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.