Black Ops 7 Was an Abomination — Modern Warfare 4 Reminded Me What Call of Duty Should Be

Call of Duty does not need to be clever all the time. It does not need to question reality, turn houses upside down or send me running along roads suspended in the sky. It is a military shooter. I buy it to pick up a weapon, fight an enemy and take part in the enormous battles and tightly directed missions that the series once delivered better than anyone else.

Apparently, the people responsible for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 had other ideas.

Last year's campaign was an abomination. It took the familiar Black Ops themes of brainwashing, psychological manipulation and unreliable memories and pushed them so far that the result barely resembled Call of Duty at all. Instead of tense covert operations and memorable military set pieces, we got floating scenery, inverted buildings, giant hallucinations and environments that behaved like unfinished levels from a surreal puzzle game.

It was not frightening. It was not profound. It was just fucking stupid.

Mind games are not a substitute for proper missions

The Black Ops series has always experimented with perception and memory. That was part of its identity long before Black Ops 7. The original games understood, however, that those ideas needed to sit on top of something recognisable.

There were soldiers, intelligence agencies, secret programmes, political conflicts and enemies who wanted something. The player might not have understood the entire truth, but the world still had rules. The psychological elements made you question what had happened during an otherwise grounded military story.

Black Ops 7 appeared to think that making a scene stranger automatically made it more interesting.

It did not.

Turning a house upside down is not storytelling. Making the player run along an inverted road is not psychological depth. Filling the screen with distorted scenery does not compensate for the absence of a coherent mission. Those sequences felt like visual demonstrations created to impress somebody during a development meeting, then stretched into playable sections without anyone asking whether they were enjoyable.

They were not what I wanted from Call of Duty, and I doubt I was alone.

The campaign's greatest mistake was treating the shooting as something that needed to be interrupted. Every time the game began to resemble a military shooter, another mind sequence arrived to pull it apart. It felt embarrassed by the basic appeal of the series, as though fighting through a well-designed battlefield was no longer imaginative enough.

There is nothing wrong with a game about shooting enemy soldiers. That is what Call of Duty is. Nobody buys it because they desperately want to explore an upside-down living room.

Black Ops 7 forgot why people play Call of Duty

The best Call of Duty campaigns understand momentum. You enter a mission, receive a clear objective and move through a series of escalating situations. The environment changes, reinforcements arrive, plans fail and the player is pushed forwards.

The formula is simple, but simplicity is not the same as laziness. Executed properly, it creates some of gaming's most memorable action sequences.

Black Ops 7 replaced that momentum with confusion.

Its campaign mixed together co-operative design, Warzone-style systems, enemy hordes, armour, weapon rarities and prolonged encounters against enemies that took far too much punishment. Rather than feeling like a carefully constructed single-player campaign, it often felt like several existing Call of Duty modes had been dismantled and welded together.

That might have made efficient use of maps, mechanics and progression systems, but it did not make a good campaign.

Even contemporary reviews that praised its multiplayer and Zombies modes regularly identified the campaign as the weak point. At the time of writing, Metacritic records a 65 critic average and a 1.7 user score. User scores are never a perfect measurement, but that level of hostility does not appear from nowhere.

The multiplayer may have been competent. Zombies may have given its established audience what it wanted. Neither of those things made the campaign's mind-game sections any less unbearable.

I never finished it

I cannot tell you whether Black Ops 7 eventually redeemed its story because I never reached the end.

I was disgusted with it and stopped playing.

Some people may argue that this means I cannot judge the entire campaign. They are technically correct, but needing to finish a game before deciding whether any part of it was enjoyable would be absurd. Entertainment is not a prison sentence. A campaign has to earn the player's continued attention.

Black Ops 7 did the opposite.

Every upside-down building and ridiculous hallucination gave me another reason to turn it off. I was no longer curious about what came next because I did not trust the game to deliver anything I wanted to play. Finishing it began to feel like work performed solely to justify disliking it.

I had already seen enough.

That is arguably the most damning criticism I can make. I have played Call of Duty for years. I like military shooters, cinematic campaigns and large-scale action. This should have been one of the easiest games to persuade me to finish, yet it drove me away.

Modern Warfare 4 feels like Call of Duty again

Thankfully, this year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 seems to understand what the series is supposed to be.

I am approximately halfway through the campaign, so this is not a final review. The remaining missions still have time to disappoint me. Based on what I have played so far, though, the difference is enormous.

There have been no ridiculous mind sections. I have not been forced to run along an upside-down road. Houses have remained attached to the ground. The game has concentrated on soldiers, weapons, objectives and a conflict with stakes I can understand.

Most importantly, I am enjoying it.

That does not mean Modern Warfare 4 is mindless. It includes puzzles, exploration and optional objectives, but these elements support the central action instead of replacing it. A puzzle gives me something else to think about for a few minutes. It does not tear apart the world and expect me to admire how strange everything has become.

The side content also appears substantial. If you explore properly and complete the optional missions rather than charging directly towards every main objective, there looks to be enough here for a couple of days of play.

Activision describes the complete campaign as containing 16 missions across the Korean Peninsula and other international locations. Some missions remain tightly directed, while the larger sections provide side objectives, puzzles and equipment to discover.

That balance is what Black Ops 7 lacked. Optional content should reward the player who wants more without obstructing the person who came for the main campaign. It should expand the experience instead of making it feel as though several unrelated game modes have been forced into one package.

The puzzles work because the shooting still matters

There is an important distinction between adding variety and abandoning your identity.

A military campaign can contain puzzles. It can offer exploration, stealth, side missions and moments where firing a weapon is not the immediate solution. Those elements can improve the pacing by giving the action room to breathe.

They work in Modern Warfare 4 because the game eventually returns to what it does best.

You solve something because it helps you progress through a hostile environment. You explore because you may find equipment or another way to approach an objective. You complete a side mission because it contributes to the larger operation.

The activity has a purpose within the world.

The mind-game sections in Black Ops 7 felt different. They existed to be strange. Reality collapsed because the game wanted another excuse to throw bizarre images at the player. Their relationship with the military campaign became increasingly difficult to recognise.

I was not being given more ways to play Call of Duty. I was being prevented from playing Call of Duty until the hallucination ended.

Longer is only better when I want to continue

Campaign length is not everything. A brilliant six-hour game is more valuable than a tedious 20-hour one. Nevertheless, Modern Warfare 4 currently feels more generous because I am choosing to spend time with its optional content.

That choice matters.

When I examine a side area or stop to solve a puzzle, I am extending the campaign because I am interested in what it contains. Black Ops 7 felt longer for the opposite reason. Its worst sections seemed to delay the next enjoyable moment.

One game makes me wonder how much else there is to discover. The other made me wonder how much longer I had to tolerate it.

I may reach the end of Modern Warfare 4 and decide that it has its own collection of problems. There are already moments where the game closely controls where I can move, and a larger mission is not automatically a better one. I will reserve a complete verdict until the credits roll.

Halfway through, however, it has already achieved something Black Ops 7 could not: it makes me want to finish the campaign.

Call of Duty does not need to apologise for itself

Call of Duty became successful because it offered accessible gunplay, dramatic campaigns and spectacular military action. The series has changed considerably, but those foundations still matter.

Experimentation is welcome when it strengthens them. It becomes a problem when developers appear determined to replace them.

Black Ops 7 was not bad because it attempted something unusual. It was bad because its unusual ideas were tedious, intrusive and frequently ridiculous. Its mind-game sections confused visual novelty with good design and treated Call of Duty's core appeal as something too ordinary to sustain a campaign.

Modern Warfare 4 feels better because it is willing to be Call of Duty.

It has weapons, soldiers, puzzles, side missions and large battles. So far, the strange elements have remained under control and the optional content has provided reasons to spend more time in the campaign. It offers variety without demanding that I run through an inverted housing estate.

Perhaps the second half will change my mind. If it does, I will say so when I finish it.

For now, I am simply relieved to be shooting enemies on roads that remain the correct way up.