A shift away from single-player leaves Call of Duty with its most lopsided and homogenous entry in decades, though what it does offer is consistently good fun when accepted on its own terms.
In the opening of the new Call of Duty, Milo Ventimiglia lays a cigar on the grave of series fixture Frank Woods. He takes a long stroll through a cemetery with Troy Marshall, the powerful backbone of last year’s story, now white-haired and walking with a stick. Four decades have passed since the events of Black Ops 6; gone in the blink of an eye, the pull of a trigger.
“Stop looking backwards, David,” says Marshall. “What matters is what you do next.”
It’s a philosophy that developers Treyarch and Raven have embraced with Black Ops 7, tossing out decades of established programming in the process. Almost every year since the launch of MySpace, there has been a new single-player Call of Duty campaign. Though varying in quality, they have defined a genre – a distinct form of first-person cinema, which has placed the player at the centre of countless deadly spectacles: their own execution; a nuclear detonation; the collapse of the Eiffel Tower. They have allowed us, in short, to get an eyeful.
But this time there isn’t one. Oh yes, you can launch Black Ops 7’s story mode in solo if you like – maybe even struggle gamely through its first few missions, while ignoring the three superfluous protagonists in every cutscene. But it’s a co-op campaign, marked on the main menu as such, and the co-op isn’t really optional. Not if you want to have a good time.
The theatrical choreography that unfolds around a solo protagonist in COD – a single actor who can be directed to a specific mark and swung from a rope, blown out of the sky, or otherwise made subject to some intricate stuntwork – is naturally impossible once two-to-four players are milling around the scene. The action of Black Ops 7 is therefore broader and simpler: stealth sequences that go permanently loud the moment a player is sighted; boss fights which pitch you against hefty health bars and phased waves of opponents.
Not for nothing does the plot of Black Ops 7 revolve around a robotic threat. Enemies come armoured as standard, so that every player has a chance to stick the boot in before they crash to earth. Thankfully, in the wake of Warzone, Activision’s studios have cracked the nut of making metal fun to shoot at – excelling in the field of audio feedback, as bullets penetrate plates and rupture fuel tanks with a crack and a whoosh. The synthetics in particular explode with pleasingly concussive force, setting off chain reactions through their ranks.
Attribution
Each pocket of action is bookended by implausible piles of armaments – buffet tables of specialist grenades and crates offering binary choices of upgraded weapons. Verisimilitude takes a backseat to co-op convenience, and dialogue is similarly sidelined in case it gets in the way of mic chat, the exposition and character moments saved mainly for cinematic intervals. There is nothing here remotely comparable to Black Ops 6’s ambitious moments of immersive scene-setting; no Hitman-lite social simulation, no trotting about on marble floors at a Washington fundraiser while Bill Gates gladhands in the background. All is in service to a smooth multiplayer session.
Black Ops 7 gets away with such abstraction by leaning into the series’ history with nightmarish visions – plucking the hallucinogenic bioweapon from last year’s campaign and pumping it permanently through our protagonists’ systems, so that missions alternate between grounded assaults and flights of fancy. Before long, you’re calling in enormous hunting knives as if they were airstrikes, watching them plunge through your enemies and into the earth like sudden new skyscrapers.
It’s through dreamlike sequences like these that the campaign draws on the memories of Black Ops characters, taking you back a decade and a half to Vortuka’s forced labour camp, for instance, and the LA drone attack that finished out 2012’s story. While effective enough as fan service, these reminders of past crescendos introduce a kind of cognitive dissonance, since Black Ops 7 is more indebted to Destiny than any of the campaigns it references. Amid the callbacks, there’s little room left for Ventimiglia to explore what I’m sure Black Ops 7’s writers would tell you is a meditation on forgiving one’s own mistakes.
Treyarch and Raven are better off when machine-gunning their own furrow, as with a breathless sprint through Tokyo’s arcades and out onto the rooftops. It’s a parkour-adjacent sequence that finds you bouncing off billboards, as flutes trill in sync with the butterflies in your stomach. There are similar giddy thrills to be found in Avalon, the fictional European state that recurs throughout the campaign and constitutes its endgame – where the returning grappling hook from Black Ops 6 can lift you out of a firefight and into a seamless flight on the wings of your jumpsuit.
The wall-bounce that elevates the Tokyo mission carries through to multiplayer, evoking the boost jump of old without compromising the familiar feel of frantic deathmatch. Because that’s how competitive COD is always played – as deathmatch, regardless of the mode you happen to be occupying. When there’s an objective to capture, it’s merely deathmatch with a diversion. It’s that which will always separate it from Battlefield.
The most successful of the new modes, however, introduces a fun wrinkle in the form of an ‘overload device’ – essentially a football which one player must pick up and deliver to a goal in their opponent’s spawn area. There’s an illicit joy to dodging the fight altogether and sprinting to the endzone, scoring just a second before you’re cut to shribbons by your frustrated enemies.
Messier is the new 20v20 mode, Skirmish, which throws wingsuits, grappling hooks and vehicles at maps which are just about large enough to contain them. It’s tempting to file Skirmish under the wider Warzone-ification of COD, but in truth it more closely resembles Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory – widening the tight combat loop of deathmatch and leaving the extra room largely empty. You’re more likely to be surprised by what happens in Skirmish than in other modes, but you’re more likely to be bored too.
Zombies, meanwhile, is Zombies – a house under its own rule, beloved by its disciples, consumed by self-reference. It remains an elaborate horde mode in which new routes are progressively unlocked across a labyrinthine map, and favourite weapons are gradually beefed up to tackle tougher and tougher onslaughts from mouldering corpses.
This year though, unusually, co-op COD heads will have a time conundrum on their hands. They’ll have to choose between dedicating themselves wholly to Zombies or to the campaign’s endgame. In the latter, multiple friendly squads deploy into open-world Avalon to conquer zones of graduating difficulty, before extracting with their winnings. It’s a winningly freeform setup, which forefronts Just-Cause-style mobility and low-commitment objectives. Fairly relaxed lunch break fodder, unless you potter into high-level territory.
Activision is already working on ways to evolve the Avalon map with updates in upcoming seasons, and from a publisher perspective, you can see why turning the annual campaign into a live service appeals. This way, COD’s studios can more directly convert the expense of briefly-enjoyed levels, cutscenes and performance capture into long-term income.
But I do think it’s ultimately unwise. In an era when big-budget games are expected to be enormous and endlessly engrossing, Activision has had a good thing going. Every year, Call of Duty has brought three discrete offerings to the table, catering to solo, co-op and competitive players all at once. By eliminating the single-player campaign, the publisher has compromised that inherent variety, turning a distinct set of experiences into a more homogenous mush.
Besides the uninspiring top-down twin-stick novelty of Dead Ops, there is also no mode I’m aware of in 2025’s edition of Call of Duty in which you can comfortably pause to go for a wee, accept a parcel delivery, or answer your phone. I consider that a design flaw.
It’s very probable that COD will return with a solo campaign next year; I can’t imagine Infinity Ward has been working on anything less. But elements of Black Ops 7’s approach are likely to trickle into future entries, and I consider that a shame. As the lacklustre campaign of Battlefield 6 proved, there are few studios out there with the institutional knowledge to deliver single-player spectacle on a par with Call of Duty. To neglect that legacy in the immediate wake of Black Ops 6, a spy thriller which was critically acclaimed as COD’s finest solo outing in years – all while dressing this new game as a direct sequel – is a minor travesty.
If you can accept Black Ops 7’s fundamental changes to the formula on their own terms, you’ll have a good trip, despite the psychochemicals coursing through your veins. I’m just not convinced those changes bode well for the health of the series.
A copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was provided for this review by Activision.