Call of Duty used to be the undisputed king of the shooter genre. Whether single-player campaigns or online, Call of Duty was at the top. The vast majority of its annual audience might only come to these games for multiplayer, but it never stopped Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer from creating action blockbusters with strong characters, incredible set pieces, and a string of missions that felt like an unrivaled rollercoaster ride through specific historical settings.
Players Are Already Turning Against Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6
What began as a fan favourite entry has quickly soured into something sad and corporate.
While some were definitely stronger than others, upon picking up Call of Duty each year, you always knew that Activision was going to deliver a good time. But in recent years, that hasn’t been a guarantee. Somewhere along the way, it became obvious that greater profits could be made by focusing purely on multiplayer offerings while hurling single-player campaigns onto the backseat, often meaning laughably less effort was put into bringing them to life.
Black Ops 4 shipped without a campaign at all, but the first time I felt this quality slip well beyond the realms of acceptability was with Modern Warfare 3 in 2023. At the time, I described it as the breaking point for Call of Duty, and how turning this planned expansion into a full game despite its distinct lack of content was both lazy and cynical. Turns out that I was wrong, as things could still get a whole lot worse.
Why Is The Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 Campaign So Terrible?
Back when Black Ops 7 was revealed with a spectacular cinematic trailer earlier this year, it had all the potential in the world, with all the ingredients needed to craft a brilliant trip down memory lane. Not only was Alex Mason returning as protagonist, but it appeared myriad skeletons in his closet would act as antagonists alongside a megacorporation eager to take over the world. This is the only foundation you need for a globe-trotting adventure.
Unfortunately, the finished product is a lazy, unimaginative, and borderline nonsensical jaunt that would rather throw you into mind-bending dreamscapes than bother to tell a story that makes any logical sense. Call of Duty is meant to be larger than life and ridiculous at the best of times, but that has never stopped each campaign from making us care about what its heroes are fighting for. We gotta save the world, stop an evil bad guy, or something — but that isn’t the case with Black Ops 7. It’s strung together so haphazardly that I don’t even want to play it.
Let’s start with the first mission, which has Mason and a mixture of familiar faces and allies, who aren’t nearly interesting enough to care about, breaking into a facility to retrieve a piece of important equipment from falling into the hands of The Guild. This generic goal is with the aim of ensuring the world is protected from the return of deceased terrorist Raul Menendez, who players will likely remember as the main antagonist of Black Ops 2.
He’s back, but this time in our deepest, darkest dreams, whenever we take too much acid. After retrieving the precious cargo, you will be dropped into a dreamscape where giant machetes fall from the sky as you hop between a bunch of floating islands while faceless goons and bullet sponge robots do battle with Mason.
The campaign is also designed to be played in co-op, meaning that even if you want to play it solo, you still need to load into a lobby. And because the game views you as going into an online session, you cannot pause the game while playing either. Nice one, Activision!
First up — why does every single enemy have its own health bar? Call of Duty campaigns are known for throwing endless waves of enemies at the player who will go down with just a few shots, with it constantly encouraging you to push forward instead of being stuck behind loose bits of cover. But here, every encounter is defined by filling your adversaries with just enough bullets to kill them, before repeating the process over and over again. There is no additional strategy to adopt against enemies with more health, just extra ammo to be wasted in making progress. It’s trying to mimic something like Borderlands 4 with about ten percent of the fun and whimsy.
Activision Doesn’t Care About The Quality Of Black Ops 7
Upon escaping your first foray into Raul Menendez’s mental prison, you are given the task of venturing into the city of Avalon where a deadly psychedelic gas has started to spread. Black Ops 7 tries to make this newly introduced city feel like a living, breathing world in which most of its citizens are now close to death, but instead it feels like a section of a Warzone map has been retrofitted to benefit the campaign. It’s like the map existed first, and the developers had to scramble to come up with some sort of narrative context that would best fit around it. As a consequence, nothing about it is alive, reactive, or feels like you’re actually meant to be there.
There is no single desired path to take through the map, while enemies seemingly appear at random instead of offering a proper challenge. I found that you can pretty much just run right to the objective and progress instantly instead of bothering to fight any enemies, which isn’t fun to do in the first place. Everything about the campaign — aside from its occasionally lavish CGI cutscenes, feels rushed and cobbled together. Health bars, weapon caches, and co-op gameplay are so weirdly out of place and Activision desperately wanted the campaign to fold into multiplayer progression at direct detriment to the gameplay experience.
Call of Duty campaigns used to be an annual highlight in triple-A video games. An exercise in excessive spectacular and larger-than-life storytelling that understood exactly what it had to be in order to succeed while always having enough freedom in its setting to experiment. The original Modern Warfare trilogy, early Black Ops titles, and the excellent Advanced and Infinite Warfare all stand the test of time because of this. Black Ops 7 spits in the face of that legacy by delivering something so half-baked that I can’t even bring myself to finish it.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
- Released
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November 14, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Drugs
