A Near Future Shooter Chasing Its Own Tail
Call of Duty Black Ops 7 lands on November 14, 2025 with a seventy dollar price tag and a clear goal from Treyarch and Activision. Fuse every major mode into one shared content machine. Campaign, multiplayer, Warzone and Zombies are all built out of the same parts, the same maps and even the same systems.
On paper that sounds efficient. In practice it makes the whole game feel like an extremely loud content farm.
The most obvious casualty is the campaign. Instead of a focused story with unique setpieces, you get a co op friendly tour of future Warzone and multiplayer maps. Think wave defense missions where you and some buddies hold out against brain dead AI while grinding through armor bars and health pools that feel ripped straight out of a battle royale.
The story does not help. After getting dosed with a bio weapon from Black Ops 6, Alex Mason’s son dives into shared hallucinations that replay the memories of his father and his father’s squadmates. It is an excuse to remix classic Black Ops moments rather than tell anything new. You revisit characters like Woods and Mason in trippy dreamscapes that feel more like a fan mod than a big budget sequel.
Instead of nostalgia, you get bizarre boss fights. Woods mutates into a giant Venus flytrap monster. Harper turns into a skyscraper sized kaiju that slams out predictable shockwaves on the deck of Black Ops 2’s USS Barack Obama. These encounters follow the most basic pattern. Shoot glowing weak point, dodge clutter, wait for a shield, kill the adds, repeat. They feel more like rejected Destiny 2 bosses than Call of Duty.
Most fights suffer from the same problem. The game imports Warzone mechanics directly into the campaign. Armor plates, color coded weapon rarities and very long time to kill turn encounters into damage races rather than snappy firefights. Enemies are so tanky that you often end up sprinting straight at them hoping their AI breaks long enough for you to unload an entire light machine gun mag into their face.
There are occasional multiplayer style killstreaks you can pick up and drop into fights. These are less power fantasy moments and more mercy kills that finally end another tedious arena. The overall feeling is not epic Call of Duty spectacle. It is cheap, padded content.
Endgame, Skirmish and a Whole Lot of Generative AI
Finish the story and you unlock Endgame. This is a co op PVE mode set on the new Warzone style map based around the Mediterranean town of Avalon. You drop in, loot crates, choose perks and move between objectives as enemy difficulty ramps up.
In theory it is an extraction or raid inspired mode that extends the life of the campaign. In reality it doubles down on its worst traits. Weapons feel miserable until you reach legendary tier loot. Enemies from basic soldiers to flimsy zombies have absurd health and damage. AI breaks easily in the open world so the solution is to make every target a total bullet sponge. Getting through fights means holding down full auto on heads for far too long. It is less tense survival and more tedious mowing.
The map itself fails to stitch its zones together in an interesting way. There is little sense of discovery or flow. Once you have walked it a few times, the idea of dropping back in loses its appeal fast.
On the competitive side, Skirmish tries to be the big casual mode with 20 versus 20 matches. Even in the sweatiest lobbies it never comes close to the chaos you get in Battlefield sized fights. The main culprit again is Warzone design bleeding where it does not belong. Armor plates make gunfights too spongy for classic Call of Duty. Instead of explosive kill or death streaks, you get duels that demand high accuracy with laser precise, low recoil near future guns but rarely feel satisfying.
The weapon lineup does not do much to save it. There are some nice touches like the AK 27 echoing the feel and sight picture of the classic AK 47 but overall the arsenal looks and handles like a blur of similar, sleek sci fi rifles. Even after dozens of hours and fifty levels, the reviewer could only remember the name of that one gun. Coming off Black Ops 6, it feels like a step down in personality.
Movement also tries to evolve with wall jumps. On paper this should open up more vertical flanking routes. In practice most maps simply are not built for it. After a long grind through the playlist, the only memorable use case was bouncing around solar panels on the Raid style map to change lanes. A flashy system with barely any real payoff.
Visually Black Ops 7 also stumbles. Near future Call of Duty has always been a bit divisive but past entries still had strong art direction and memorable arenas. Here the game is loud and cluttered without being stylish. Generative AI assets are everywhere. Victory screens, calling cards, weapon skins and even some textures have that smeared, off look you get from raw AI output. In a full priced release that already feels cheaper than usual, this is hard to ignore.
Multiplayer cosmetics clash even harder this time since Zombies and standard multiplayer share the same wardrobe. You will see robots wrapped in human flesh and time travelling zombie hunters diving into futuristic industrial maps. It is busy, chaotic and not in a good way. Instead of cool or funny it just looks like a randomizer was let loose on the art team.
Zombies And The Bigger Problem
Zombies is the one mode that mostly survives intact. It still delivers the familiar loop of boarding up windows, training hordes and slowly gearing up. This time you can drive vehicles which sounds amazing but mostly ends up being a fast travel system between long fights with tanky enemies. If you are already tired of bullet sponge design elsewhere, it will hit you here too.
Across campaign, Endgame, Skirmish and Zombies the same pattern repeats. Enemies require too many shots. Encounters stretch out longer than they should. The game depends heavily on reused assets and Warzone mechanics to prop up its structure. Instead of a tightly tuned shooter, Black Ops 7 feels like a content ecosystem designed to keep you grinding rather than having fun.
There are flashes where the game is almost entertaining in a so bad it is good way especially in co op. Playing with a fully micced squad and collectively roasting the wild hallucination cutscenes and clunky bosses can be genuinely funny. But that kind of enjoyment comes from laughing at the game not with it.
For long time fans it is hard not to compare Black Ops 7 to older campaigns and multiplayer offerings that felt sharper, better paced and more visually confident. This entry leans hard into efficiency and cross mode integration but pays for it with identity and fun factor. It is Call of Duty at its loudest and most exhausting and it leaves you wondering when it stopped being something you wanted to jump back into every night.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/call-of-duty/call-of-duty-black-ops-7-review/
