First impressions: 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' campaign

First impressions: 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' campaign


A scene from 'Call of Duty: Black Ops.'
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Activision

Momentum is building for Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops, developed by Treyarch and launching on November 9 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and PC.

While multiplayer details are to be unveiled next week, Game Hunters recently had a single-player campaign walkthrough at a Microsoft media event in Toronto.

Before you read on, consider this a spoiler alert:

The year is 1968 and you are Sargent Mason, in charge of a Special Forces platoon in a remote Vietnamese village. Your chopper is shot down behind enemy lines, but at least your Black Ops team survived and you're poised to perform your call of duty: investigate Soviet involvement in the area and find General Kravchenko.

Wading through water, you'll sneak up on VC boat and take down the Vietcong as stealthily as possible. While knives perform most melee moves well, firepower will be required for distant threats. This was an ideal time to show off Treyarch's "bullet time" effect, where the camera followed the slug from the barrel of your rifle to the forehead of an enemy, in slow-mo, resulting in one dramatic blood spray. These kinds of cinematic moments are peppered throughout the level.

As you infiltrate this swampy village -- weaving between huts, kneeling behind tall grass and fences, and making your way around pigs and chickens – you'll engage in a few skirmishes, as quietly as possible, so that you don't awaken the entire village of gun-toting Vietcong.

On a related note, this huge set piece is quite impressive, down to the authentic architecture, rain sequences, and Vietnamese music and dialogue you can overhear inside (and around) the huts.

As you sneak up on an enemy soldier, you'll instruct your teammate to provide a well-timed distraction. Then you can plant some C4 under a house, swim underwater (and see bloodied bodies tossed into the swamp by your fellow ops) and then detonate the explosives once you reach dry land and take cover in a forest. Oh, before you make this kind of noise, however, you'll want to kill a sleeping VC in a hammock with a knife to the neck.

After a lengthy gunfight to clear an area, you'll then destroy an antiaircraft gun with rocket launcher, engage in another heated battle while ducking behind rocks, and then make your way to a clearing as choppers come to your rescue.

At the end of this demo, you jump down into a deeply dug tunnel -- which is the start of the demo shown at E3 2010 -- and as you clear it out, you'll turn on a flashlight to illuminate the subterranean labyrinth, protect your mates and then remove barrier to access another tunnel.

This is where the demo ended, but presumably, General Kravchenko is somewhere close by.

Sounds like it will be cool. I don't think the gameplay or graphics of W@W was bad. It was just that it was another WWII game.

Hopefully, they will keep all of the little things that MW2 introduced (like the lobby mute) and that, along with a new time period and environment the game will be pretty good.

Well i'm looking forward to it,

It's the "thing" to do in November haha