Another year, another Call of Duty game. This year, Call of Duty Black Ops 3 is taking the reign of Activision’s Call of Duty series. Created by Treyarch, BO3 strays from the basic run and gun gameplay of past games, and is closer to the exoskeleton gameplay of Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, the previous title before BO3. A game’s gameplay defines much of the experience of many of the game’s modes, often making or breaking how fun or frustrating a game type may be. Before any of the other game types, let’s talk about the campaign first.

Spoilers ahead

Although most players usually skip the campaign mode, many should reconsider doing so with this campaign. The story mode takes RPG (role playing game) aspects into the gameplay, something previous CoD games have tried to do. Before every mission, the player can modify his/her weapons and classes, changing what attachments they may want to add on guns or what grenades to take.

The player may also modify his exo-suit to focus on one of three main soldier classes. Of the three classes, I found the Control class (hacking) one to be the most useful, as many of the enemies the player faces are robots and are susceptible to the Control class. Even the human enemies can be defeated with the hacking class, as the player can hack an enemy’s exosuit to bend in erratic directions and breaking the wearer’s bones, disabling them from any more combat. The Chaos class is fun, yet lacks the efficiency of the Control class. The cooldowns on the Chaos class seem to take longer than they should, and many times I found myself spamming the ability buttons to no avail. The Martial class focuses less on hacking and destroying from a distance, but more on getting up close and personal with the enemy. Coupled with smokescreen and invisibility abilities, I feel this class might be the best for the game’s harder difficulties. The class you choose may change some dialogue within a mission, with your teammates telling you to hack a drone to use it against the enemies. You wouldn’t be able to hack if you had the Chaos class, for example, and they likewise wouldn’t tell you to hack it. But enough of the classes, now onto the actual story.

Although not as good as Black Ops 2’s campaign, Black Ops 3’s campaign deserves a shot. Black Ops 3’s campaign follows a soldier and his partner as they solve a mystery as to why a friendly squad has gone AWOL. The basic plot of the story seems simple enough, but gets stranger as the story progresses. The player starts losing his mind, and coupled with cybernetic enhancements, things get strange. I won’t talk too much on the ending of the story, but I can say that this campaign has managed to keep me entertained longer than the average Call of Duty. And if you beat the campaign, you unlock an alternative Zombies mode, called Nightmare, where the player goes through the campaign’s locations killing zombies this time.

Of course, the campaign isn’t perfect, and has its share of problems. I felt a bit bored with the scenery, which is strange for a CoD game. I have never had this problem with Call of Duty games before, but in this game all of the action takes place in either Egypt or Singapore, with very few variables in between (a little of Sweden). Many missions looked the same because of this, and when there wasn’t dialogue or action I noticed this.

Some of the relationships between characters also feel a bit forced (Rachel and the player, for example). Some dialogue or action seems a bit out of place, with characters going out of their way and nearly dying to save a person they barely know.That doesn’t make the campaign any less fun, and the digital world sequences were truly fun.

Other than that, there isn’t too much wrong with the campaign. If you have time on your hands and want more of Call of Duty Black Ops 3, then I recommend playing the campaign. But I recommend another game type more than campaign, and that would be Zombies.

Zombies in BO3 consists of multiple maps and gametypes right out of launch. There is the normal Zombie mode we know and love with two maps, Shadows of Evil and The Giant (if you own the season pass or bought the Deluxe edition). They are what you would expect from Zombies, and are both fun, with Shadows of Evil having more storyline based action and The Giant focusing more on survival. There are new perks to be found, new weapons, and the addition of Gobblegum (think smaller perks) that can be bought and used at will from Gobblegum machines. The other Zombie game types are Dead Ops Arcade 2 (which is actually an Easter Egg) and Nightmare mode. Dead Ops 2 is a top-down shooter where the player must kill hordes of zombies (surprise!) and survive as long as possible while chasing a cybernetic gorilla (don’t ask me why, but Dead Ops attempts to imitate older arcade games of the 90’s, so that might be where Treyarch got their inspiration from). Nightmare mode, as I said earlier, is basically the campaign, modified with a stranger storyline and many enemies have been replaced with zombies.

Out of all these options, Shadows of Evil and The Giant are still my favorite maps. They have the classic Zombies feel to them, and they are definitely worth spending time on. The others are good pastimes, yet the classics are where Zombies truly shine. But even then, Zombies is not the place where Call of Duty shines the most. That would be Multiplayer.

Multiplayer is what defines Call of Duty. Any CoD game can exist without Zombies, or even a campaign, but for a CoD game to not have Multiplayer is unheard of. Since BO3’s movement system is akin to that of Advanced Warfare, movement is fluid, and the player is constantly running and gunning. The lift ability players have is not as overpowered as Advanced Warfare’s, and usually won’t save your life, but is enough to create awesome set pieces where a person guns down two enemies with one sniper shot, jump on the wall and do a 360 “noscope.” Try doing that in other Call of Duty games.

The basic game types are all back, with few new additions, and the pick ten system returns for a player’s class. While most of my issues with the multiplayer are certain overpowered guns (cough cough, most of the assault rifles) and certain killstreaks (cough cough, sentry gun on Nuketown), the multiplayer seems relatively balanced. There are very few guns that aren’t good, and everyone having the same level of overpoweredness seems to somehow balance the game.

All in all, BO3’s multiplayer is very enjoyable, and possibly one of the best Call of Duty multiplayers up to date. It has very few bugs that take away player enjoyment and seems to play better than recent CoDs. Who knows, maybe Black Ops 3 is just what Call of Duty needed to revive the series.

9.25/10.