Technologies

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review: A Big, Messy Experiment That Doesn’t Pan Out

The latest Call of Duty fumbles its much-anticipated campaign, while zombies and multiplayer modes retain the status quo.

Developers Treyarch and Raven Software are drawing water from a nearly empty well with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. The newest entry in the long-running franchise is a direct sequel to Black Ops 2, a game released more than a decade ago.

If you haven’t played that game, you’ll probably be able to follow along with Black Ops 7’s story just fine. It’s a shallow adventure about shadowy criminal groups and false flag attacks that focuses more on tying Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 6 together than telling a coherent tale of its own.

Last year’s Black Ops 6 was a genuinely entertaining Cold War-era supersoldier thriller that reinvigorated the series. But Black Ops 7 is cerebral and recursive, an ouroboros of nostalgia attempting to capitalize on warm feelings for Treyarch’s long-running franchise by placing old characters in wacky situations that feel like a horrible game of Mad Libs. The game is a complete misfire that doesn’t understand what makes the predecessors it’s pilfering from great in the first place.

There are glimmers of hope in the latest iterations of the multiplayer and zombies modes, as a handful of loadout changes and bigger maps shake up the gameplay in a real way. Nothing feels fundamentally different from last year’s release, though, and Black Ops 7 simultaneously manages to feel like a rote reproduction and a step down from Black Ops 6.

For the love of god, stay away from the Co-Op Story Campaign

Call of Duty’s single-player campaigns have never been high art. This is a series of video games that roleplay as action movies, full of thinly veiled American military propaganda. Occasionally, a generic army man mourns the death of another main character, and you feel something approaching a flicker of sadness (which is then snuffed out in a hail of gunfire moments later).

These campaigns often fail to connect on an emotional level, but they’re reliable thrill rides through and through. It’s cathartic to throw caution to the wind in order to gun down mooks, rain helicopters from the sky and take down the «bad guy of the year.»

Black Ops 7’s Co-Op Campaign fails on the most basic level: It’s not even gratifying to blast apart baddies throughout the game’s 11-mission-long story, because everything feels painfully goofy. The narrative rushes headlong into the Black Ops series’ worst mistakes time and time again.

Taking place a decade after the end of Black Ops 2, it would’ve made sense for Black Ops 7 to explore ramifications from the game it’s following up on: a world fractured by the death of a martyred terrorist and social media revolutionary. Instead, the main objective of the player’s four-person squad is to prevent a criminal organization known as The Guild from deploying its fear toxin MacGuffin (the same bioweapon at the center of Black Ops 6’s story) around the world.

Black Ops 7’s campaign is split between open-world operations in the Mediterranean city-state of Avalon and literal nightmare sequences remixing story beats from prior Black Ops games, and neither one of these types of missions is particularly good.

Avalon is a pretty but relatively empty in-game area, which makes driving or wingsuiting hundreds of meters to reach the next burst of action feel tedious and frustrating. Approaching from different angles doesn’t feel like it makes a tangible difference, since stealth isn’t a truly viable option. These missions are a misguided attempt to introduce players to the map for the new co-op Endgame mode, but they just end up being a frustrating waste of time.

Yet the open-world missions are still preferable to the dream sequence missions, because I’d rather feel frustration than secondhand embarrassment. Since the good guys spend the entire length of the story dosed with a powerful hallucinogenic bioweapon, they frequently have to delve into their fractured psyches to battle physical manifestations of inner trauma.

This is a total train wreck for multiple reasons. We only know the main character, David Mason (played by Milo Ventimiglia, who turned in a surprisingly flat vocal performance), and Harper (played by Michael Rooker, who spun straw into gold with an awful script), from one prior game — 2012’s Black Ops 2. But we don’t know them well enough to truly care about their baggage. The other half of the squad is composed of new, one-note characters who don’t get proper characterization and likely only exist to round out the multiplayer operator roster.

Nothing in the way this narrative is delivered makes me care about these characters’ thoughts, feelings and memories. It’s still an action movie, but it’s full of nauseating melodrama and silly boss fights. Rehashing the Vorkuta prison escape from the original Black Ops game with zombies isn’t cool — it just makes me want to play an older Call of Duty game.

And if my internet goes down for whatever reason, that’s just what I’ll have to do. There’s no offline mode for Black Ops 7 due to the fact that the campaign grants account experience points (an absolutely piddly amount, by the way) that contribute to leveling up and unlocking things in multiplayer. Even when you turn off squad fill matchmaking to play alone, you’re at the mercy of the Call of Duty servers. It’s a surreal experience to be playing a story mission with no allied nonplayable characters, only to get a high latency warning and start rubber-banding around the room.

Frankly, it’s unacceptable for this to be the new status quo for a $70 game released as part of one of the most successful video game series of all time. The ability to pause a mission has been completely disabled, so that publisher Activision can keep people engaged by unlocking more calling cards and weapon camouflages.

After the campaign is wrapped up, players can try out a new repeatable co-op mission: Endgame. This mode drops players into the open world of Avalon to take on key assignments, get stronger and extract with loot. Those new weapons can be brought back into Endgame on subsequent runs until you’re ready to take on a boss alongside other players.

I’ll hand this much to Treyarch: Endgame is conceptually exciting. The popularity of the recently released ARC Raiders proves that folks are looking for some type of cooperation in the extraction shooter space — but Endgame is not going to be the next big thing. Instead of ARC Raiders’ genuinely frightening robot enemies, the only thing scary about Black Ops 7’s enemies is how stupid they all are. There’s no player-versus-player element to keep you on your toes, and the biggest challenge in Endgame is navigating the frequent crashes to the main menu that wipe all of your character progress. If you can get Endgame to work consistently, you’ll come to find that the mode is full of repetitive mini-missions and not much else.

Multiplayer mostly replays Black Ops 2’s greatest hits, and that’s OK

Multiplayer is the make-or-break mode for any Call of Duty game. It’s the sole reason why most folks drop $70 on this series every year, so there has to be a solid framework in place for the game to grow over the next 12 months.

And to Black Ops 7’s credit, the fundamentals here mostly feel OK. Weapons feel impactful and punchy, and some of the Black Ops series’ best three-lane maps make a comeback. The new Overload playlist is reminiscent of «capture the flag,» which is great for competitive play.

The best changes to Black Ops 7 multiplayer tweak the loadout system, allowing players to apply special augments to their equipment slots and synergize perk slots to unlock special buffs. None of the changes are complex, but they add some simple strategy that creates an appreciably deep layer to the gameplay.

While most of the larger new maps don’t feel fantastic to play on (there are too many open areas, and I’ve had enemies spawn in looking directly at me), there are some real pulse-pounding meat grinders that feel just right in Black Ops 7’s standard six-versus-six playlists. I’ll never back out of a game when the map pick is Flagship, because running and gunning while mantling around a hulking naval vessel and the surrounding shipyard is the quintessential Call of Duty experience.

Classic Black Ops 2 map remasters are as good as ever. Raid, Express and Hijacked are some of the gems that pioneered the mapmaking formula that Treyarch still employs today, and playing on these maps feels great 13 years after they were initially created.

Much like with its fumbled single-player campaign, however, Black Ops 7’s biggest swing for multiplayer is a complete whiff. The largest addition is a new 20-versus-20 objective-based mode called Skirmish. Could Call of Duty be angling to pull away Battlefield players during the same year that Battlefield 6 sang its sweet siren song? I was briefly intrigued by the promise of large-scale battles, but my hopes were quickly dashed.

Skirmish is a chaotic disaster that haphazardly tosses Warzone elements around in an attempt to achieve its desired effect. Vehicles and armor plates are inoffensive enough, but the real problem is that players just wingsuit back into the map a couple of seconds after being eliminated.

I’m sure Treyarch intended for players to drop in on the active objective and battle over important parts of the map, but too often players will just fly to rooftops behind their enemies and lord over the shooting gallery. I don’t think I’ve ever been shot from behind or above as many times as I have while playing Skirmish — everything is disorganized and there is no frontline to the battle. The six-versus-six playlists offer similarly speedy gameplay but fairer fights, which leaves me scratching my head and wondering who Skirmish was designed for in the first place.

Zombies mode is rotting away: It’s just more of the same

If you’re a fan of Black Ops 6’s zombies mode, you’ll probably be happy with Black Ops 7. The new game follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, continuing the Dark Aether storyline with a new round-based survival map.

The launch map, Ashes of the Damned, feels like a modernized version of Black Ops 2’s Tranzit map, bringing back the concept of driving between main hubs of zombie-slaying action but giving the player complete autonomy over where they head next.

New wonder weapons, zombie types and a lengthy story easter egg help make Ashes of the Damned feel fresh for a while, but that novelty is sure to wear off. The map is fairly wide open, and it’s easy to maneuver around zombies, so it becomes more of a chore than a challenge to go for a high score.

And there’s the bad news: While this map is pretty good, Black Ops 7 zombies mode has no other offerings at launch (the standalone survival map, Vanhorn Farm, is just a breakaway chunk of Ashes of the Damned). Most other Call of Duty games ship with at least two zombies maps, and the absence of a smaller, faster-paced experience like Black Ops 6’s Liberty Falls is already starting to dim my interest in the mode.

It’s not all bad, though. There are a couple treats in store for Call of Duty zombies veterans. A new Cursed mode reintroduces some of the classic mechanics, doing away with armor plates at the beginning of the game, restricting loadouts and rewarding players with points each time they shoot a zombie. These rules make zombies feel a little dangerous again, which is a welcome change since Call of Duty: Cold War trivialized the mode’s difficulty.

I’ve been burned by so many Black Ops 7 game modes that I’m confident my favorite addition isn’t even a first-person shooter playlist at all. The latest entry in the Black Ops series reintroduces Dead Ops Arcade, a zombies-themed twin-stick shooter with its own set of power-ups and minigames. It’s nice to kick back and mow down hordes of zombies from a bird’s-eye viewpoint for a change, especially since this is the one mode that doesn’t force a slurry of unlockable equipment, weapon camouflages and suspiciously generative AI-looking calling cards down your throat.

Content for content’s sake is not a good design philosophy

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a decently enjoyable video game. The series’ reliable, fast-paced arcade gunplay is firing on all cylinders this time around, and there’s more content than ever before for players looking to unlock weapon camos and check off challenges.

But this is maybe the most deeply cynical Call of Duty game yet. The single-player mode has been sacrificed on the altar of constant progression and turned into another bland, repetitive activity that yields player experience points. Multiplayer and zombies modes remain largely unchanged from Black Ops 6: New maps, scorestreaks, weapons and equipment provide a change of scenery, but the flow of gameplay hasn’t been fundamentally altered.

The game is one big dopamine-drip hamster wheel, wherein the purpose of playing is not to have fun, but to drive numbers ever higher. More so now than ever before, Black Ops 7 inundates the player with experience points, weapon levels and camouflage skins, a constant barrage of flashy new bits and bytes that keep you hooked on fluff.

Black Ops 2, released way back in 2012, stands tall as arguably one of the best Call of Duty games in the series’ history. This direct sequel is a sanitized, sanded-down product that has truly lost touch with its roots.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Feb. 4, #499

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 4, No. 499.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. One of the words —«fronton» — might not be known to all the people who attempt the puzzle. There’s also a heavy focus on one specific team, which can be tough if you don’t know that roster well. If today’s puzzle has you stuck but you still want to crack it, keep reading for hints and answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Nice victory!

Green group hint: I’ll give you that guy for this guy.

Blue group hint: Where to play.

Purple group hint: Florida hoops.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Win smoothly.

Green group: Fantasy sports trade options.

Blue group: Areas of play, in different sports.

Purple group: Members of the Orlando Magic.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is win smoothly. The four answers are breeze, coast, cruise and waltz.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is fantasy sports trade options. The four answers are accept, counter, propose and reject.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is areas of play, in different sports. The four answers are course, court, fronton and rink.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is members of the Orlando Magic. The four answers are Banchero, Bane, Black and Suggs.

Toughest Connections: Sports Edition categories

The Connections: Sports Edition puzzle can be tough, but it really depends on which sports you know the most about. My husband aces anything having to do with Formula 1, my best friend is a hockey buff, and I can answer any question about Minnesota teams.

That said, it’s hard to pick the toughest Connections categories, but here are some I found exceptionally mind-blowing.

#1: Serie A Clubs. Answers: Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, Roma.

#2: WNBA MVPs. Answers: Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles and Stewart.

#3: Premier League team nicknames. Answers: Bees, Cherries, Foxes and Hammers.

#4: Homophones of NBA player names. Answers: Barns, Connect, Heart and Hero.

Technologies

Xbox Cloud Gaming Ad-Supported Tier: When Does It Start, How Much Will It Cost and More

Ads could remove the sting of Xbox Game Pass price hikes, but will it be worth it?

Xbox Cloud Gaming is one of the key selling points of Xbox Game Pass, and it generally works well. The service lets gamers stream Xbox titles to a wide range of devices, including phones, tablets, handhelds and select smart TVs from Samsung, LG and Hisense. However, following the Xbox Game Pass price increase from November, streaming alone may not be enough to keep some subscribers on board, which is where an ad-supported tier could come into play.

Microsoft confirmed the existence of an ad-supported tier last year but has not shared details on when it will launch or what it will include. New screenshots shared by players suggest the tier may be arriving soon, though questions remain about how it will work and what limitations it may have.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

When will the Xbox Cloud Gaming ad-supported tier launch?

Microsoft hasn’t made an official announcement yet, but it’s expected to roll out sometime this year, according to Windows Central. Last month, some gamers saw a different loading screen for Xbox Cloud Gaming with a message saying «1 hour of ad-supported play time per session,» which would point to the ads coming soon.

looks like ad-supported Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming soon 👀 pic.twitter.com/c8hAERrVB9

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) January 17, 2026

How much will the Xbox Cloud Gaming ad-supported tier cost?

In October, Microsoft confirmed it was internally testing the ad-supported tier, and at the time, said it would be free. Going by the load screen message I mentioned earlier, there will likely be a limit on how long people can play on the tier and during internal testing, players would have to watch a 2-minute ad.

What games will be available on the ad-supported tier?

Rumors about the internal testing suggested players would only have access to certain games for free, but the question is, which ones? Microsoft has a significant number of games available to stream, whether it’s purchased digital games or those available with an Xbox Game Pass subscription. Microsoft may allow all the digital games in a player’s library to be streamed and might make a few games available for free on a weekly or monthly basis, similar to the Free Play Days games.

Technologies

My Experience With United’s Starlink Service: How All In-Flight Wi-Fi Should Be

No need to load up devices with movies on long flights. You can stream them — and even live events — on Starlink-equipped United flights.

If I weren’t buckled into a seat, I might not have noticed that I was using in-flight Wi-Fi. When it came to working on my laptop and streaming movies on my phone and tablet, I could have been on my broadband at home.

But instead I was 30,000 feet up connected to Starlink Wi-Fi, on a United Airlines flight between Chicago and Minneapolis and thinking back to all the times I’d fought with expensive, slow, annoying internet access on planes. The ginger ale offered by a friendly attendant was a nice addition, too.

This experience was a demonstration flight on United’s first mainline Boeing 737-800 aircraft to be outfitted with the new satellite hardware. United now offers Starlink Wi-Fi service on 25% of its fleet, which includes 300 regional aircraft and dozens of mainline planes during 2025. It’s aiming to install the low-profile technology on up to 500 aircraft by the end of 2026.

At a time when our phones and smartwatches have satellite connectivity options — helping us reach emergency responders or send text messages when we’re out of range of a cell signal — Starlink and United are providing travelers with an upgraded convenience. What’s more, we’re getting in-flight Wi-Fi with speeds and connectivity that rival what we experience at home or the office.

Air travel presents a conundrum: If you need Wi-Fi in the air and it’s not working, you’re cooked. There’s no stepping out to a coffee shop hotspot or rebooting your home router. In-flight Wi-Fi has improved over the years, but it still feels risky whether it will work well or at all. And you don’t discover that until you’re already in the air.

The plane I traveled on isn’t the first United aircraft carrying Starlink’s satellite Wi-Fi equipment. United began outfitting many of its regional Embraer E175 jets in March after signing a deal with Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, last year. Although it’s the inaugural United mainline aircraft, Hawaiian Airlines got the jump late last year when it outfitted its Airbus planes with the technology.

The Boeing 737-800 I flew on went into active service the next day, starting with a leg from Houston to Fort Lauderdale. Over the coming months, United expects to outfit approximately 15 mainline Boeing 737-800 planes per month with Starlink antennas.

United is offering Starlink Wi-Fi access free to United MileagePlus members. The Standard Wi-Fi option costs $8 or 1,600 miles for MileagePlus members, or $10 for everybody else. Subscriptions for frequent travelers start at $49 a month (or 7,500 miles).

In-flight Wi-Fi is all about the experience

Believe me, I want to talk about speeds and bandwidth and what a Starlink connection could mean for getting work done or being entertained in the air. But it all starts with getting connected, and too often, that experience sucks.

On my flight from Seattle to Chicago the day before my demo, United’s Standard Wi-Fi took nearly an hour to connect to any of my devices. (United uses different internet providers depending on the aircraft and operating area, and this flight was connected by satellite internet provider ViaSat.) Once the main menu page loaded, selecting most options, including «sign in» and «free messaging,» timed out with an error that there was no network connection.

That cut into my work time, but more importantly, it was incredibly frustrating. Many of us look forward to focused time on a flight to get things done without interruptions, and more frustration is the last thing we want to add to our air travel experience.

Two experiences stood out when I was on the Starlink-equipped plane. First, it operates gate-to-gate, so you can connect on your phone or tablet (laptops still need to be put away during takeoff) as soon as you get settled in your seat. After we’d landed and were taxiing back to the gate, I forgot that I was still connected through Starlink.

For almost as long as I’ve owned a cellphone, wheels-down meant it’s time to switch off Airplane mode and embrace the familiar connection of local cellular.

Second, the few sign-on steps I had to go through weren’t any more onerous than getting on a public cafe or hotel Wi-Fi network. After connecting to the United Wi-FI network, a portal window opened with a trio of screens explaining how great the new service is (you can skip them) and a field to enter my United MileagePlus account and password.

Oh, and then there’s a video ad, which is 15 seconds or less. (If you’ve been reading so far and thinking, «Wait, it can’t really be free, can it?» there’s your answer.) That ad turns out to be important: You aren’t connected until the video completes.

I was impatient and dismissed the ad on my laptop, which led to some trouble getting connected. Another journalist on the flight mentioned that he encountered the same situation, and the friendly United tech staff on the flight were curious whether the ad had played when they helped me diagnose the issue. I also emptied my browser caches and told the computer to forget the Wi-Fi network, essentially starting me from scratch.

As far as I can tell, no one else on the flight experienced this problem, but it’s safe to say there could have been some prelaunch bugs being worked out. United’s tech support won’t be on hand for regular flights, which is why one of them mentioned they were trying to iron out any points where flyers might run into difficulty.

Once connected, I could concentrate on trying to use as much bandwidth as possible and look outside occasionally since United scheduled this flight on a beautiful autumn day (instead of bringing everyone to Chicago in the dead of winter).

How Starlink Wi-Fi performed

The hardware that makes this happen is a pair of low-profile 500Mbps antennas mounted on the top of the fuselage. Unlike current units on planes offering standard Wi-Fi, the antennas are essentially exposed to communicate with the network of nearly 8,000 Starlink satellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), or about 350 miles in altitude.

To compare, the antenna module on a non-Starlink-equipped United plane parked at the next gate was much larger to shield its antennas, which need to adjust their angles during flight to talk to high-altitude satellites about 22,000 miles up.

In the time it takes a signal to go from a plane to high-altitude satellites, the signal can round-trip the distance between an aircraft and the Starlink satellites 70 times, according to Mara Palcisco, United Airlines vice president of engineering and reliability.

(This is also different from T-Satellite, the Starlink-powered satellite technology offered by T-Mobile. T-Satellite uses a separate collection of satellites to work with phones using a portion of the cellular spectrum.)

What does that mean in terms of the internet experience? Honestly, I’d think I was at home on my high-speed fiber internet if not for the cabin noise and the occasional tight banking turn. I streamed the (underrated, in my opinion) movie Cowboys & Aliens over Netflix on my iPad, played one of United’s available videos in a window on my MacBook Pro and watched YouTube videos on my iPhone.

Also, because this was a special flight for the press and several United employees, I initiated a video call with two colleagues. Usually, video and voice calls are not allowed — in fact, they’re illegal — and United makes a point of telling customers that they shouldn’t engage in any behavior that disturbs the people around them, including calls, listening to audio without headphones or watching media that would make others uncomfortable. You can watch a live call, but technically not talk on one, and that’s behavior flight attendants will have to enforce.

In this instance, we were encouraged to go ahead, so I had a hard-to-hear video conference with CNET managing editor Patrick Holland and senior reporter David Lumb (maybe it’s time to invest in a pair of AirPods Pro 3). The video quality was stellar — no, I’m not making a Starlink pun, I promise — even better than a few recent calls we’ve had in our respective offices. A FaceTime call with a friend was similar: clear, sharp video with no telltale streaming artifacts.

But let’s get to numbers. It’s always a nerd joy to go to Speedtest.net or run the Speedtest app and be surprised at the numbers it sends back. I consistently got around 250Mbps of download speed and anywhere from 25Mbps to 65Mbps upload speed. I saw that on all of my devices: iPhone 17 Pro, M1 iPad Pro and a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip.

To put that into perspective, SpaceX says that Starlink residential internet gets up to 350Mbps download speeds, depending on location. According to an Ookla report, Starlink’s median performance is 105Mbps download, 15Mbps upload and 45ms latency. CNET senior writer Joe Supan saw similar performance when recently testing the Starlink Mini in Washington’s North Cascades mountains. (Disclosure: CNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis, also owns Ookla.)

To make what now looks like an unfair comparison, when I did get United’s standard Wi-Fi access the night before (which I paid $8 for), my speeds were 9.65Mbps down and 1.03Mbps up. Yes, those decimal points are in the correct places.

Streaming video, whether watching in-flight movies, catching up on a series on Netflix or Apple TV or watching live sports, will undoubtedly become more prevalent on flights when this level of bandwidth is available. In fact, when I chatted during the flight with Grant Milstead, United vice president of digital technology, I asked whether the in-flight videos available via United’s portal were cached on a server aboard the plane. (On my flight the previous night, I could view those even when an internet connection was elusive.)

He said that for mainline flights, which carry roughly 170 passengers, the company would still maintain those local servers for redundancy. But the regional Embraer E175 jets, the first of United’s fleet to be outfitted with the Starlink technology, rely on streamed content with no local backup. Given that the video and audio quality, from my perspective, was indistinguishable from broadband at home, that doesn’t come as a surprise.

While waiting for my trip back home (on a plane not equipped with Starlink Wi-Fi), I pondered my lasting impression of this assignment, which had me fly to Chicago, circle above Wisconsin for a couple of hours and then fly back to Seattle.

On my flight with Starlink Wi-Fi, I had uncompromised internet access. I wasn’t thinking about latency, artifacts or whether I was getting my $8 worth. I could work, watch videos, play live video games and just be bothered with any of the usual complications. And that was the best experience.