I’ve really struggled to know what or how to start this review. The reason is, although I’m currently not a huge fan, the Call of Duty series has a special place in my gaming heart. It was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that really got me into gaming in the first place. I joined clans, played in squad matches, and made friends through that game and the next couple that, nearly 15 years later, I’m still in touch with, and I still occasionally meet up with my old squadmates to play Call of Duty with them.
Whilst my friendships have grown and gone from strength to strength, what hasn’t grown or gotten better has been the quality of the actual Call of Duty games we were playing. Year after year, each game has eroded away our trust and excitement as each subsequent instalment has been progressively worse than the one before.
In our eyes, Call of Duty has been on life support for the last couple of iterations. However, the dam holding back the last bit of hope that Call of Duty will recapture its form has finally broken. The game that finally broke it was this one, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Not only has this game stuck two middle fingers up at the long-suffering fans, but it will also be forever known as the Call of Duty that ruined the franchise. It is AWFUL!
The Campaign
Black Ops. The name is in the title. Black Ops, when in reference to military operations, are regarded as covert, secret government missions behind enemy lines. Think along the lines of SAS or Navy Seals doing something deniable that they really shouldn’t. What is the Black Ops 7 campaign about? Without trying to give away too much, it’s a sci-fi, drug-tripping, children’s adventure against Godzilla and other monsters. Not exactly what I’d call a “black ops” mission. I’m all for new ideas, but seriously?
However, some may not even GET to the Call of Duty campaign as it is an always online experience. It’s also a co-op experience, and frankly, I think it was designed for four players for the whole thing anyway. Whether or not you have four people stupid enough to waste time playing this monstrosity of a shooter campaign is another matter though.
But, it gets even worse! Because it’s online-only, this brings a whole new set of issues. You cannot pause the game. There are no checkpoints. You have to complete each chapter in one go; otherwise, you have to start all over again. That wouldn’t be too bad if the action was fun, but it’s not. It’s just generic go there, shoot this. Yes, there are occasional puzzles to unlock things, but the campaign feels more like an attempt at a Destiny–style mission than anything else, and if I wanted that, I would go play Destiny.
The other issue with an online-only campaign is that if there are connection issues (thankfully, I didn’t have any), you start again. If you are playing solo and die, you start all over again. My point here is that I know plenty of people, especially those that are now getting older, that would buy Call of Duty each year for the single-player campaign alone.
The only good thing you can say about the campaign is that it has high production values for the excellent graphics and art direction. The rest, though, is forgettable.
Zombies
Of the three components the game has, Zombies is the one I personally enjoy the least. That isn’t because I don’t like zombies, it’s because I don’t like what the Zombie element here in the Call of Duty games has become.
I spent tens to hundreds of hours with friends on the original Call of Duty Zombies mode back in Call of Duty: World at War. What was so appealing about Zombies back then was, as per the enemies you were shooting, it was mindless fun. You didn’t have to think too much, you just had to hold on for as long as possible in a house. Back to the wall, lads, they are coming in type stuff! Glorious.
NOW though, Zombies have their own small campaigns, Easter eggs, puzzles, and vast areas to explore (you can now drive to places on a map), and like everything else, it just seems to have lost its identity compared to what made it fun in the first place. Everything now is literally a mission to do anything. There is one map that is pure survival, and that’s fun, but I honestly think Zombies should be a whole separate game to itself.
To complete one of these normal Zombie missions, you could spend around ten hours getting there. That is great value for money if this side of the game is your thing. In fact, I have an easier time accepting that some people will buy Call of Duty just for the Zombies.
Zombies, however, just like the rest of the game, haven’t really evolved, and frankly, they are just more of the same. If that’s what you want, great. The other good thing about Zombies is that ranking up weapons here does carry over into multiplayer upgrades too.
Multiplayer
Oh boy. This is going to hurt. Multiplayer, the key component of the game and probably the main reason a vast majority of people buy Call of Duty games, is terrible.
I’ll start with the good points. There are a lot of maps out of the box and a lot of game modes to choose from. I really started to enjoy “Overload” as my new favourite game mode. But apart from that, I started hating everything about the multiplayer.
I’ll start with the mechanics. Everything with the gunplay felt loose. Nothing felt tight or accurate. It didn’t “feel” like pick up and play Call of Duty. Then, there is the new player movement mechanics of a half jump extra. Jump up to a wall, and you can press jump again to reach even further. The maps, I feel, have been designed around this mechanic, and they admittedly worked well with the new jumping and sliding. But goodness me, with so many people online bouncing around the maps like a bunch of deranged kangaroos, it’s really difficult to line bouncing players down the sights of your gun. For example, you see a corner approaching, and a red dot of an enemy is walking towards that corner. You don’t know whether the enemy is going to be at normal level, sliding along the ground, or wall bouncing about 15 feet in the air when he gets to the corner. Because of this, you don’t know where to aim when they get to the corner. There should be some system of making it harder to aim if you are bouncing or sliding, but there isn’t. It’s incredibly hard to read what the enemy player is going to do and, therefore, track them and shoot them. This sucks the fun out of the main part of the game, i.e.: shooting.
Even if you have a player in your sights, the net code is terrible. I had an enemy come around a rock, so I fired at him in front and behind. The only time I got hit markers was when I wasn’t aiming anywhere near him! How can you possibly play a game when it works like this? A shooter so bad you don’t know where you should actually shoot to score hits?
With the gunplay, I started to just waft my gun in the general direction of an enemy, and with the bad net code, bouncing player movement, and the loose feeling of the mechanics, I found I could hit more while playing this way than by trying to track an enemy down my sights.
The third thing that started to grind my gears were the “You’ve got to be kidding me!” moments. You know what I mean. Those times where, for example, you’re in a random spot on the map, a place where you shouldn’t be. There is no UAV or any way for the enemy to know your position. Even though you are 95% covered behind something, they leap around a corner, spin in the air, and head shot you from halfway across the map with an SMG. You watch the kill cam sequence only to see that they were trying to line up on you even before they had made the corner. In short, they already knew where you were before they could have been able to see you. I’m not going to say people are cheating, but I am going to say that this has happened to me far more often than it should have given the number of times I’ve literally said out loud, “You have got to be kidding me!”.
Then we have the maps themselves. I kind of like the basic map design of 3 routes to the middle area. The thing is, there are too many new maps that felt lazy in their design like this. To add to this, there are lots of old maps from previous Black Ops games included that turned up so often in the playlists, I didn’t feel like I was playing a new Black Ops game, just the old ones again.
TTK (Time To Kill) is erratic. At times, I thought the TTK, although short, was okay. But then I kept having to put a clip into people, only for them not to die, yet I was being killed at the nearest whiff of a couple of bullets going anywhere near me. Even when the game did feel like it was working properly, TTK was too quick for me. Not everyone wanting to play the game is an 18-year-old with lightning-fast reaction times. Other games, which I won’t name directly, but for the sake of the conversation, we will call it “BATTLEFIELD 6”, at least give the older audience a way to contribute if their reaction times are slow. Call of Duty doesn’t do this, so it makes itself unwelcoming and feels like a game that is now just for the young.
Lastly, none of the multiplayer games have any atmosphere. I’ve been playing a lot of Battlefield 6 lately, and one of the key aspects of that game that makes it so addictive is how immersive the battlefields are. Black Ops 7 is bereft of anything immersive. You play a multiplayer match, and it’s practically silent. Turn the music down, and all I can barely hear are occasional footfalls or distant gunfire. Other than that, it’s silent, and frankly, I hate it because it makes the game feel very sterile and boring. No background noise, no war noise, no screaming enemies, no explosions, nothing.
Overall
As well as the above issues, I also need to mention the hideous UI menu systems. You need a PhD to figure how to navigate this menu. I still haven’t properly figured out how to find the game mode in multiplayer that I like playing, and unless it’s part of the featured highlight section, I don’t know how to get to it.
At the end of the day, the only part of the game I’d say is “okay” is the Zombies section. Everything else is bad to awful for various reasons. If this was any other game, that would be the end of it, and we’d move on. But this is Call of Duty. This is arguably the largest, longest running console franchise in history. The ridiculous amount of money the franchise has racked in over the years is astronomical, and this should mean it’s the pinnacle of gaming, right? RIGHT?
At this point, if you have been a fan over the years, it’s hard to not get a little bit angry. Rather than plough that money into the series to make things even better for fans year after year, it feels like the development of the franchise has stagnated and gone backwards with as little money used to keep it afloat as possible. It’s been a long-running debate if Call of Duty should take some time off to breathe and rediscover itself rather than put pressure on its developers and fans by releasing the same things with different skins year after year.
Black Ops 7 has crossed that line and is so bad that I feel it will be the game that finally forces the team to break the cycle and just stop. The game isn’t fun to play. Multiplayer is broken, single-player is devoid of excitement and a mess. It’s only Zombies that is still breathing (ironically), and that’s on life support too. It’s time to put us all out of our misery and stop this nonsense. Everyone, take a well-earned break so you can come back stronger.
Summary
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is probably the worst game in the entire franchise. The series has lost sight of what it is supposed to be about. Nothing works well, plays well, or is even actually fun to play in the first place. They say that dedicated fans will keep buying the game year after year, but even they will have their limits, and I feel this is it.
Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software
Publisher: Activision
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC
Release Date: 14th November 2025
