Given that the Call of Duty series had pretty much milked World War II and the Vietnam war for all they're worth, it's hugely refreshing that Black Ops 2 finally takes the series into the future - albeit the near-future - as many have been wishing it would for a long time. It's fair to say that plenty of what we've seen so far looks absolutely ridiculous - at least in comparison to the more grounded approach of the Modern Warfare titles - but hopefully this will be in a positive way; after all, does anyone take these games that seriously in the first place, what with their Richard Nixon cameos and Nazi zombies? If this futuristic approach gives Treyarch a blank cheque to do what they like, and hopefully open the game up a bit, then it can hardly be a bad thing. Above all else, it should help distinguish CoD - as it sorely needs to be - from the glut of military shooters crowding our screens; the 2025 setting, with its insane vehicles and thought-provoking plot - about the value of a soldier in a technologically advanced world - seems a might more imaginative than what we're used to from the series. Whether it works in execution, then, is the next question.