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.
The fourth or fifth mission of Call of Duty: Black Ops moves the action to a launch site where the main character needs to take out a team of scientists working on the prototype of a Soviet ballistic missile and the rocket itself.
The level is well designed and varied but underscores one of the biggest problems with this title, in particular, and with the first person shooter genre, in general.
The player gets less and less to do with each new iteration of Call of Duty and, it seems, the relaunched Medal of Honor.
I already mentioned the fact that you need to wait on others to open doors but the space launch mission adds quite a few more infractions to the list.
At one point the game forces the player to stand in place when a convoy passes, instead of simply allowing him to make a mistake and then learn that one should have stayed in place instead of moving.
Then the main character gets handed down a binocular and the game adds insult to injury by not allowing the player to actually determine what he is looking at.
Instead the game automatically follows a pre set path in order to allow a mini cutscene that focuses on a mission critical character.
And, further down the line, what could have become a simple yet interesting sneaking section turns into a simple follow the leader bit and the game even takes away from the gamer the simple choice of where to hide a body.
These all could seem like small things but they are symptoms of a disease that will soon see the player relegated to just pushing the fire button while Call of Duty takes over the task of aiming for him and moving him around the scenery.