of Duty campaign? A cinematic blockbuster experience, full of explosions and set pieces, offering a linear but impactful 5-6 hour thrill ride. Black Ops 7 looked at that formula and said, “Let’s throw that in the trash and replace it with a forced 4-player co-op system.”
The campaign is essentially just Warzone or Zombies with cutscenes slapped on top. In story mode, your weapons level up just like they do in multiplayer. If you play solo like I did, you’d expect the AI to take control of the other three squad members, right? Keep dreaming. If you play solo, you are completely alone. The developers were so lazy they didn’t even bother programming friendly AI companions. Yet, you still hear the other characters’ dialogue triggering as if they were there. They’re just ghosts haunting your audio channels.
There is zero tactical depth. Just chaos. To make matters worse, “Level Up” and “Weapon Unlocked” notifications constantly pop up on the screen. Look, I’m in the campaign; I don’t care about your rank-up animations breaking my immersion. Not that there was any atmosphere left to break, anyway.
The level design is equally horrendous. “Go to point A, clear the enemy wave, go to point B.” That is the entire game. There is no cohesion between missions. Why are we here? What are we doing? Who knows. A cutscene ends, the screen goes black, and boom—you’re somewhere else. It feels like watching a playlist of disconnected YouTube clips.
Bullet Sponges and Robots
What do you expect from a military FPS? When you shoot an enemy, they die, right? In Black Ops 7, enemies have health bars. Yes, actual RPG-style health bars floating above their heads. And they refuse to die. You can dump an entire magazine into them, and they barely flinch. The hit registration, that classic satisfying “CoD crunch,” is gone. It’s been replaced by the feeling of shooting a water pistol at a metal wall.
At some point, the developers must have run out of ideas because they decided to integrate Zombies directly into the campaign. Black Ops 6 had a similar mission, but it was a one-off event, and the presentation was actually high quality. Here, they’ve literally just spammed enemies all over the map without rhyme or reason.
A Technical Wreck
The technical state of the game is somehow even worse than the gameplay. Just attempting to play Call of Duty is torture. To get in, you open the launcher, select the game, the game closes itself to restart, then opens again. Sometimes it closes and reopens again. It’s an endless loop of frustration.
The graphics range from mediocre to eye-searing. I wouldn’t call them “ugly” per se, but they lack any form of polish. It looks like a movie with unfinished visual effects. There is no color balance, no artistic touch—just raw, unrefined assets.
Slaughtering the Legacy
We see plenty of legacy Call of Duty characters, but they lack any emotional depth. It’s a transparent attempt at nostalgia baiting—“Look! It’s your favorite characters!!1!”—but they’ve managed to botch that too.
Multiplayer
Let’s talk about the only part of the game remotely worth playing. The Multiplayer mode offers something close to the classic Call of Duty experience. I wasn’t huge on the maps, but they aren’t terrible. Interestingly, the gameplay reminded me a lot of Titanfall 2. In fact, I’m re-downloading Titanfall 2 as I write this review because the movement felt like a knock-off version of it. But at the end of the day, it’s just CoD. It functions, mostly.
Verdict: The End of an Era?
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is the ultimate proof that the series is suffering from an identity crisis and is in freefall. We thought quality would improve after Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, but things have not gone according to plan. From claiming they would stop the annual release cycle to the last-minute disaster that was Modern Warfare 3 Remake, and now this… the bells are tolling for the Call of Duty franchise.