Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a baffling entry in the series. After building back the goodwill of the series with Black Ops 6 after a disastrous 2023 with Modern Warfare 3, the bods behind the series have decided to repeat the same mistake at a time when the game really needed to be good.
It resorts to turning the campaign into a more realised version of the Modern Warfare 3 campaign. Rather than building a flashy, set-piece-driven jingoistic funfair, Black Ops 7 instead fuses mechanics from across the game’s many modes into a mess.
While it drags in plot points from Black Ops 6, it’s a diet cola pseudo-retelling of the previous game and not particularly required for playing. However, what’s here is like a cry for help from inside of Treyarch. Almost as if Black Ops 6 was one too many, and BO7 has completely broken them, using this as an outlet, like a reactor going critical, blowing pollutants out the top.
Black Ops 7 Campaign is a Total Disaster
Black Ops 7’s campaign is a total disaster which has already seen players abandoning it. Almost every aspect prodded at me, almost as if it’s designed to be as irritating as possible. In fact, the whole purpose of the campaign, to act as a semi-tutorial for the more open-ended Endgame mode that unlocks after completing it, has now just been made available even if you don’t finish it.
It’s always online, with getting into solo games an actual chore. However, Black Ops 7 features some of the most bullet-spongy enemies I’ve encountered in recent memory. Entire clips of ammo will go into taking down some of the tougher enemies, with the lightning action that the series has relied on becoming a nightmare cluster of health bars and stats.
What should have been an intense chase scene turned into a series of three or four arenas of funnels for enemies to suck all the energy out of the room. Even as guns are upgraded or the more fantastical elements come out, enemies constantly feel as if they’re too spongy. Every molehill becomes a mountain because the game feels as if it were built out of spare parts.
Treyarch’s campaign is split into different sections. A linear mission will lead to the wider world, where you and the squad you’ll probably have been forced to join up with will all travel to one objective until the next linear mission. There’s zero bombast in this game, as it’s impossible to do the more cinematic Call of Duty campaigns or specialized missions when you have four possible idiots darting about the place.
One of the first missions sees the team, led by Black Ops 2’s Alex Mason, have to infiltrate a base stealthily. Immediately, we went gung-ho because one person decided that running forward into the crowd with a grenade was the right thing to do. To be fair, it was, as it helped us move through the pain of each combat encounter.
Mason’s team has been poisoned by this mind-messing mist, which causes their linked brain chips to hallucinate based on their PTSD. It’s here where the game is at its most interesting, unintentionally hilarious, and flabbergasting.
Giant Michael Rooker
Black Ops 7 has these cool setups, but squanders everything because it all boils down to being funnelled into a room to fend off waves of enemies. Every single mission feels the same; rather than the international pulpy story of intrigue and espionage, Black Ops is at its best. Even when the game tries to add elements of its mind-bending moments, these are also often just rooms to fight hordes of monsters.
Some moments, it’ll add platforming or puzzles, all of which I’ve seen go on for that bit too long. I’m unsure who Treyarch thought was playing their games. It took one person 10 minutes to fail at a hacking puzzle, leaving the other three of us to try to survive an endless wave of the most bullet-spongiest of enemies. Another section where you’re forced to dodge traffic, two players seem to have never done any other gaming other than Call of Duty’s multiplayer.
Look, Black Ops 7 has a boss fight against a giant, Godzilla-like Michael Rooker, who plays Harper in the campaign. This particular fight really highlights the many issues with Black Ops 7’s campaign, in that there’s zero weight behind it.
Not only do I have to remember Rooker’s character from Black Ops 2, but I also have to care when the story has been mostly these guys speaking in Jerry Bruckheimer quotes and sounding bored. During the fight, the player who was Rooker’s character was simply there with us, fighting alongside the gang as if nothing had happened. They didn’t even try to invent a good reason for it either. Accept it, don’t question.
There is also a boss fight against a plant monster.
Co-op Campaign Blues
I’m all for pushing the boundaries of reality in these games. Call of Duty, when it leans on what it knows, tends to be a little too safe. Treyarch’s continued attempts to try to drag the series forward in some capacity have to be applauded, but Black Ops 7 isn’t it. The mixture of horror monsters, combined with military combat and heavily relying on nostalgia for games that came before, is certainly a choice, but it’s entirely scuppered by the fact that it’s demonstrably boring and egregious in its design.
Burying the options for solo play, a total lack of checkpoints, and hinging it entirely on online play means that at some point, this campaign will just be a matter of fact, a worse experience to play as time progresses. We’re going into the second week of the game, and it is already taking a bit too long to get into campaign matches in the game. At some point, it’ll be entirely abandoned, especially now that Endgame has been unlocked for everyone.
Call of Duty’s Endgame is a Surprising Extraction Shooter
So let’s talk Endgame. It’s Call of Duty’s extraction shooter, or what feels like a test run for the real thing. The thing is, it’s actually quite compelling, despite it being an extension of the woeful campaign. It’s entirely player-versus-environment (PVE), so there’s no player-versus-player action here. Instead, you swing through different objectives at your choosing, and either team up with whoever you’re forced to squad with or try to survive on your own.
It has a combat level that increases as you complete missions and kill enemies. Here, the enemies are still bullet sponges, which isn’t particularly fun to deal with, but at least it quickly dishes out upgrades once you get into the flow of things.
Black Ops 7 links all four modes into one pool for experience points this time around, which seems to mean that Treyarch has decided to flatten mechanics so one size fits all. That means there’s now armor in the campaign, pulled from Zombies and Warzone. The multiplayer is still as it was, that said.
20 vs 20 Skirmish
Multiplayer, as you’ve probably heard or read already, is the saving grace of Black Ops 7. One major change this year is the 20 vs 20 mode, Skirmish. This dumps players into the campaign’s large map and has players fight over various control points. It’s genuinely a really incredible time, offering a level of tactical fun that the main multiplayer can never truly offer.
Each player flies in on a wingsuit when they respawn, and it can lead to some fantastic moments of weeding out snipers or getting the jump on a group of players. One match saw a sniper make their nest on a tall tower, and was just mowing everyone down and vanishing. Sure enough, as I’m waiting to respawn, a cloud of blue outlined wingsuits descends upon them, gutting their game plan entirely.
It’s chaotic, but not in the way regular multiplayer can get. There are ebbs and flows, similar to those found in Battlefield, which adds this great tension as the score nears its final point.
That all said, a large portion of the multiplayer still remains unchanged. In fact, in a rather bleak moment that summarises the state of the franchise, Nuketown 24/7 was the main playlist the game was promoting. It’s been in every Black Ops, and in 7, it’s pretty much the same here.
However, multiplayer is still as exhilarating and reliable as it’s always been, as popcorn for the brain. By the time I got in, I was a high enough level thanks to the new pooled experience point system, creating a buffet of guns to choose from. It also means that Black Ops 7 cuts those tiresome early levels for multiplayer, where you’re strapped for different options to take into matches. That is, for those who want to dedicate their time to the god-awful campaign, or time in Zombies.
Black Ops 7 Zombies Mode
Zombies continues to improve its accessibility for new players or casuals, while still offering the obtuse survival wave-based affair people have come to love. Thankfully, Treyarch has kept the considerations for those of us who like to go solo, keeping the save function to pick up games rather than having to give up entirely. This said, it’s once again, more of the same.
Black Ops 7 just has zero interest in rocking the boat, but adding to it with embellishes and minute changes that only the most hardcore would notice.
AI Usage in Call of Duty
To curb the positivity with just another headscratcher of a situation. For whatever reason, Treyarch has decided to double down on its generated AI art, but not so confident in the move as to put it up front and center in the game. For the longest time, Call of Duty has had cards with different art that sit behind your username in multiplayer. Treyarch has filled these with generated AI art, with a few in that gross, vague hue of yellow that these generators have poisoned themselves while harvesting the internet.
It’s like a reflection of Black Ops 7. Completely useless and doesn’t add to anything. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is the biggest argument for a shift in how Call of Duty releases itself in a post-Microsoft acquisition world. Black Ops 7 should have been an expansion, downloadable content, not a full $70 product. It isn’t. It’s an update and refresh of the formula introduced last year, to charge this much, and with generative AI inside, along with a campaign so riddled with issues that it’d be another 1000 words to break it all down.
Black Ops 7 Final Thoughts
If this is what has to happen once every two years for the Call of Duty machine not to grind its thousands of workers down into dust, then maybe Microsoft and Activision shouldn’t bother. To say “take a leaf from EA’s book” feels heinous, but the F1 games won’t be getting a 2026 edition, instead opting to provide a big update and release a full game the year after.
Black Ops 7 might have fun in store, along with a surprising extraction mode, but none of it is worth the entry price, unless you must absolutely have it. A resounding disappointment, and what should be a wake-up call for the folks behind the scenes.
2 / 5
| Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 | |
| Pros | Cons |
| Skirmish is a good direction for multiplayer | God-awful, always online, co-op campaign |
| Multiplayer is still fun | Feels like this could have been an expansion DLC, rather than a $70 product |
| Kills all the good will from the previous year | |
| Outside of Skirmish, multiplayer remains mostly the same thing | |
Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox
Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software
Publisher: Activision
Release date: November 14, 2025
