Call of Duty has long been a formulaic mainstay of release calendars, an annual obligation, but the routine has crashed to a new low with Black Ops 7. Despite the minimalist approach to innovation affecting virtually every entry in this increasingly dry series, Black Ops 7 manages to feel like the most negative release in franchise history. After marking Modern Warfare 3 (2023) as a low point for these games, I didn’t expect the newest installment to come in so far below Sledgehammer’s efforts, painting a depressive picture of a series currently in freefall. The tiresome collection of recycled mechanics, half-baked ideas, and ever-aggressive (and thematically ridiculous) monetization practices make the $70 price tag feel far weightier this time around. For a series that once defined a console generation with high-octane spectacle and standard-setting gunplay, this year’s installment from Treyarch and Raven Software isn’t just disappointing—it’s actively frustrating.
Black Ops 7 attempts to marry the confusing, mind-bending psychological narratives of the sub-series with the contemporary open-map, armor-plated structure of Warzone, and the resulting package is a chaotic, unpolished mess. While the core shooting mechanics remain competent, they are buried under layers of unnecessary, bizarre design choices, and an undeniable stench of generative AI assets, making the entire experience feel cheap and deeply uninspired. Coming off the heels of the admittedly surprisingly enjoyable Black Ops 6, this year’s title has all but snuffed out any lingering, emaciated excitement left for the IP.
More Head Scratching Than Mind Bending
The single-player campaign has, at times, been a highlight of the Black Ops lineage, relying on conspiracy theories, Cold War paranoia, and memorable characters like Alex Mason and Frank Woods. Black Ops 7 tries to continue that thread, pushing the story into the late 2020s and focusing on the fallout of the Black Ops 6 bioweapon incident. It’s an interesting premise: diving into the shared, hallucinatory memories of a new protagonist who must navigate the confusing, non-linear trauma of his predecessors. The problem is, the narrative coherence is completely lost in the execution. For large portions of the five-hour story, you are stuck in repetitive, psychedelic dream sequences battling literal spider monsters and even allies turned into oversized bosses. This immediately pulls the game too far from its psychological roots, abandoning the grittier, pseudo-realistic spy thriller atmosphere the series is known for.
Worse still are the mechanical changes awkwardly grafted onto the campaign from Activision’s continued Warzone push. Every single enemy, from the lowliest grunt to the most heavily armored robot, comes equipped with a spongy health bar. The advancement of this direction disrupts the Call of Duty experience. Instead of the satisfying one-shot lethality that makes the series so snappy, combat degrades into a tedious DPS race more akin to games like Destiny. It’s monotonous, mushy, and drains the adrenaline right out of the set pieces.
The campaign’s structure alternates between traditional, linear missions and vast, open-world segments set in Avalon. These open zones feel like abandoned MMO maps—empty, lifeless stretches of terrain filled with uninspired quests and enemy mobs that exist only to soak up bullets. The decision to make the campaign always-online with no pausing and no mid-mission checkpoints is baffling. If your internet connection stutters or if real life interrupts your session—getting kicked for inactivity during a brief campaign break is a rage-inducing design choice—you lose all mission progress, forcing you to restart frustrating 20-minute missions from scratch. Every decision feels like a clear disconnect between the product and player, showing how out of touch these games have become.
Quickened Chaos
While campaigns can be fun distractions, Call of Duty lives and dies by the longevity of its multiplayer component. Unlike Modern Warfare, the Black Ops series opts for a faster, arcade shooter experience. Black Ops 7’s multiplayer, unfortunately, fails on almost every major front, mainly due to a collection of conflicting and unfun design philosophies. The most noticeable mechanical addition is the new wall-bounce mobility, allowing players to scale walls and buildings with absurd vertical speed. This mechanic, while theoretically designed for aggressive players, makes for an unappealing flow. The resulting gunfights are frequently unwinnable guesswork, forcing you to anticipate whether an enemy will be sliding along the ground, standing still, or bounding 15 feet in the air like a spring-loaded super soldier. The movement is so jagged and frenetic that the jarring chaos borne from it rarely made for genuinely engaging firefights. Trying to track these bouncing players with any precision often felt frustrating. But, hey, I’m willing to call it a skill issue on my part, a byproduct of growing older and losing the superhuman reaction times of my teenage years.
The map design only exacerbates the problem. Many feel like low-effort three-lane layouts, or worse, awkward sections ripped directly from the campaign’s open-world zones and forced into a competitive setting. The result is a lack of clear frontlines, leading to constant, maddening spawn flipping and being shot in the back from angles. You can win a 1v1 gunfight decisively, only to be immediately melted by an enemy who spawned five feet behind you in the next instant.
Never-ending Endgame
Black Ops 7 delivers “Endgame”—a not-so-new open-world PVE zone that borrows heavily from the extraction shooter genre. Players venture in to the open map with their squad to complete objectives and secure high-tier loot. At moments, there are intense encounters that show there could have been something here with enough refining, but the mode is ruined by the same issues plaguing the campaign: enemy health sponges and a repetitive mission structure. And it’s a stretch to call any of it new; Endgame is a low-effort reskin of Modern Warfare 3‘s Zombies mode, which was a reskin of DMZ. How many lazy revisions can the same mode undergo?
Sadly, Zombies doesn’t sit in a notably better state. All of the issues plaguing the other modes make the classic undead horde mode feel less rewarding than ever, amounting to another bullet sink dragged down by the least interesting iteration of Call of Duty‘s formula. Long gone is the more rooted vision that once drew in the masses in World at War and instead sits a stale, arcade-y look-alike that has lost its way. And if I had to choose any mode to act as a gun-leveling tool, I’d rather do it in Endgame. That’s as close to praise as we’re getting in this review.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review Verdict
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7: is a game suffering from an identity crisis, simultaneously attempting to be a serious Black Ops sequel, a co-op Destiny-like shooter, a Warzone spin-off, and a low-effort annual update. It fails to excel at any of these goals, presenting the lowest bar set by the franchise, one clearly suffering from stagnation and degradation. It offers the bare minimum required to satisfy the annual release schedule, but nothing more. – Joshua
[Editor’s Note: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was reviewed on PC, and a copy was provided to us for review purposes.]
