I want to start by prefacing that it has been years since I actually sat down to play a Call of Duty title. I did play Black Ops 6 last year through Game Pass, but when I say I have less than an hour overall in that game, I mean it. No, there was a time, in my youth, when I was playing to go pro, when Black Ops 2 was the most recently released game in the series. I got pretty close to it until my team tried to kill each other, but that’s a different story. The point is, going to Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, I had relatively fresh eyes and a belief that when you have the opportunity to review a game, you owe it the gravitas of your attention. Hence, I came away with a range of opinions.
Starting with the story mode, which is usually the first thing I tackle in any Call of Duty title, I am still left questioning how I actually feel, as anticlimactic a sentiment as that is. While many might walk away upset with certain elements of absurdity, I actually enjoyed them. At least the drug-fueled nightmare fuel the game occasionally throws at you is original, an attempt to do something unique that the franchise had not brought to the scene prior. The shame, that is, weirdly enough, so much of this runs through attempting to call back to Black Ops 2. That being the last entry I know like the back of my hand, burned into my brain, I recognized all of these callbacks or blatant reskinned locations. The problem was I questioned who this was for since I couldn’t imagine the full audience gets the same benefit. The multiplayer stage Hijacked was reused both online and in the story, which is one thing; it was another when entire levels are themed around the events of the now 13-year-old game.
The single-player itself features players taking the role of David “Section” Mason, who returns as protagonist since last being featured as such in, you guessed it, Black Ops 2. He leads a group of characters that seem stuck in angry mode as they attempt to stop a tech corporation from enacting some plan that… Didn’t really make sense… Annoyingly, the main story is designed for co-op and requires online play regardless of it you choose to play solo. This bar’s convenient checkpointing, as if the game crashes as it did for me, you lose all that progress, then require about 2 minutes of loading to get back in online. The narrative also treats the four characters that players can take the role of as present through dialogue; the game only allows for players in Quere to be present, which feels heavily at odds with the usual story of platoons mowing down waves of vague terrorists in pursuit of saving the world.
The worst aspect of the story is that all of this runs through a rather bland villain in the form of Mad Men’s and Sabrina star, Kiernan Shipka. In fairness, I would give he credit for doing the best she could with the material she had, the idea for the villain just felt ill-conceived and bland. This becomes so much more pronounced when the game uses these throwback elements to present Menendez, the villain of 2 and a favorite in the series, as an early antagonist before unceremoniously cutting that and leaving Shipka’s Emma Kagen to show up from time to time, contribute very little beyond condescension to the player, then sorta disappearing for 3 missions and repeating. She comes across like a character written by describing a tech bro to AI based on watching Silicon Valley. There were legit explorations that could have been made here; instead, we get whatever this is supposed to be, which, unfortunately, isn’t compelling.
Her main tool for fighting your group is a toxic hallucinogenic that causes a group trip, forcing several levels to be more metaphysical. As I said, I actually enjoyed these parts as not Call of Duty as they actually were. There is legitimately a part where you run around a demonic hellscape, where you get chased by demons while fighting a giant flower plant in the center, shooting orbs at you. While actually DOING this, I had a much less flattering opinion of the activity, but afterwards, the only thing I could think was I had done the shooty thing before, I had not done whatever that was. Granted, it is imperfect. In certain stages, you are exploring the hellscape, shooting at enemies with not much more. Others require you to do more and play more heavily into the absurdity, and these offer at least some of the flavor you get from this twist.
It doesn’t help that platforming is so much of these stages can revolve around platforming, and the button prompts can be less than responsive at best and annoyingly finicky at absolute worst. In addition, the game these changes to the formula might have felt better if the game didn’t so heavily commit to having a live-service aesthetic, complete with health bars hanging over enemies, and an abundance of enemies that run straight at you, which feels like every stage has way too many. The checkpoint system isn’t much better, though, and can often require you to clear multiple high-traffic areas to hit a checkpoint. In others, the checkpoint acts similarly to a respawn, which throws you to a bizarre point where you are, just not that you have seen following the flow of combat.
One of the aspects I did find really cool was the open-ended areas you get throughout the game, which I stupidly didn’t piece together as part of an open world until much later than I should have. The open world becomes fully explorable after the game, too, and it was fun, albeit weird to get used to, though these areas often had to worst checkpointing. There is a lot of depth to the exploration of this world, even if, at a surface level, you are mostly traveling from contained location to have a shootout in to contained location to have a shootout in. That’s what I wanted, though, so it’s hard to find any fault. I will say, the biggest complaint here is that tools like boats or gliders are baked into the experience, so the grandeur of moments like gliding into a base under the cover of darkness are non-existent here, which, at least when I was playing the series, was Call of Duty‘s bread and butter.
Thankfully, the gunplay returns and is just as good as I remembered, with tight controls and a significant amount of choices for loadout options. I also liked how every mode feeds into a universal leveling system, allowing me to have a lot of options when I finally finished the narrative and went online, something you used to have to put in the work for, which can disadvantage some players who struggle to gain momentum with the core loadouts. Of course, I was probably 40 levels higher than most people I played against, which suggests players prefer to go the other route, and I’m just crazy. It does feel satisfying when you reach a point, and bullets come whipping from every direction to aim and shoot, and the narrative makes gun choice pretty easy, rather than locking you into two through the mission perogative. The issue is that enemies like the ones that charge you feel at odds with the rest of play, and the game relies on it heavily, especially in the hallucinations, where hordes can be sent at you.
Multiplayer definitely has changed since the last time I dove in, with changes that feel like they make it harder for a player to stay still. I wasn’t a camper in my heyday, but I knew how to control where players would come from some so there were some adjustments I had to make. Maybe it’s because, for the round I was playing, I was going 30 with a 2.0 KD ratio that I walked away enjoying this a lot. The frantic play as you move through these maps kept me on my toes with combat feeling tight and reactionary, though snipes are still the bane of my existence, as I never mastered how to perfectly hit anybody from across the map and get an instant kill, like some players. There are a lot of attachments for guns, though, and shifts for play to allow somebody like me to build a long-range viable LMG kit that can compete with these players to some degree.
What was weird was how familiar I was with the multiplayer on offer since three maps returned from Black Ops 2, so it felt right at home. It’s a weird juxtaposition that I spent a lot of time on solely because I didn’t want nostalgia to cloud my opinion. They were better built than the newer maps, but I felt that way in the end.It probably has something to do with the wall jump, which is featured despite most of the multiplayer being boots-on-the-ground combat. It’s an interesting mechanic that allows you to jump at a wall, then jump again off it to reach other locations. In the returning maps, which do not fully feature pathways geared towards this, it’s cool, a new way to combat by jumping off a wall in a similar flow shift to sliding as you try to outplay your would-be killer, or, better yet, get you access to areas of advantage more easily. You can especially use it for blitzkrieg flanking as you jump right up into somebody’s face. The problem, the new stages all have routes that specifically require you to use this ability over gaps to traverse the stage, which creates choke points where progression is either a death sentence or just ill-advised.
The other issue I had was just how little of the absurdity from the story made it to the multiplayer mode, which commits to fairly expected structures. One level in the story, in which you fight across a highway warped by the toxin that required platforming and even portals to traverse, would have made for a great stage to convert for multiple players, but sadly, it was not to be. One multiplayer mode uses the open world for a bigger area and more players in matches. I liked the mode a lot, but sadly, the Battlefield comparisons are unavoidable, and the mode doesn’t do this format quite as well. Though it is better than Delta Force, if that is any consolation. Getting to play with all the new tools at your disposal was one of the best elements on display there. Being able to attach your gun to ledges, while I’m pretty sure it isn’t new, is kinda new to me, and I very much like doing that as well. Of course, multiplayer can wear thin when you are sitting in an objective only for none of your team members to even look at it.
The last time I played Zombies was when people would go on long-winded rants about this story that supposedly existed when all I knew was shooting things, and Steve Blum was Spike Spiegel. It was pretty simple, though. Nazi zombies rip off planks, and you buy guns and doors, then shoot them. Parts of the expansion here are cool, and I love that you quickly get modern guns rather than being limited to World War II weapons like those older modes, at least till you progress. It is so much more complicated, though, perhaps too complicated in some ways, and of course, I skipped a lot of versions of the game mode, so I could be completely off base on everything in context.
The narrative Zombies mode features you fighting through areas and completing objectives along with waves of enemies. This was a little disorienting as the emphasis felt placed on the objectives, but rounds were still a thing. Since the game becomes progressively harder with each round, getting distracted and clearing rounds makes the actual task at hand harder, feeling more like a punishment, but tasks require doors opened, so there is some balance. Then we were driving around from area to area, so the mode has gotten bigger, though not all areas felt intuitive when it came to completing them, and exploration, at least in the older version, checkpointed you with doors between areas, but here they lock buildings in the much wider areas. This can make it difficult to traverse the areas you are in while trying to find resources, and annoying, given how much easier it is to fight the hordes outside rather than inside the tight and confined spaces you unlock.
I was never a big fan of the zombie modes to begin with, though, as a GameStop employee, I have heard the phrase “I want to buy Zombies, but I don’t want those other two modes, how can I do that?” This being said, it has become so open-ended that it was enjoyable not to encounter the trapped-in-a-corner dead outcome at the end of every run. There are also several modes to play, one of which is a more traditional take, so that even players so out of the loop, like me, can feel like we know what we are doing. Like everything about these games, though, and especially Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, friends make the experience better, and I don’t have any of those.
Verdict
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 fails to fully delight with its story; this much I’m hard-pressed to deny. The interesting twist to the formula is that the form of the hallucinogens leads to some interesting outcomes, but not always rewarding ones. It is also used far too often to harken back to Black Ops 2, which invites constant comparison to a game that is objectively better designed, with a much better villain than the one on display here. All this being said, the story has some bright points, like the open world you eventually unlock, and the ability to level through its tight gunplay.
The multiplayer modes, on the other hand, deliver far more consistently than that. The fast-paced action with more tools to keep you on your toes, and some cool modes, all bring something to the table that keeps me coming back. Even as a fish out of water in zombie mode, the loop manages to entertain and feel way less limiting than what I was used to, but I like the comparison point to any other more recent versions. I wish the multiplayer had fewer Black Ops 2 modes and more maps inspired by the weirdness you experience constantly in the story, or a killstreak that summons a giant Michael Rooker, but that feels like splitting hairs, given how it kept me coming back. The wall jumping, which the new stages all seemingly require for traversal though could have been done without.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 isn’t going to be for everybody; that much became very clear early into the narrative. Maybe the multiplayer put that on display as well. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything here for anybody, though, and for the right player, I think there is definitely something here.
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Reviewed on PlayStation 5, also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC
A copy of this game was provide by Activision for the purposes of this review.
Developer: Trayarch, Raven Software
Publishers: Activision
Release Date: November 14, 2025
Pros:
+Tight, Fast paced gunplay
+Open-world map you eventually unlock
+Multiplayer and Zombies modes
+I enjoyed the most Bizarre of the elements
Cons:
-Bad Narrative with bland, forgettable characters
-Especially boring villain
-Newer multiplayer map design
-More of the narrative gimmick should have been in multiplayer
-Always Online and Co-Op focus
-bad checkpointing
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Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
