Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 - 7 Reasons It's The Best One Yet (And 4 It's Not)

Why It's Not...

4. The Campaign Ranges From Weird To Terrible

It's fair to say that Black Ops 3's campaign is easily the most ambitious of any CoD game to date: it wants to broach thought-provoking ideas of transhumanism, life after death and the future of warfare, but it also can't seem to find a coherent way to do so. Sometimes BO3 manages to be compellingly weird, such as when it hurls a fleet of Terminator-like robots at you, but it more often swings for the fences and strikes out wildly, burying itself in nonsensical fantasy storytelling which, while admirably brave, is sadly ultimately a failure. If fairly tolerable for its first two-thirds, the game goes wildly off the deep-end from the eighth mission onwards, indulging in too many senselessly surreal (if admittedly visually impressive) sequences that struggle to muster an internal logic and pretty much feel like they happen "just because". This leads to a wildly disappointing and repetitive final mission which brings the game to a close in confusing and infuriating fashion. Nice try, Treyarch, but if your attempt to push the narrative to new dimensions has fans wishing they were playing a generic shooter campaign instead, then you've done something massively wrong.