Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 – Review

Smooth and precise gameplay, wasted on a mediocre game

Ever since the first rumours about Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, I’ve been a bit sceptical. All the more so because last year’s Black Ops 6 felt like a return to form for the franchise. I was genuinely pleased, I’ll admit, especially as I’ve been a fan of these games since the very first release. But the joy wasn’t to last, and within a month of multiplayer I was utterly sick of the toxic community, of the attention microtransactions get, and of all this nonsense with skins, coloured bullets and the “Fortnitification” of every multiplayer shooter.

Even so, where it did score, it scored well, and Black Ops 6 offered a well-written storyline that I enjoyed playing through. And that’s where I want to draw the first parallel with what Activision and Microsoft are calling a full-price game in 2025: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Because what’s going on here? Instead of a well-thought-out narrative with a beginning and an end, we got a rushed pile of rubbish that, apparently, is the way it is because it prioritises co-op gameplay. So we’re stuck with a terrible, half-arsed storyline that adds no value whatsoever. The spy and CIA conspiracy tales are gone, replaced by a collection of old missions reimagined. Because whoever had the nerve to brag about writing this garbage was so staggeringly lazy that all they could manage was a regurgitation of “famous moments” from previous games, along with a few fantastical scenarios we live through on one of the Warzone maps. And I’d love to say I’m joking, that it’s some kind of parody of the series… hah, joke’s on me: Black Ops 7 is a perfect parody of the series it belongs to.

How does the single-player campaign work, you ask? You make a lobby with yourself and wait to play single-player. Naturally, you also need an active internet connection, because God forbid a mode where you play alone could do without one. And that brings certain limitations. For one, you can’t pause. You press ESC, the menu appears, but the action carries on. You know, like in multiplayer. And if nature calls, or the phone rings, tough luck! Either we play, or what are we doing here?! The different missions are separated by tired cutscenes, and if you happen to quit the game in the middle of a mission (again, it’s never made clear where one starts and ends), there isn’t a checkpoint to be found. You start over and keep your mouth shut.

And if only the story were any good… but what we have here is a stew of elements that want to turn Call of Duty, an arcade military shooter, into a full-blown looter shooter RPG with boss fights and the whole shebang. What used to be missions full of action and intrigue are now ten-minute slogs of firing a virtual gun at an enemy who teleports around and hunts you with 30-metre-tall machetes falling from the sky. Yes, folks, I’m still talking about the newest Call of Duty. When you finally finish one of these missions, you’re met with a cutscene in which you and your three teammates growl something at each other and marvel at how hard the ayahuasca is hitting, giving you hallucinations. In fact, the visions are so vivid that everyone thinks they’re alone against the enemy. Pardon… you are alone, and the three chaps who turn up in the cutscenes couldn’t be bothered to be added as bots. There are examples of how it’s done, like Left 4 Dead, but who cares?

But who am I to bang on about single-player this much? Call of Duty is a serious multiplayer game, with an active community and content coming out of its ears. Except that the people still playing this rubbish for more than 20 hours are still in primary school, secondary at most, because I can’t think of a sane adult who’d have fun with this ADHD of a game. Everything is fast-paced for the sake of it, not because there’s any particular point. The maps have been the same for several years, and if I see one more Nuketown 24/7 playlist I’ll bite my desk. And if you’re not playing Nuketown, you’ll be playing Hijacked. The rest of the maps? Given how good they are, I’d sooner uninstall the game.

The same goes for the weapons, although it’s more hit-and-miss here. Weapons can’t change all that much because, well, some are like that in real life. But Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 isn’t set in the present; it’s set around 2035. That means the developers were free to create futuristic weapons from scratch. What did we get? The M4 under another name, the AK-27 instead of the AK-47, and assorted variations on the same theme. Nothing new, nothing original, and in a game with so many assault rifles and shotguns, the most overpowered weapons are the knives, the pistols and the sniper rifles. But hey, we have skins! Four categories of skins, no less, just because. There are the ones you unlock only in single-player, meaning those rubbish co-op missions you’re forced to repeat until you’re sick of them in order to unlock everything. After those come the skins unlocked in standard multiplayer, you know, Team Deathmatch, Domination and so on. Then there are the skins unlocked in Zombies mode, and the ones from Warzone. And to unlock all of it, all you have to do is quit your job, cut ties with your family and friends, and sit like a good little vegetable in front of the screen, with a fully loaded credit card at hand for the next pack of skins and coloured tracer bullets. Pew-pew!

In a year like 2024, all this rubbish might have slipped by a little more unnoticed, on the grounds that the gameplay is good at its core and there’s plenty of potential in there. But in a 2025 that has given us Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders, with Delta Force slowly picking up steam, it’s very hard to look at Call of Duty and say: “Wow, this looks fresh, I can’t wait to play it!” It’s the same game as ten years ago, refusing to evolve, yet shamelessly sold for €70 in its Standard edition. This isn’t a game, it’s a taking of the mickey.

The one quality that might save it, though it could never justify the price on its own, is the zombies component. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has one of the best, if not the best, zombies campaigns in the whole series. At least, that’s how it looks at first, with better-designed maps, weapons that are (for the most part) well suited to killing the undead, power-ups and all sorts of upgrades that test your luck a little, and the same Easter eggs we’ve grown used to. Unfortunately, zombies have been done to death for a long time, and apart from the dedicated community, I’m sure this part of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will be quickly overlooked.

Everything that makes a game, well, a game has been hugely watered down in the Call of Duty yard. It simply doesn’t offer the same fun as it used to, back when the developers’ attention went on how to improve the recipe a little and what Hollywood-worthy story to write next. Now it’s all about the money, the more the better! And to underline the greed, the company’s higher-ups have forced the developers to include AI-generated art – the sort of thing we grind for and pay for. Great combo!

It’s a shame about this game’s gameplay, which strikes me as at least as solid as in previous years. Well, it’s only logical that not much has changed technically. The graphics engine is the same IW 9.0 we’ve been seeing for a few releases now, and it has proven extremely efficient and, remarkably, well optimised. That results in rock-solid gameplay that I’d love to be hammering away at 24/7, but sadly Black Ops 7 doesn’t motivate me to do so. The same engine also means we get superb, borderline-realistic visuals, which make the game look very good on a powerful system. Textures are clean, the lighting is built properly and looks good even without ray tracing, and the characters look like you’re watching a TV series. And when we glance at the additional technologies, we see that both NVIDIA and AMD have put their names to it and handed the developers every toy going.

Unfortunately, the end result is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, a game that manages to be weak precisely where it matters: the entertainment factor. The franchise’s identity seems to have died some time ago, and as much as I enjoy the reheated stew of Modern Warfare I – III, and the fact that Black Ops Cold War and 6 carried on the Cold War conspiracy tales, the lack of authenticity is felt in spades. And Activision just can’t manage any more, especially after the Microsoft acquisition, so longtime fans of the series get AI-generated crap, remakes and remasters by the bucketload, but nothing new or original; nothing to make today’s youngsters fall in love with these games. The series won me over with Call of Duty 2, and by the time the first Modern Warfare games came out I already considered myself a super-fan.

I hope Activision understands what went wrong and finds a solution, perhaps by dropping the annual release schedule and making us miss Call of Duty. Today, all I miss is the time when these games used to be good. Cheers!

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Played on: PC & PS5
Release date: 14 November 2025
Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software
Publisher: Activision