Review: Sci-fi hijinks liven up ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops III’

It’s one of the biggest franchises in the world, but the latest Call of Duty is not necessarily the video game on everyone’s mind right now.

That might be Fallout 4, or perhaps Star Wars: Battlefront. Maybe it's Halo 5: Guardians, which just landed, and Lara Croft is back in a few days with Rise of the Tomb Raider. Traditionally, other video games get out of Call of Duty’s way in early November, smartly distancing themselves from the game’s blast zone and the ensuing week when seemingly half of the planet is shooting each other online.

Not so in 2015. With huge games around every corner, this is the year the video game industry came to play. It’s also the year Call of Duty decided to get playful.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a seriously beefy video game, packing three fully realized modes, plenty of sci-fi powers, and a handful of bonus experiences that could probably be standalone games in their own right. Yes, it’s still largely about dudebros duding out and shooting out, and yes, your preconceptions about this franchise means you likely made up your mind before even clicking on this review. But get out of your head and you’ll find a surprisingly interesting shooter, one that manages to toy with Call of Duty’s staid conventions in clever ways.

Future tense

Set in a dystopian 2065, the game’s story takes a Terminator-like turn. The world has been plunged into chaos as rival countries and terrorist groups engage in a robotic arms race. You play a member of a secretive CIA strike team (again), but you’re not just a guy with a gun. A limb-shattering event made you ripe for a mechanical makeover, complete with a fancy computer planted in your brain, that is as useful and as problematic as you might expect. You’re Robocop by way of a parkour instructor.

Related: Review: 'Halo 5 Guardians' saves its so-so story with marvelous multiplayer

Over the course of 11 missions, you zip around the globe tussling with men, machines, and man-machines as you try to get to the bottom of some sort of disaster. At least I think that’s what it’s about. It goes sideways quickly, and at around the halfway point starts to dip its toe into freaky, dreamlike surrealism. It goes to some dark, interesting places, and while the likes of Christopher Meloni and Katee Sackhoff put in good performances, the whole shebang lacks the socio-political punch of other recent Call of Duty games.

Worse, it lacks characters you care about. Call of Duty has always struggled with its dialogue, and sure enough, the script is packed with future military jargon and cookie-cutter caricatures. Your pals are interchangeable action figures, all overly serious, stubbly bores. While the story stretches its legs, the dialogue does not. It’s hard to have one without the other.

But that’s OK, because the storytelling doesn’t really matter when you’re shooting robots in the face. Black Ops III is less linear than past games. Skirmishes often take place in large, open environments that encourage multiple strategies. One player might grind through enemies on the ground using a machine gun; another might jump-jet to a window and snipe a different path.

This is distinctly Call of Duty, though, chock-full of the franchise’s signature Michael Bay-shaming set-pieces. You demolish more buildings than the Las Vegas mafia, and Black Ops III’s campaign keeps the adrenaline pumping just enough to power you to its confusing conclusion.

Or you could skip the whole thing and start with the last mission, because in a series first, every campaign mission is available from the start. This is primarily to support the game’s focus on local and online co-op play. I’m not sure who exactly is pining to jump into Mission 6 before Mission 3, but it’s a good example of Black Ops III’sgenerosity. This game gives players a lot to play with.

Powers to the people

You can customize just about every inch of your character, including your weaponry, your loadouts, your outfits, your superpowers, and even your gender (yes, you can finally star as a woman, and frankly, the female voice actor is miles better than the guy). The better you play, the faster you’ll unlock cool gear and attachments, giving the solo experience a taste of the multiplayer upgrade goodness that’s been the real star of Call of Duty for years.

The game’s superpowers liven it up. Equip the Martial powers and you’ll be a wrecking ball, dashing across the battlefield to deliver knockout blows and massive ground pounds; invest in the Control set and you can hack into enemy sensors or unleash swarms of destructive nano-bots from your fingertips. Black Ops III also puts it own spin on the newfound mobility introduced in last year’s Advanced Warfare, with thruster-pack enhanced double jumps, wall runs, and quick slides.

Related: Review: The future is bright in ‘Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’

Slap all that together and you feel more like an Avenger than a SEAL. Purists might scoff at such a pivot, but Black Ops has always been the experimental branch of Call of Duty. I’m happy to see it go even crazier.

Special friends

Of course, countless players will never see any of that, because they’ll turn on Black Ops III and hop straight into multiplayer. While the core concepts remain the same — you earn points to unlock better gear, perks, Scorestreaks and loadout slots — gone are the single-player game’s powerups. In their place are Specialists.

Instead of roaming around as a bunch of identical, square-jawed jarheads, you now pick one of nine pre-built characters. Each comes equipped with one unique weapon and power, giving the multiplayer a fun, comic-book shot in the arm. Prophet, for instance, can save his hide by glitching back in time a few seconds. Outrider can send out a pulse to reveal enemy locations. Ruin runs around with gravity spikes that can take out enemies with one well-timed ground pound. These are all on slow countdown timers, limiting the cheapness.

I’m a fan. Some may bemoan how these curious abilities interfere with the game’s finely tuned (and finely crafted) gunplay, but there’s a wonderful tension in waiting for your power to recharge and plotting how you want to deploy it. It gives the multiplayer some chaotic flair. Besides, you’re still at the mercy of the legions of Call of Duty experts who will likely make your online life a living hell. The Specialist weapons and abilities complement your unlocked guns and perks; as always, higher-level players have access to cooler stuff than newbies, and the Specialists don’t tip that relationship one bit.

Sadly, where the Specialists offer something new, most of the mode types will be familiar to frequent players. After Halo 5’s scintillating Warzone, hopping into yet another Deathmatch or Domination game feels a little bland. Developer Treyarch does great work upending the stiff characters, but I wish they did the same with the way we play online.

Dead again

Tire of getting massacred by better players and you can hop into Zombies, which sees four characters tossed into a 1940s noir hellscape overrun with shrieking hordes of walking corpses. The main campaign channels some potent star power — Jeff Goldblum, Ron Perlman, Heather Graham, and Neal McDonough play the quartet of troubled antiheroes — though other than a short intro movie, it’s mostly just voiceover quips you might not hear over the din of music, monsters, and gunfire

New this year are gumball machines that dole out special powers, and a Beast mode that briefly transforms one survivor into a nightmarish, tentacled thing. A revamped XP system helps give it a whiff of the customizability found in other modes, but in the end, Zombies is still Zombies. This remains Call of Duty’s most opaque mode, a trial-and-error survival game that takes patience and a great team of helpful, friendly players willing to guide you through its intricacies. Fans of the mode will dig it, though, as it’s bursting with color.

But wait! There’s more!

Black Ops III’s trinity of solo, multiplayer, and Zombies is plenty, but it keeps going. Beat the campaign and you’ll unlock Nightmares, essentially a zombified remake of the story. An Easter egg grants access to an arcade-like twin-stick shooter. A Freerun mode tests your agility in a holographic obstacle course. I’m convinced that every two hours spent playing Black Ops III generates a new menu item.

But is more really more? Black Ops III deserves credit for delivering a wider game than Advanced Warfare (or Black Ops II, for that matter), but it’s not necessarily a deeper one. More meaningful, fundamental changes to how we experience the game were passed over in favor of a maelstrom of strange new ideas. It’s just plain weird.

I happen to like weird, though, and Black Ops III does enough to carve out its own identity. Whether or not that identity has enough in the tank to hold off the other huge games arriving this holiday remains to be seen, but if you like different ways to shoot stuff, you won’t find a more complete package.

What’s Hot: Heady mix of gunplay and powers; Specialists are great; impressive amount of content

What’s Not: Bland writing sinks campaign; lacks compelling new multiplayer modes

Platform reviewed: PS4

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