14 DAY TRIAL // Call of Duty: Black Ops is the new first person shooter from developer Treyarch and publisher Activision Blizzard, allowing the player to experience the covert ops conflicts between the United States and Russia during the era of the Cold War.
Call of Duty knows its linear and the developers know that the only way to deliver linear level after linear level and make the players love them all the same is to cloak their true nature by offering apparent freedom and by designing levels that appear open despite being fully closed.
Perhaps the worst level in Black Ops is the one involving the scientist Clarke and the run around in South Korea, trying to escape hit squads by jumping around from rooftop to rooftop while taking out the bad guys who try to kill you on landing.
The firefights are pretty well designed, with the player paying attention on different levels at the same as he moves ahead relentlessly and the frantic pace repeatedly lead me to making semi blind jumps which lead to my death and much cursing.
Call of Duty: Black Ops has its checkpoints spread out fairly well so you never lose too much play time when dying but in a game where so much freedom is taken away from the player and even driving is handled via button presses it would have been better to have the jumps autodirected to the right landing spot.
The reverse is true in the SR-71 mission, where the player watches over a team and needs to direct a ground team in low visibility.
Here the game offers clear points to where the team operators need to be directed too, despite the fact that the experience would have been much more engaging and thrilling if the checkpoints were not clearly marked and a bit of trial and error came into play.