Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review: Unlucky Number Seven

If you’ve spent any time on gaming forums or subreddits in the past couple of years, you’ve likely come across a fair share of detractors who have nothing but complaints to levy against the Call of Duty franchise. And to be fair, some of those criticisms are perfectly valid. For those of us who’ve been playing the series on and off for the past 20-plus years, the newer entries can be a bit of a difficult pill to swallow. Live-service games are big business after all, and it was only a matter of time until gaming’s FPS giant would fully embrace it, with enough battle passes, weapon skins, and cosmetics to make your head spin. As it turns out, war sometimes changes.

To be clear, my issues with Black Ops 7 don’t lie in its business model or shift away from the franchise’s more grounded roots. After all, each mainline release has always come jam-packed with enough content to please almost everyone, to the point where you could simply engage with your favorite modes and ignore the rest. Unfortunately, some folks will be left behind this year.

There’s no beating around the bush — Black Ops 7’s campaign is the weakest we’ve seen in years. For a franchise that essentially defined a unique spin on the first-person cinematic shooter, with each built upon high-octane set pieces from nuclear detonations to full-scale assaults on cities, Black Ops 7’s campaign feels bombastic and empty in comparison. A lot of that can be chalked up to the fact that while the story can be enjoyed solo, it’s very clear that developer Treyarch intends for it to be enjoyed co-operatively, to the point where it’s labelled as a co-op campaign in the game’s main menu.

As a result, you can wave goodbye to tightly choreographed setpieces or tense stealth sections that can go sideways in an instant. To accommodate an increased player count, the game’s dozen or so missions are instead centered around plenty of explosions, countless waves of enemies (with health bars and armored variants to boot), and a diminished focus on dialogue. One also can’t help but feel that the campaign, in particular, suffered from having to meet the deadlines of the ever-demanding yearly release cycle. There are no selectable difficulty options (with enemy scaling now based on player count), and even when playing solo, you won’t be accompanied by AI-controlled squad mates, despite their voiceovers still being present.

To its credit, the story is filled with some dreamlike (or nightmarish, depending on your perspective) sequences that cherry-pick the best moments from Black Ops history and reimagine them for a new era (all thanks to a few plot devices and a hallucinogenic drug that would make Scarecrow giddy with excitement), attempting to actually remember every callback and reference to the series’ history is an exercise that most won’t be fit to complete. While revisiting the Battle of Los Angeles and Vortuka Prison were fun nostalgia trips on their own, the rest of the story is largely forgettable and borderline nonsense. It all culminates with Endgame, a replayable, open-world mission that has you drop into the city of Avalon, complete objectives, rack up XP, and then exfil before you (and presumably, your squad) is taken out. It’s arguably the most interesting wrinkle Black Ops 7’s campaign has to offer, but for those who are looking for a more traditional single-player mode, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

For those of you who are solely interested in online multiplayer, there’s a lot more in store for you, even if what’s on offer is rather familiar at this point. Two new modes are now available. Overload, a reimagining of Uplink that debuted a decade or so ago, has teams competing for a single Overload device while being tasked with delivering it to a designated area. Skirmish is a bit more interesting, upping the player count to 20v20 and tasking teams with completing a variety of objectives over a larger map (spoiler alert: each one is set in Avalon). Sadly, there are only two such maps available at launch, but I imagine this number will grow over time.

As is tradition, Zombies rounds out the modes on offer, but at this point, you already know if you’ll invest your time into it. I won’t even try to weigh in on the constantly expanding storyline that has become more convoluted than the Metal Gear franchise, but for those who enjoy unlocking easter eggs or breaking your own record for reaching the highest round possible, you’ll be glad to know that the one map currently on offer (Ashes of the Damned), is the largest one ever created.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review: Final Verdict

While there’s plenty of content on offer, Black Ops 7’s well-executed (if not overly familiar) multiplayer and Zombies modes are eclipsed by a truly baffling, nonsensical campaign. Here’s hoping that 2026’s Call of Duty manages to find its footing again and, hopefully, stick the landing.

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