Black Ops 2 - Game Review

Welcome to the very first post on my new games review blog. To get the ball rolling I thought I would start with a recent release and arguably one of the biggest releases of the year. As many of you will know Call of Duty Black Ops 2 has three modes; Mulitplayer, Campaign and Zombies, in this review I will take each mode into account  before coming to a conclusion. Firstly I'll start with the campaign, In general terms Black Ops 2's campaign is cut from the same cloth as previous Call of Duty titles in that it follows a linear pathway, taking you from battlefield to battlefield. However there is one major difference in comparison to previous titles, and that is there are 6 possible outcomes to the story. As you progress through the story the way in which you complete the missions as well as how you confront decisions given to you throughout the campaign will effect the way the game ends, and the closing cinematics will show this. In terms of a Call of Duty game, this is new ground, even though it has been done to an extent by other games such as Mass Effect 2 for example. Added to the usual array of single player missions are what I like to call the 'spec ops' missions. These are where you take control of squads to generally defend certain objectives from enemy forces. Although these aren't compulsory it is advised to complete them as they do contribute to the story in the end, as well as certain achievements. Compared to Modern Warfare 3, the campaign in Black Ops 2 felt more exciting for me, with new guns, equipment and gadgets, plus the excellent voice acting from Michael Rooker (Merle in AMC's The Walking Dead). In terms of difficulty, I have always considered the Veteran difficulty in Treyarch's Call of Duty games to be harder than that of Infinity Ward's. As with most games I would advise playing on a lower difficulty first to get a feel of the campaign before replaying on Hardcore or Veteran. One last note on the Campaign is the introduction of Challenges. There are 10 challenges to complete per level, ranging from kills with certain weapons to collecting all the intel, these are a nice bonus if your looking to compete with friends for mission scores or if your looking to get 1000 gamerscore from Black Ops 2.
Moving on to the Multiplayer, all the usual suspects have returned (Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination etc.) but Treyarch also brings back the party game modes (Gun Game, Sticks and Stones, One in the Barrel) as well as Kill Confirmed and introduces Hardpoint. With the death of kill streaks, Treyarch replaces them with a new system called Scorestreaks, to get these you can do pretty much anything from assisting and killing to capturing or defending objectives. However this does not stop some players from camping on all game modes, I find this lessens the enjoyment of an objective based game such as Domination as some team members ignore the objectives overall.
Lastly the Zombies mode has built upon previous Treyarch installments of Zombies. You can still play the traditional survival mode if that's all that you desire, but if your wanting something a bit different I would suggest Tranzit. After several hours of playing Zombies, I grew to love the added features of Tranzit and of course the new Zombies easter egg. In Tranzit you and up to 3 others can go from one area to the next via a Bus or if your feeling adventurous you can venture into the mists by foot, just be sure if you take this path to watch out for the Denzines of the Forest that jump on your face (5 knife strikes will knock it off or 1 strike from the Galvaknuckles.)
As an overall game, Black Ops 2's Campaign is solid, and enjoyable, the new Zombies mode is enjoyable, introducing new things, whilst keeping the same round by round format, finally the Multiplayer is similar and the scorestreaks help balance things a bit, however this does solve the key issues of campers and quick scopers.
Total Score: 9/10