“Call of Duty: Black Ops 7” Signals a Franchise in Stasis | Video Games

“Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” was one of the more underrated games of 2025, a blockbuster experience with a genuinely engaging campaign and some of the best multiplayer map design and physics in the genre’s history. Listen, some people gave up on “Call of Duty” years ago, tired of paying $60-70 every year for what often feels like little more than new maps. The franchise has been operating under an ethos that my grandfather used to preach for a long time: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And given how much money these games made, they definitely ain’t broke. People love to complain about “Call of Duty,” but they still buy it in ridiculous numbers.

As defensive as I was about the criticisms often aimed at “Black Ops 6” from people who hadn’t even played it, “Black Ops 7” deserves every one of them. The multiplayer portion of the game, which most players use, felt like a step back at launch, with uninspired new maps. It’s telling that the maps most commonly chosen in multiplayer matches and the ones that seem to be enjoyed the most are literal rehashes of ones from other games: Hijacked, Raid, and Express. The new maps are clunky and just poorly designed. And the game’s physics don’t seem as consistent either. At the start, grenades simply didn’t work, doing almost no damage at all.

To be fair, the actual game mechanics seem to have improved over the last few weeks. But I have to admit I’m a bit exhausted by games that punish their most loyal fans by releasing inferior products that are then fixed through patches.

Of course, fans of this series, even the reluctant ones, will tell you that patience is the key with a game like “Call of Duty.” Don’t like the launch maps—six new ones are coming in season one, which started this week. And, to be fair, they do seem like a step-up from the initial batch, although, again, the highlight is a remastered “classic” in Standoff. Having said that, I do think the developers will continue to fine-tune “Black Ops 7” to make it better with each update. I already like it significantly more than I did a couple of weeks ago.

What they can’t change is maybe the worst campaign in the history of the franchise. Story-based, cinematically-inspired campaigns have become an increasingly lesser part of games like “Call of Duty” and “Battlefield,” but “Black Ops 6” had a great one, and this one promised to pick up right where that left off, with a co-op campaign that can be played with some of your best buddies. It’s an absolute mess. Starring Milo Ventimiglia and Michael Rooker, it is mainly built on the mission in “BO6,” which incorporated gameplay from the Zombies mode into the campaign through a psychedelic agent that had your soldier battling a supernatural enemy. That aspect has been amplified tenfold, leading to an early boss fight in which you are literally dodging giant machetes falling from the sky.

Here’s where a critic would usually convey the story of a campaign mode, but I can’t even really tell you what the one in “Black Ops 7” is about. All I know is that I had to fight a giant Rooker-Meets-Terminator creature more than once. Even worse than the awful boss fights are the waves of generic enemies who have all the AI of an installment in this series from over a decade ago. Campaigns in a game like “Black Ops 7” should feature intelligent enemies, villains who can respond to your gameplay, communicate, flank, and be unpredictable. The enemies in “BO7” have all the personality of zombies in a “House of the Dead” arcade game.

It’s remarkable how few people are even playing the campaign. My trophy for completing it revealed that less than 1% of players had achieved that goal. While it’s tempting to dismiss the campaign as not even worth talking about, given how few are playing it, I feel like it’s one of the places that this series could push back against the criticisms that each installment is the same by offering something worth playing. The developers just refuse to take that opportunity.

“Black Ops 7” offers many other ways to play beyond the campaign and multiplayer, including fan favorites Zombies and Warzone, as well as the return of Dead Ops Arcade. And there are a few welcome new tweaks. I like the addition of Overclocks, little customizable options to add to scorestreaks, field upgrades, and equipment, and the new mode Overload (basically Capture the Flag) is fun.

But it’s hard to shake the feeling that all of this is getting exhaustingly repetitive. Nothing lasts forever. Will the sense that every “Call of Duty” is the same as the last “Call of Duty” eventually catch up with these video game soldiers? Probably not this year, but I don’t believe “Call of Duty” can rest on its success forever without experiencing a decline. The franchise may not need rescuing yet, but the clock is ticking.

The publisher provided a review copy of this title. It is now available.

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