Ranking Every Call Of Duty Campaign From Worst To Best

11. Black Ops II

The first Call of Duty to really flirt with futuristic themes, Treyarch's Black Ops series sort of lost its charm once it transitioned from its 1960s espionage roots to the near-future bombast of this sequel.

It's not bad taken in isolation, it's just that in comparison to the psychologically-driven original game, Black Ops 2 feels like a misstep. The jump to the future didn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but the way the game returns to the past to build a decades-spanning plot isn't executed anywhere as neatly as it should have been.

But that convoluted plot is still the saving grace of this sequel, as the ability to see returning characters in a new context is admittedly appealing, even if some of the recurring threads from the previous game feel a bit tacked on in the grand scheme of things.

It's still a campaign worth playing - and the ability to pursue branching storylines adds something new to the CoD formula - but Black Ops 2 feels at odds with a publisher that clearly wanted to leave past conflicts behind and embrace a new science-fiction future.