You’ll go into battle with “cyber cores,” the things that give you special powers to mess with the enemy, like barreling through them at a sprint to send them flying, or incapacitating several of them with a burst of sound waves. Where Black Ops 3 tries to add new ideas, it struggles. The end result is muddled: the dialogue is confused, sometimes assuming there are many of you and sometimes not the battles are confused, with paths and flanking areas that aren’t particularly useful and the enemy designs are confused, mostly just going the Destiny route of providing you with bigger baddies that require you to shoot them more, instead of asking you to rethink your strategies.
However, Black Ops 3 constantly waffles between being built for one player and for four - it’s not sure if it should try to tell a story of a team or an individual, it’s not sure if it can rely on you to bring friends to enemy encounters, and it’s not sure how to build battles that can work with variable numbers of human participants.
Black Ops 3 ditches the fascinating narrative experiments of Black Ops 2 and instead leans on a new concept: full cooperative play that supports up to four people. In fact, the campaign in total is a bit of a mess. Zombies delivers as usual, though it’s just as tough to break into and enjoy for players not already bitten, ahem, by the undead bug.
In Black Ops 3, the subject is transhumanism, the idea of augmenting people to be better, more powerful killing machines, and what they give up as software wired into soldiers’ brains provides them with the ability to hack and control machines - and potentially, to be hacked and controlled themselves. With Black Ops 2, Treyarch took its branch of the Call of Duty franchise into the near future, concerning itself with the implications of robotics and automated warfare. It’s not all bad - Call of Duty is nothing if not a highly polished set of core mechanics - but it is an unfortunate and misguided step backward for the series.
Instead of attempting to advance the franchise in clever but logical ways, it flails around, throwing everything it can at players to keep them interested. It’s disappointing, then, that Black Ops 3 abandons all the forward progress of Treyarch’s last effort. It added refreshing variety to Call of Duty’s blockbuster gameplay formula, including exciting, new elements for what had become a best-in-class but annually-expensive multiplayer mode. It told a subversive tale of unforeseen consequences and the cost of conflict, with a branching plot that not only required players to make tough choices, but which adapted to their failures and successes. Then Treyarch dropped Black Ops 2 - a game filled with good ideas and earnest, interesting attempts to advance the series into exciting new territory. Prior to its release, repetitive annual releases felt like they were slowly crushing Call of Duty to death.
When Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 came out, developer Treyarch seemed like it might be the long-running first-person shooter franchise’s savior.