To throw a grenade you tap and hold the ever present grenade icon on the cluttered UI, drag to where you want to aim, and release.
There are none of the spectacular set pieces the series is known for, just section after section of totally adequate, completely phoned-in shooty shooty action.Īlso, the analogue sticks are too twitchy by default, so you'll spend time lowering the sensitivity until you get things just right.Īnd there are some touchscreen shenanigans thrown in for no discernible reason. You have access to two guns at any one time, you toddle into an area, spot an enemy, tap the left shoulder button to snap to the target, squeeze off fire, rinse, wash, and repeat 'til the credits start rolling. Those experience points have no bearing on the online component of the game.Īs for the down and dirty mechanics of play, this is a post- Modern Warfare game of Call of Duty, and things are as you'd expect. "Oh well" I said to myself, "at least I'll build up loads of XP to carry into the multiplayer". I couldn't push past the second level - no matter how hard I tried - for an entire hour, for example. However, the game attempts to counter this by being brutally unforgiving in certain spots, usually by adding hostages or a timer. It's not difficult in the slightest, missions are short, and if you're a seasoned Call of Duty player, you can probably beat the entire story mode in forty five minutes.
There are Time Trials to try and get a maximum of 3 stars for beating quickly, and a mode in which you attempt to survive increasingly difficult waves of aggressors. As you beat its dozen or so levels on varying difficulties, you build up Campaign XP. That's because Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified sets its sights on a more instantly-rewarding, far shallower single-player experience. They're all implemented simply to serve the purpose of dropping you in an area and asking you to wipe out the enemy. Who knows? Maybe there's some greater canonical tie-in, but taken as a separate title outside of the two home console releases you'd be hard pressed to find anything that even tangentially links the seemingly disparate events that make up Declassified. You're in some snowy research facility! Now you're in a city shooting dudes in suits! Now you're in Afghanistan! "Are these events connected in some way?" you wonder to yourself, as you mow down room after room of identical looking soldiers in drab, lifeless environments. The presentation of their narratives is bewildering, jumping from character to character, not explaining fully where or when they are, or what they're up to in the individual missions - let alone why you should care. If you're really into the fiction of the established Black Ops universe and are looking for more insight into Alex Mason and Frank Woods's past then you're out of luck. You'll need to be the world's biggest fan of the series to derive any enjoyment from this lazy first-person shooter offering. I'm glad we did, because hopefully we'll save a few potential punters from squandering their hard-earned money on this garbage. We had to go out and buy our own copy - such is the entertainment giant's faith in it. We didn't get a review copy of the game in before launch, or even on launch day. Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified is a cynical, half-baked, tired little mess of a game, and Activision knows it.