The “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 | Story So Far” trailer ends with the line “In the world of Black Ops, the past never dies.” In retrospect, it reads like a joke—and a little like a threat. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is what happens when, instead of letting a storyline die, you embalm it with Mountain Dew and force its caffeinated corpse to reminisce with you. Sure, it’s an interesting way to revisit an old friend, but in between moments of nostalgic fun, it’s hard to ignore that you should probably open a window.
Let’s be honest, most people buy Call of Duty for either the multiplayer or Zombies, and while both offerings are as good in Black Ops 7 as they were in Black Ops 6 (BO6), they’re not all that different. The experience is similar enough to give you the cynical inkling that you’ve paid full price for a reset to your camo grind and to unlock a near-future reskin.
Part of this is an inevitable byproduct of Call of Duty’s biennial production model, where one studio handles back-to-back yearly releases. The games feel similar because they are. Making a game is expensive, and Call of Duty is expected to be as regular as Madden.
“This is the biggest Zombies campaign yet and is arguably the centrepiece of Black Ops 7, rather than a fun add-on.”
All things considered, this is a more substantial update than the change between the last two Modern Warfare remakes. It may be a reskin, but it does not always feel like one. Multiplayer carries over the same mechanics as BO6 but has gone through a pacing overhaul that brings the series back to the fast-paced, arcade action of Black Ops 2.
It also introduces a strong new 20v20 Skirmish mode, where two armies fight for control of objectives across two large maps. Speaking of Madden, there is also the new football-like Overload mode, where teams try to deliver an EMP spike to the enemy’s safe zone. Of all the new features, Overload produced the most intense matches during the play test period, and it is easy to imagine it becoming a fan favourite, much like Kill Confirmed did in 2011’s MW3.
Zombies seem to have gotten the lion’s share of attention this time. This is the biggest Zombies campaign yet and is arguably the centrepiece of Black Ops 7, rather than a fun add-on. The new map features six locations and is so large that your team will need a haunted, upgradable truck to get around. Lucky for you, there happens to be one. Players have eight characters to choose from, including the original team of Richtofen, Dempsey, Nikolai and Takeo.
Where things get a little more dicey is the single-player and co-op campaign and the accompanying Endgame mode.
Overall, as a single-player action game, it comes together pretty well. As a Call of Duty title, though, it is going to be divisive. Black Ops 7 leans hard into sci-fi and horror, moving almost entirely away from its military shooter roots. Where older entries drew inspiration from action thrillers and real-world conflicts, Black Ops 7 is fully self-referential, even blurring the narrative and mechanical lines between itself and its Zombies mode.
Trying to summarize the story of this game in a short review would be like giving bullet points to a fever dream. I’ll try my best, but I just finished it this morning, and the whole thing is still a fog.
“Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is what happens when, instead of letting a storyline die, you embalm it with Mountain Dew and force its caffeinated corpse to reminisce with you.”
The story in Black Ops 7 sends players back to the near future of 2035 for a new adventure with Black Ops 2 protagonist David “Section” Mason. David and his special forces team are deployed to the Mediterranean to hunt down a tech CEO named Emma Kagen, who is responsible for creating a new bioweapon called Cradle. This gas weaponizes fear and triggers violent mass hallucinations, or maybe they are real. Things get weird fast.
As the game progresses, the grounded, real-world missions melt into Dalí-esque reimaginings of classic Black Ops locations. The story starts with your squad fighting waves of robots and faceless corporate soldiers, but before you know it, you are firing rockets into the mouth of a 300-foot-tall Michael Rooker and protecting memories of fishing with your dad from being corrupted by demon spiders. Yes, you read that correctly.
You also fight armies of POW ghouls and shoot corrupted blossoms off a gargantuan flower made of Frank Woods. It’s all very normal and very serious.
The problem isn’t that it’s tonally different from what Call of Duty fans expect, it’s that it’s tedious to get through. As the enemies grow more unreal, they soak up more and more damage, turning everything from the mid-game on into a string of bullet-sponge arenas.
Whenever the story takes another whacky turn, it’s just a sign you’re in for more repetitive gallery shooting. It’s also so consistently goofy that it’s hard not to check out mentally. If it were played for laughs or as a campy romp, that would be one thing, but the game presents all of it with Call of Duty’s signature “cool guys don’t look at explosions” bravado.
This all culminates in the new Endgame mode, which extends the campaign into an open-world multiplayer PvE extraction shooter. It sounds pretty cool, but it doesn’t feel new, and what it evolves from was free.
“Black Ops 7 leans hard into sci-fi and horror, moving almost entirely away from its military shooter roots.”
Endgame is a reworked DMZ. Players drop into an open-world map solo or in a squad, complete missions and try to extract before the timer runs out. There are zombies now, and no PvP or looting, but the setup is essentially the same. Instead of gambling with gear, players gamble with skills. As you complete missions and defeat enemies, your operator gains perks, improves weapons and raises their combat rating. If you extract successfully, you can re-enter the map with your upgraded character to take on tougher sections. If you die, progress resets.
It’s an interesting take on the extraction genre, and after endless hours of looting scrap metal in Arc Raiders, the break from item grinding is welcome. But the lack of PvP and the tonal mix of robots and monsters across the Avalon map leaves me underwhelmed.
And like the rest of the campaign, Endgame is far more arcadey than anything we’ve seen in Call of Duty before. Enemies have visible health bars and spit out damage numbers when shot, they don’t drop weapons for battlefield pickups, and their strength scales depending on where they spawn on the map.
It’s Call of Duty trying something new, which is genuinely interesting, but it’s not yet clear whether it works.
It’ll be interesting to see how the community takes to the PVP-less open world. There are tangible benefits to the lobby working together—but then again, this is COD.
I won’t lie: I’ve already done some “science” and found ways to mess with other players. There’s no reward for being hostile, except the act itself, but in COD, this is enough.
I’d never encourage trolling ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), but just note: it took me twenty minutes to invent my own version of PvP. I’m one dumb, mostly benevolent guy—there’s no telling what an entire ecosystem of COD players will come up with. I fear for the innocence of this mode.
But I digress. The whole point of Endgame and the story’s tonal shifts seems tailored to the Zombies crowd. Cradle, as a narrative device, opens the door to swarms of melee demons, wizards and flying beasts, while the near-future setting makes room for tanky robots and weapon-upgrade stations. None of it really gels, though, and the acid-trip revisiting of old Black Ops moments feels tacked on and unnecessary.
Call of Duty is a series in metamorphosis; it needs to adapt or die. Black Ops 7 is the awkward pupa stage—its parts have turned to goo. The good bits are starting to reform, but they haven’t yet become something new. To distinguish itself from old rivals like Battlefield and new contenders like Delta Force, it bets on itself, doubling down on its Zombies fanbase and leaning into its arcade shooter roots.
For the most part, it works, but the game still feels weighed down by shoehorning old storylines and characters into something that’s trying to be new.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a love letter to Zombies fans, and the mode is clearly where its heart is. Its Dark Aether adventure is the most ambitious yet, and its influence spills into the main campaign. Multiplayer remains largely the same as Black Ops 6, with tighter, faster maps that reward constant, violent motion over careful positioning. For me, the single-player campaign and Endgame are a miss, but two out of three ain’t bad.
