Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 campaign review – even worse than you heard

Ahead of our full review, we dive into the story campaign of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 and discover a new low for the franchise. 

You may have heard already, but Activision doesn’t often send out review codes ahead of time for Call Of Duty. As the biggest-selling gaming franchise in the world it doesn’t need to, but it means we’re playing the latest entry, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 at the same time as everyone else and word has already got out that the four hour long campaign is maybe not the best the series has ever seen.

Our scored review will arrive later this week, once we’ve had a chance to play more of the multiplayer and Zombies, but we have finished the campaign already – so we can at least offer our full impressions on one corner of the Black Ops 7 suite. 

Call Of Duty campaigns might be the most inconsequential part of the package (if you look at the trophy unlock percentages, only a slim minority bother to complete them), but they’re still the tone-setter for the whole game. Which is a bit of a problem when the experience is as bad as Black Ops 7.

There was a time when the campaigns for Call Of Duty were cutting edge. The one for the original Modern Warfare is one of the most influential single-player experiences in video game history, but that was almost 20 years ago now and while the series’ popularity hasn’t waned its storytelling ambitions certainly have.

The Call Of Duty franchise has settled into a predictable, if still relatively enjoyable, bombastic groove, which feels closer to a Mission: Impossible movie – something that last year’s entry, Black Ops 6, nailed to a tee with casino shootouts and bike chases from a Bill Clinton gala. 

They’re easily disregarded as dumb thrills, but for the most part, they’re well designed and accomplished. If we’re starting to sound misty-eyed over campaigns of yore, it’s because the one in Black Ops 7 will make you want to bury your head in the past. Call Of Duty has had a few stinkers over the years, such as Black Ops 3 and 2023’s Modern Warfare 3, but this might eclipse them both as one of the worst campaigns in the series’ history.

In many ways, the Black Ops 7 campaign combines the worst design choices from those two games. Like Black Ops 3, you have the novelty of a co-op campaign for up to four players, along with open-ish levels set in the Avalon map (launching for Warzone next year) – reminiscent of the lazy ‘open combat’ missions, using recycled Warzone assets, from Modern Warfare 3. 

The campaign oscillates between these Avalon-based missions and the linear, curated levels you’d normally get from a Call Of Duty campaign. Realistically, of all 11 missions, only six actually feel like handcrafted experiences – with the rest coming off as cheap padding to artificially stretch out the length. 

This wouldn’t be too offensive if those six levels were dynamite, but even those largely fail to live up to what’s come before. Set in 2035, the campaign is pitched as a sequel to Black Ops 2, as returning protagonist David Mason leads a specialist unit to investigate the apparent return of a deceased terrorist.

A short laboratory infiltration later, however, and a hallucinogenic toxin is unleashed across Avalon, which causes the group to experience (very conveniently, for the co-op setup) shared distortions of reality. 

This basically allows the designers to inject, without much care or thought, try-hard ‘trippy’ sequences whenever the feeling takes them. You’ll be barrelling through encounters in a tropical jungle, only for the terrain to shift dramatically to stacks of blackened shipping containers littered with mutant spiders.

The aforementioned laboratory outbreak morphs into an actually-quite-fun jump across floating islands as giant machetes fall from the sky, while a later boss sees one of your teammates blown up to a Godzilla-sized scale, as you avoid his giant ground slaps and flaming projectiles, like a showdown pulled from Devil May Cry. 

The Black Ops branch of Call Of Duty has pulled off similar experimental tricks before, but whereas those felt earned and intentionally placed for some narrative payoff, Black Ops 7 doles out these sequences ad nauseum to where it all becomes incomprehensible drivel.

Often, in the space of one level, you’ll be fighting soldiers, robots, zombies, poisonous flying insects, and super-powered beings who can teleport across the field – and while this might sound fun on paper, the incoherent carelessness reeks of cobbled together desperation.

Much like the levels themselves, the co-op implementation feels bolted-on at the last minute. You can play through the campaign solo but, bizarrely, you won’t have any AI squad mates if you do so, leaving you to wander the levels alone despite hearing their voices on comms and seeing them in cut scenes.

If you do squad up with others, though, the levels rarely ever lean into co-op coordination and, in some cases, it’s possible to miss entire sequences if one teammate pulls too far ahead and triggers a scripted event. 

In one instance, we climbed atop a flying jet as the mission required, expecting some kind of level-gating as the other players caught up behind. Instead, it took off and we were left alone to protect the gunship from enemies atop nearby buildings, as the other players simply ran across the Avalon map – missing the whole sequence – to the next mission marker. 

There are baffling design decisions throughout. A dreadful hacking mini-game is inexplicably crow-barred into the experience, despite being a lesser version of the same Bioshock pipe hacker from nearly 20 years ago. Only one person can use these hacking stations at one time, and while they are occasionally effective at creating tension, as others fight off enemy waves, they mostly amount to either pointlessly easy fluff or laborious momentum killers.

If the campaign already felt like a hodgepodge, the concluding ‘Endgame’ provides a baffling PvE end to the whole experience. After beating all 11 missions, you’re thrown onto the full Avalon map with up to 32 players, in what is essentially an extraction mode.

In squads of four, you roam the map and complete objectives – such as clearing outposts or tackling mini-bosses – to boost your combat rank and acquire skills, so you can access tougher areas with greater rewards. If you manage to escape through one of the dropships across the map before the time runs out, you maintain your combat rank for the next round. 

The Endgame is competent in isolation, but it only reinforces how pointless the preceding four hours are and, by extension, why they are so sloppily assembled. The entire campaign is a smoke and mirrors stealth-launch for a new multiplayer mode.

It could have been advertised as a separate entity in the Call Of Duty suite from the beginning and, post-Arc Raiders, been welcomed with open arms, but by packaging it in this way, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’ve been duped into playing something you didn’t sign up for. 

There have been bad Call Of Duty campaigns in the past, but we’ve never felt simultaneoulsly insulted, cheated, and aggravated by one before. Black Ops 7’s opening note ticks all of these boxes, and while multiplayer and Zombies might pick up the slack, the overall first impression is, regrettably, pure codswallop. 

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