A giant man played by Michael Rooker engulfed in red mist roars and slams his fists on the deck of the U.S.S. Barack Obama. Meanwhile, a squad of online randos and I jump over brightly colored shockwaves like in a 3D platformer from a bygone era, all while unloading hundreds of magazines into his huge face until he enters a different phase. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a weird one.
It’s no secret the latest Call of Duty is launching into an abnormally difficult climate despite the knockout success that was last year’s Black Ops 6. Xbox has regularly been doing layoffs to keep things afloat as Microsoft demands for better margins to feed an elusive AI god.
Understandably, this has had a negative impact on morale across the company’s gaming division, including Activision’s studios. Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders have also sucked up almost all the air in the online shooter space ahead of Call of Duty’s yearly launch.
For the developers at Treyarch, Raven Software, and the other eight (yes, really) studios credited on this game, it’s a frustrating scenario. There’s no doubt very talented people work on Call of Duty and are often allowed to put out a banger amidst all the corporate chaos and unhealthy deadlines, yet 2025’s Black Ops 7 feels like a downer and a sign of the franchise crumbling under its own weight once again.
A Cobbled-Together Misfire of a Campaign
In spite of wobbly post-launch seasons and an annoying focus on character skins which completely ruined the grounded and gritty mood of the base game, Black Ops 6 felt like a return to form after Vanguard (2021) and the second and third of the freshly rebooted Modern Warfare series. Perhaps the most surprising element in last year’s Call of Duty was how robust and varied the campaign was. From tight set pieces leading into flexible, semi-open bits to experimental missions that leaned on the Black Ops series’ stranger muscles, it was a hell of a good time.
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Black Ops 7, on the other hand, feels like the opposite and almost made me wish they’d dropped the idea of doing a campaign this year altogether. Modern Warfare III (2019) already struggled on this front due to a short development cycle, and often came across as the designers forcing chunks of open Warzone maps into paper-thin mission layouts that were guided by equally meager narrative beats.
Black Ops 7 picks up the stories from II and 6, but its co-op campaign doesn’t do the plot justice.
Activision
Regardless, there were some highlights of Call of Duty doing its thing. In Black Ops 7, there’s only a barrage of weapon level-ups, perks, and open sections that work well enough in the unexpected Endgame mode, but not during its five-hour-ish storyline set in 2035 (a decade after Black Ops II (2012).
Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) is the scenery-chewing villain this time around. A surprising bit of casting, but one that mostly pays off, especially when you realize how dull David Mason (Milo Ventimiglia) and his team are. Sure, Michael Rooker gets to have over-the-top fun as Mike Harper, but the writing doesn’t help.
Any and all development of the psychological warfare-oriented story and its characters is tied to Avalon and The Guild’s mysterious biological weapon, all while Black Ops’ recurring villain Raul Menéndez seemingly returns from the dead. You’ll also be fighting surreal monsters and zombies more often than anyone expected.
Black Ops 7 is more outlandish than grounded, despite it being a military shooter.
Activision
The campaign briefly touches on the ideas of the world surrendering its security of a tech giant and the use of deepfakes for nefarious purposes, yet they’re footnotes on its pages, with the script solely existing to guide players from one psychedelic scenario to the next. In some cases, the linear sections are convincing enough, but for the most part, Black Ops 7 feels like a mediocre looter shooter in structure and moment-to-moment gameplay. Furthermore, the campaign often runs into network issues that aren’t present in other modes even if the graphical performance stays strong across the board.
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Co-op Players Are the Main Target This Year
Black Ops 7 is no doubt “the biggest Black Ops ever,” as the marketing has repeated over and over again, but that translates into a game that’s simply spread too thin. Time was obviously an issue while developing this entry, and thus the solution was to push out an absurd amount of reheated content and modes, even if that affected the campaign’s integrity (and identity). If you dislike bullet sponges and health bars on top of enemy NPCs, I have bad news for you.
Four-player co-op is an enticing idea on paper, but when there’s very little difference between the campaign and its replayable 32-player PvE (player vs. environment), extraction-inspired Endgame mode due to the heavy recycling of maps, enemies, assets, and progression systems, you start to wonder about where the limit is on having too much content.
Cooperative multiplayer takes over the campaign, but isn’t up to snuff with the actual competitive mode.
Activision
Black Ops 7’s central co-op experience feels, above all, like a game obsessed with fighting for the players’ undivided attention, and it goes about doing so by showering them in unlocks, level-ups, and different ways to play what ultimately is the same stuff. I don’t mind the new gameplay ideas explored in Endgame and how it smartly reuses past content, but this approach is awful as a substitute for an actual campaign inspired by Michael Bay, Peter Berg, and other big action filmmakers.
The fan-favorite Zombies part of the package fares much better, mainly because it stays on its lane and only iterates on what was working fine in Black Ops 6 and past winners from Treyarch. It could be argued the scope of ‘Ashes of the Damned’ could scare away diehards looking for more restrained co-op runs, but round-based Survival trips to the Vandorn Farm map perfectly capture the pacing and vibes of the older Zombies modes.
GobbleGums, drinks that grant permanent perks, weapon upgrades, mysterious chests, and effects are all back, making each run an absolute blast of old-fashioned co-op fun that feels less haphazardly thrown together than the campaign and its Endgame.
Competitive Multiplayer Stays Afloat by Inertia
Of course, as generous as the co-op offerings are this time around, the competitive multiplayer remains the main course and the reason why Call of Duty veterans are likely to check Black Ops 7 out via a Game Pass subscription at the very least. Six years into the post-Modern Warfare refresh, it’d be shocking to get a straight-up bad core multiplayer, and Treyarch played things here to retain all the positives of last year’s iteration while also making a stronger effort with the 16 maps available at launch, at least when it comes to the 6v6 playlists.
The classic multiplayer mode is the best part of the package, but still falls short of last year’s Black Ops 6.
Activision
There’s also a 20v20 mode called Skirmish that exists halfway between a Warzone experience and the respawn-based core multiplayer, with players literally flying back into the action every time they fall in battle, which makes for quite chaotic matches. It does a better job of adjusting large-scale battles to Call of Duty’s frenetic loop than the Modern Warfare series’ Ground War mode, but it’s hard to see the bulk of the player base treating it as more than a curiosity, especially when the resolution is noticeably blurry if you’re on the (highly recommend) 120Hz mode on console.
By and large, Black Ops 7 plays exactly like 6, unless you consider the addition of a second jump after touching vertical surfaces a major shake-up; neither the co-op content nor the competitive multiplayer are readjusted to make the extra movement options play a role in the average gunfight, only adding some traversal bits to the overarching level design that wouldn’t be there otherwise.
The omnimovement and gunplay feel as good as last year, but the gameplay is otherwise Black Ops II-flavored Black Ops 6, which isn’t a bad thing, but highlights how not even a return to a futuristic setting can substantially alter the design tenets established in 2019.
I’m more positive about the brilliant decision to make all the progression shared across all modes. This means that players who are into the grind and burning through prestiges and camo challenges (among many other unlockables) won’t have to go through every mode to level up weapons, common equipment, and whatnot.
Fan-favorite Zombies campaign is another bright spot, and shares progression with the other modes.
Activision
This also affects career level; you may come out of the campaign, a few Endgame rounds, and the Zombies mode more than halfway through the progression track traditionally limited to the competitive multiplayer, with all the relevant guns, perks, and gadgets unlocked. Equipment, scorestreaks, and deployables’ overclocks (a new feature providing alternative upgrade options) can also be gained by leveling up all over the place.
Compromises and Muddled Ambitions
As you can surely tell by now, Black Ops 7 is an ambitious but disorganized game; the logical endpoint of taking all the manpower and resources of ten studios to force them into yearly releases. The current cycle means that we get a winner every few years — as long as you’re into Call of Duty’s increasingly off-putting brand of market-tested jingoism. The rest of the time, players should be prepared for misfires such as this one; the production values are there, but the cohesive creative vision isn’t.
Even if we set aside all the real-life drama surrounding Xbox and Microsoft’s corporate shortcomings, we’re looking at a product that’s more compromised than 2023’s Modern Warfare III in new (but unsurprising) ways, such as filling both multiplayer progression and background art across most levels with AI slop. This isn’t only an insult to every artist and developer involved in the making of each Call of Duty, but also to anyone paying for a premium release that’s chock-full of microtransactions to boot.
To see one of the biggest entertainment franchises of all time cutting corners so egregiously is frankly embarrassing and feels like a death sentence as we move into the post-launch cycle when Black Ops 7 was already fighting an uphill battle with the public opinion.
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This game is a hard sell for a myriad of reasons, but there was always the chance of Activision pulling a second hat-trick this year. Instead, we’ve received a Call of Duty entry that can safely be skipped even if the basics are covered decently enough. There are fantastic shooter alternatives this year and far better Call of Duty games still kicking.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is out now for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. It’s also available with an Xbox Game Pass subscription.
