Reviews// Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

Peter: In these missions you can either take the detached approach of deploying your troops from an elevated position, or join them and control troops and drones. In some of the missions a detached approach seems to work best, where as in others boots on the ground are invaluable.

The step up to veteran difficulty feels very familiar. It's a lazy way to make the game seem harder. Often the only difference is the amount of damage you can take and dish out. Also, in veteran the opposing force seems to have a much larger grenade stock. I have found the 'hardest' difficulty to be mostly easy, only frustrating in parts. It only plays longer because it often forces you to die a lot more whilst trying to do the simplest of tasks.

Scott: The online action is fast-paced as always and is well-balanced. It includes the standard multiplayer game modes like Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. There's also a new one called Hardpoint, in which there is a zone that the teams fight to capture. The Hardpoint moves every so often to different parts of the map in a seemingly set pattern, and your team gains points for having an exclusive presence within it.

Treyarch has also added "multi-team" across a few of the game modes, in which there are more than two teams in a game. This adds an interesting dynamic where enemies kill each other for you, saving you the work as well as stealing your points.

The class system has changed a little to enable you to swap out unwanted or useless items for more favourable ones. You have slots for a primary and secondary weapon, along with perks, equipment and more. You are limited to filling only ten of these per class. You can also use wildcards to give you an extra perk, attachment etc, but using a wildcard means sacrificing a slot.

Peter: So you've reached maximum level online: what now?! Luckily, in line with the other CoD games, after levelling to maximum Blops 2 gives you the option to prestige. Luckily, unlike past Call of Duty games, this doesn't involve the resetting of all your hard-earned weapon levels, stats and emblems. And in going prestige, you can unlock new playercard backgrounds and emblem parts to show off to everyone you meet in lobbies.

The Zombies game mode has become synonymous with Treyarch's CoD games and this trend continues with Black Ops 2. In this iteration the developer has added a couple of new modes to help keep it new, even on its third outing. As always Zombies seems to be a popular game mode, despite the fact that it gets old fast. The great idea of progressing deeper into the map and turning on the power to grant the use of perk machines is there, but this is hard to do if you don't know what you're doing.

Scott: It's an effort to learn the ins and outs of the Zombies mode without a lot of patience and help. It's too easy to fail even after making lots of progress, but I suppose that's what it's all about.

For all three of these sections, you get plenty of bang for your buck if you like FPS action and a bit of chilling violence. The campaign is full of plot twists and loud action to satisfy everyone from the casual FPS gamer to the deeper thinkers. The multiplayer modes are great for groups of friends or solo competition, with a league mode to match you up with equally scoring competitors and see how you compare.

Pros:
+ Fresh ideas added to the campaign mode
+ Well balanced online setup
+ New game types within Zombies

Cons:
- Short, linear campaign
- Story is confusing at times
- Zombies gets monotonous

SPOnG Score 8/10