It's right about the time you're shooting a well-known communist leader in the head that it all clicks into place. Here we are in Call of Duty land again, where insane Boy's Own battle action and precise historical detail weirdly conjoin. This long-running series of million-selling military shooters is essentially the Inglourious Basterds of the gaming world – a strange, ridiculous, entertaining, fanciful and bloody celebration of man's interest in violence. And it still works. By some considerable margin, Black Ops works.
For the campaign mode, you play almost exclusively as Alex Mason – a special operations veteran caught up in the Bay of Pigs invasion and then cast into a covert war that quickly descends into a fraught psychological odyssey. As the action ping-pongs between Cuba, Vietnam and Russia, an interesting tale plays out concerning dodgy CIA dealings, Nazi experiments and communist expansionism, all bubbling beneath the accepted "facts" of the era. It's similar to the Modern Warfare titles in that it actually boils down to a classic manhunt in the end, but while some elements get lost in the rush, this is easily the most cogent and well-constructed story we've seen from this franchise in a number of years. Although it's not quite the time-travelling psychedelic drug orgy some were expecting, there are several well-handled plot twists that make Modern Warfare's narrative battering ram look even more brutish and incoherent.
Splattered across the game's expansive Cold War canvas is a very familiar Call of Duty experience. Once again, we're shooting our way along linear paths, more often than not following a lone indestructible character as he barks out orders. Navigational options are kept to an absolute minimum, a straitjacket that feels almost suffocating at times, especially when we're shown astoundingly rich and detailed environments like Vietnamese jungles and the inner chambers of the Pentagon only to be told we can't go anywhere.
