What if Call of Duty was different?This appears to be the defining question informing the direction of developer Treyarch’s latest, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. While large portions of the design conform to the tenets established by prior iterations of the franchise, the unparalleled wealth of gameplay options and brilliant twists on the formula have shaped Black Ops II into the most ambitious and exciting Call of Duty ever made. It occasionally feels like the team might have strayed into territory they’re not quite masters of, but significant tweaks to the multiplayer loadout system, as well as the realization of player agency in the campaign, make this far more than “just another Call of Duty.” This is an evolution.

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You Can Shape It, but This Story Isn’t About the Hero

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Take Your Class and Love it

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It’s Time to Use Your Braaaiinssss

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Which Platform Should You Play?

The campaign narrative jumps between various characters’ perspectives and also in time. The Cold War-era missions follows characters such as Alex Mason and Sgt. Frank Woods from the first Black Ops, while the 2025 missions follow Alex’s son, David. All of these soldiers’ fates are intertwined with the villain, Raul Menendez, and his organization Cordis Die. Menendez is the sort of villain you just can’t seem to kill and, consequently, who knows how to hold a grudge. Thing is, he’s not your typical, “I’m evil cause I do bad things,” bad guy. Menendez is a tragic character, a product of imperialist nations’ meddling during the Cold War and a survivor of some truly traumatic experiences.The story successfully casts Menendez in a light where I’m still not sure how I feel about him. At times I wanted him dead, while at others I felt like he had a right to want revenge. Hell, I even vacillate between agreeing with his end goals. Like the film Inglourious Basterds, Black Ops II becomes less about you and the “good” guys, and more about the motivations and perspective of the villain. The very fact that I’m still thinking about how the story played out -- something unprecedented in a Call of Duty campaign -- is a testament to the strength of the writing.A great narrative already makes Black Ops II stand out in the pantheon of Call of Duty campaigns, but where it really sets itself apart is the addition of player choice and consequence. Moments and devices that would otherwise seem irrelevant -- like whether you find all of the intel in a level or choose to shoot someone -- can come back to haunt you, hurt you or help you. Failing objectives might result in new or more challenging missions rather than a restart screen. It’s a brilliant riff on the traditional Call of Duty campaign design, and, combined with the additional cutscenes that flesh out the story, creates a narrative worth replaying just to see the wildly different moments and endings. Most importantly, choice makes you apart of what you play; it’s not just a story, it’s your story. I may not have found the ending of my first playthrough satisfying because terrible things happened, but I appreciated that it was a direct byproduct of my actions.The effects of your choices are often evidenced in the new Strike Force missions, shorter objectives which give you control over a group of soldiers and various drones. Sometimes these objectives are a result of your decisions and performance, and they tend to have tangible effects on the outcome of your story. These tasks are worth playing because of their crucial role in the creation of your story, but the limited command controls make them less exciting. You can order your troops around the map from a strategic overhead view or via the usual first-person control, though neither is as tactical as intended. You can’t rally soldiers on your position, and your AI allies will rush to die. Each objective essentially comes down to ordering my troops to move from point to point as a huge group while I single-handedly save the mission by taking direct control and fight a horde of foes. The importance of Strike Force’s outcome adds tension and stress to the action, but the ineffective input and inept allies create an unnecessary challenge that compromises its potential success.Shooting is as fun and precise as ever, and alongside the abundance of gigantic explosions, vehicle missions and intense firefights, it feels like the closest thing most of us will ever get to starring in an action film. In that sense, Black Ops II is the classic Call of Duty formula at its best, with an important, defining difference: The emphasis on drone warfare, the exotic-but-grounded weaponry and the attention to detail in the believably high-tech signage and architecture makes Blacks Op II feel strikingly plausible even when it strays into non-historical settings.The team at Treyarch brings a bit of the multiplayer loadout flavor to the campaign as well. Before each mission you can now customize your character’s weapons (restrictions apply to make sure you’re not using a future weapon in the past, for instance), accessories and even give them perks. Every level also has challenges associated with it, and you can scope out the leaderboards to see how you stand up to your buddies. These are small details, but they’re important because they layer on another reason to replay the stages. If for some bizarre reason the narrative doesn’t grab you, then you still have lots of additional goals to try and achieve that are decidedly more “gamey.”While not as big of a departure in structure as Treyarch’s single-player, Black Ops II’s multiplayer dares to defy the modus operandi, and provides a number of new options and modes that make it more engrossing than what’s come before.Call of Duty has shaped the way other shooters present class and loadout designs for years, and Treyarch successfully redefines the standard with the Pick 10 system. The hook of Pick 10 comes from the ability to defy the loadout rules. Each attachment, weapon, grenade or perk counts as one of your ten points, and you can swap them out at will to create a huge number of combinations. Treyarch has also added in Wild Cards, which allow you to spend additional points to break even more rules, like equipping two primary weapons or up to six perks. Pick 10 allows the creation of the most specifically tuned classes in any shooter ever. You want to have a soldier with a pistol, four perks and two throwing axes? Do it. Maybe you want to snap three attachments to a LMG, ditching your grenades to give yourself additional perks or a badass secondary weapon for close quarters combat -- you can do that too. Pick 10 accomplishes something I didn’t even realize I wanted: For Create a Class to be as exciting and enticing as it was when I first popped in the original Modern Warfare. I don’t just experiment because I want to create a loadout perfectly tailored to a specific mode, but because it’s a genuinely fun and intuitive system to use.A number of other smaller design tweaks highlight the clever design of class creation in Black Ops II. For instance perks now only affect your character, leaving it to the attachments system to affect your weapon. Thus if you want to do something like fast reload, which will make longtime players look for the Sleight of Hand perk, you’ll need to hook up your weapon with a fast clip attachment. The Kill Streak system has also been wisely replaced by Score Streaks, making every match less about how many kills and in what consecutive order you get them in, and more about doing whatever nets you the highest score. This accomplishes a majorly important feat: it makes every game less about your Kill / Death ratio. Sure, it still won’t keep people from obsessing over it, but if you want to get it higher you’re going to need to help with objectives.While I appreciate the rush that leveling up and unlocking items provides, it always felt strange to reward you with a stat reset after hitting the cap and Prestiging. Apparently some wise people at Treyarch agreed. Unlike previous games, after each of the 10 levels of Prestige you won’t have your stats reset, but instead continue your weapon experience and challenge progress and earn even more rewards. For starters you now get a token that allows you to unlock any item regardless of its level requirement, forever. In addition you also get a Prestige Token that nets you either an additional Create a Class slot, a refund on all unlock tokens you’ve spent during your progress to date, or the more traditional character wipe that resets all your stats. This completely changes my attitude towards Prestiging, and makes it something I actually want to do.As for modes, we get the time-tested classics TDM, CTF, Search and Destroy, etc., as well as some variations that keep multiplayer from feeling like a simple rehash. First there’s Hardpoint, a version of Halo’s Crazy King mode. You battle to capture specific points, holding them for as long as you can to rack up points. It’s not exactly original, but the way it focuses the fight around specific points stands as a perfect example of how new modes can make specific Score Streaks and loadouts more viable (Take the Defender Score Streak on Hardpoint, you can thank me later). Another excellent addition to multiplayer is the option for multi-team battles. Returning modes like Kill Confirmed are a lot more interesting with four teams of three, and this option breathes a bit of new life into modes we’ve all played to death. And of course you can still play these in four player local split-screen play, or take two people and go online.For all the years Call of Duty’s been around, though, it’s never quite managed to make it easy for new players to get into the experience right out of the gate. You pretty much jumped in right after campaign and started the level grind alongside players who have the skill of cyborg ninjas, which isn’t exactly a fun introduction. Treyarch’s changed this in a couple of important ways with Black Ops II, though, starting with Combat Training. From levels 1-10, new Call of Duty players can join others in battles against bots. After 10 you can still fight bots, but you’ll only ever earn half the experience, ensuring no one uses this to level easily, but also keeping you from feeling forced to join public games to proceed. If all you ever want to do is smash bots with your buddies, you can create Custom games and fill them out with AI opponents, tweaking everything from the victory conditions to the player health to the amount of items and classes people can take in their loadouts. There’s also a number of Party Game options, which still net you experience, and allow you to change up multiplayer pacing with sillier game modes like Sticks and Stones (crossbows, throwing axes and ballistic knives only) and One in the Chamber (your gun has only one bullet until you score a kill). There’s simply more ways than ever to just have fun with Call of Duty’s multiplayer in Black Ops II.Treyarch’s also improved the competitive aspect of Call of Duty with the inclusion of the forwarding thinking League Play mode. League Play allows you and your friends to create teams, complete with a unique name and emblem, and hop into matches with everything unlocked right from the start. You simply play a few placement games to get matched up with similarly skilled teams, and then head out to see if you can earn your way to higher tiers. It’s a proven system that’s resulted in much fairer matches for strategy games like StarCraft II, and a welcome reprieve for those who want to skip the level grind entirely and just focus on tactics and skill building.People love to criticize the length of Call of Duty games, and if Black Ops II were only a campaign that might make sense, but this argument falls apart once you look at how much content is included. The legs of the franchise come not only from the single and multiplayer components, but, in the case of Black Ops II, from the increasingly robust and easy-to-use social features built right into the game. The Theater system was always really cool to me, but a bit too complicated for my tastes -- until now. You can still create films with a number of tailored shots, or you can just hit a single button and the game will automatically compile a decent highlight reel ready for easy upload to Elite. Elite’s engaging tools and slough of helpful and interesting info can provide useful insights about you and your friends performances, potentially improving your game, but it’s disappointing it’s still only available for PS3 and Xbox players.Like the level creator in LittleBigPlanet, some of Black Ops II biggest multiplayer social features – namely, COD Casting and streaming – interest me more as a consumer than a creator. Whatever your preference, you can now shoutcast live matches in specific instances such as Custom Games for tournaments, getting a host of data about every player’s performance. You can also watch replays, utilizing the codcast controls to get additional features which should give people with home capture setups more options.* Or if you want to try your hand at streaming, you can do that too by syncing your YouTube account with Black Ops II. The quality and framerate of the stream isn’t the best, and it only works with League Play matches, but both streaming and COD Casting offer ways to connect with the community that despite their limitations feel ahead of their time and unlike anything else the competition brings to bear.Black Ops II’s Zombies mode is the deepest the franchise has seen, even if its “campaign” narrative is reliant on the self-imposed stories arising from your roaming, zombie-slaughtering adventures with three pals.The thing is, even if Tranzit doesn’t come together as a traditional campaign, it’s still a fun alternative to the otherwise serious CoD gameplay. The ridiculousness of the Zombies world is pervasive, and the constant banter between characters, the silly robotic bus driver or the horror movie camp that saturates every second keeps things light. Moreover it’s a lot of fun to do something cooperative in Call of Duty. Fighting off increasingly difficult waves of undead inspires a different sort of tension than anything else the series has to offer, and with Zombies, it’s just about goofing off and having some laughs rather than trying to be the best.Tranzit offers not only a different pace from the rest of Black Ops II, but also rewards exploration with new mechanics, secrets and easter eggs that encourage you to try it over and over. It’s intentionally designed vague, leaving you to your own devices to find random objects to combine into machines or defensive items in the environment. Once you build them you’re given no explanation about how to use them. It’s a bit aggravating, sure, but when you stumble upon a solution it’s also really rewarding, especially when that knowledge is applied to your evolving Zombies routineZombies mode is filled out with Survival mode and the new competitive Grief mode. Survival feels a bit hollow now that there’s the option to play in the larger Tranzit world, but it’s an alternative for people who’d rather just defend a single area and forgo all the exploration. Grief is another silly addition to zombies, pitting two teams against one another in an effort to see who can hold out the longest. You can’t directly harm one another, but you can stun them when they try to revive their buddies, or even throw meat at them to make them more attractive to the undead legions. Both Grief and Survival feel more like afterthoughts when compared to Tranzit, but they were fun distractions nonetheless, and, alongside custom game options, provide even more ways to lose hours and hours to Zombies.We played on 360 for review, but having spent time with the PC version we can safely say they're virtually identical. The PC version doesn't have Elite, but it does feature additional options that PC players expect such as remappable controls and advanced graphics settings. Essentially, what it comes to is this: pick up the version where you'll have the most friends to play, because long after the campaign is over you'll have hours of awesome multiplayer and zombies to dive into.The PS3 version got off to a rocky start, with console lock ups, issues where multiplayer games just wouldn't launch and a host of other infuriating problems. Thankfully, though, things seem to have cleared up after just a couple of days, with even more patches on the way to shore things up in the near future. At this point the PS3 version feels virtually identical to the 360, with only occasional texture pop in and framerate drops that ultimately don't detract from the overall experience.*Originally the review mistakenly said you could codcast recorded matches and upload them to YouTube, as well as codcast live League Play Matches. It also said that the livestreaming feature was on PS3 / 360, while it's also on PC. We've edited the text for clarification, as well as provided additional details about how codcasting works. IGN regrets the error.