Now, as you may have gathered from the various gaming news websites, Black Ops is the new Call of Duty game, developed by Treyarch, due to hit store shelves on November 9th later this year. If you've been hiding in a cave in a remote part of the world then I could understand this being news to you, however if you are a normal, news-following gamer then you will most likely know this nugget of information. You might be wondering what to expect from this positively anonymously titled Call of Duty game. It get's more interesting after the jump!


It seems Treyarch have decided that they've pretty much exhausted the World War II genre of gaming. After milking the proverbial gaming cow for all it's worth in their previous title World at War; Black Ops will be set in the Cold War era and beyond, promising battles across the globe stretching from Vietnam to Russia. The Call of Duty games are renowned for their scripted, movie-like sequences and for Black Ops the CoD formula has not been altered in any way. Treyarch have promised Black Ops to be very character-driven, and will be the first Call of Duty game to have the protagonist actually speaking from a first-person perspective.

Black Ops witnesses the evolution of the Special Forces, and players can expect to experience various covert, secret operations spanning decades apart, with unconventional weaponry - including a scoped crossbow for players to use. The fact that Black Ops spans so much time has me worried, I'm worried because the Single Player campaign will have to be easy to follow and not convoluted and with so much skipping forward and backward it could end up being a Lost-esque affair with the characters jumping through time. Treyarch will find it difficult to hold the average gamers' attention if this is the case, and I hope it does not fall prey to several gaps in the storyline as they jump from the war in Vietnam to, say, a covert op in Russia. Only time will tell.

The game was recently shown to a variety of gaming journalists from the big gaming magazines. One of the levels has you manning a SR-71 high altitude reconnaissance craft. It echoes of the AC-130 missions as you look through a grainy, black and white screen at the figures down below. Another sequence shown was the player working their way down a mountainside (sound familiar?) towards a military base in a canyon of ice and rock. It looks to be an exciting affair, as you're given the aforementioned scoped crossbow, you can approach the military base two ways. You can either pick them off stealthily or go for all out explosions with explosive tipped crossbows. I'm looking forward to how this particular part plays. It could go very well, but similarly it could just feel same-y and feel too familiar.

The second sequence shown takes part in Hue City, Vietnam. As you rappel from a helicopter, it gets a direct hit and you find yourself landing in a nearby office building. What follows is a precisely scripted sequence as you make your way through the burning building, with plenty of visceral, grisly encounters, locals fleeing for their lives, people dieing all around you. As you go through, enemies immediately poke out from corners and try to attack you. It all seems really exciting, and very much scripted, as we've come to expect from this genre. You are given a shotgun which fires napalm-type charges, and can take out groups of enemies in a single hit - that sounds absolutely bad-ass to me. Another note to add is they have kept in the particularly bloody, icky parts from World at War, which in my opinion is a plus, as it conveys the seriousness of war rather than making it arcade-like.

I really like how they are giving the guns elemental tweaks and hope they can include electric shock type bullets as well. This writer would be brimming with anticipation if you could use this type of elemental shotgun in the multiplayer. Ah, multiplayer, that is one thing which is yet to be shown, but let's hope it's as fast paced and brilliantly made as Modern Warfare's multiplayer was. Ever since Call Of Duty 4, it has not been beaten, and I hope CoD: BO can surpass it. One thing I will credit Treyarch of doing well is creating vast, sprawling maps for vehicular use as well as running around in. If they could just add more vehicles, like in BFBC2, they could be onto a winning formula. According to the Call of Duty wiki, they have left out Commando.

All I can say is, watch this space, people, they've at least done one thing right.