REVIEW: 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops III BETA'

I'm about to do something I'd promised I would never do: I'm going to review a Call Of Duty game. Yes, the summer drought has gotten so bad that when Activision suddenly announced that the beta of Blacks Ops III is now free on Steam I had no choice but to wait the four sodding hours it took to download (which is longer than the average Call Of Duty story mode) and bash out this review in the space of a few hours. You're welcome.

There is very little I can say about this franchise that hasn't already been said. It started off as a series trying to capitalise on the sucess of Medal of Honour's World War 2 simulations - because by jingo war is such fun. Then in 2008 it made the bold step into the modern age...and that's when things got problematic.

Suddenly, the likeable Russian characters fighting Nazi's were replaced with burly white Americans/Englishmen shooting black people who may or may not be evil. Whilst Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare had that profound sequence where you play as a soldier dying of radiation poisoning, it also had that sequence where you take control of a tactical missile interface and bomb sentient blips on the screen.

And that sums up all the games that came after Modern Warfare: abhorrent. You're chucked from one setpiece to another with no time to rest and no time to explain who you're shooting or why they deserve it. If you want to know why many people still think video games are ultra-violent, brain-corrupting filth then play any Call Of Duty game made between 2009 and 2013. Not only were these repulsive but they were some of the highest selling games ever made. They did the impossible: they sunk millions of pounds into a game that's four hours long and earnt billions from it.

DENIED

I'd like to say that the reason why the modern shooter died a death was because Spec Ops: The Line showed everyone how despicable the sub-genre was, but I think it's more because the world has changed. It's still just as racist as ever, but with the Ed Snowden leaks revealing the extent of US corruption, the UK and Australia being very openly corrupt, FIFA being almost shut down due to bribery allegations, US policeman shooting every black person who looks at them funny. and the Syrian government having a higher civilian body-count than ISIS - suddenly the terrorists seem less of a threat.

Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare went back to private corporations being the central antagonists, and it felt so good to be shooting people the same skin colour as me again. The game was still an over-linear piece of crap designed for spoilt children, but at least it was just a bad game rather than racist propaganda that encapsulated everything wrong about the United States.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops III continues the series's jump into the future as the franchise has finally realised that it's less attached to reality than Alice In Wonderland. It plagiarises Titanfall's wall-scaling mechanics, but they're much poorly implemented considering that the maps are still flat and tight, whilst Titanfall was tall and open. And there were giant robots. And helicopters. And jetpacks. In fact, if you want to play as a space-marine shooting people online then you should probably play Titanfall instead because, whilst you have to actually pay for it, you're getting more than an hours entertainment out of it.

This leads me to the massive asterix alongside the 'free beta' - it's just the multiplayer. I guess they're still working out if the bit where you snipe should go before or after the mandatory stealth-section - but either way the singleplayer is nowhere in sight. You can't even play against bots. There's not even a tutorial. It's like Half Life Deathmatch but without mod and LAN support.

That's the biggest problem with Black Ops III's multiplayer: you're thrown right in and expected to survive. I've played the Advanced Warfare multiplayer, and it was actually pretty fun. Then again, it was fun because I was playing splitscreen with a friend against bots. The pressure of competing against real people was removed, and the true spirit of multiplayer shined through: just having a good time with good people.

Because there is no offline mode in this version. During my first game, I was being murdered by people with melee attacks, grenades, people somehow using bullet-time, and an orbital missile strike. How were any of these people able to achieve this? How could I do that? Well, I'll just have to find out by myself...if everyone could kindly let me stand here for just a few moments not shooting me.

So my kill/death ratio was abysmal, and I wasn't anywhere near unlocking the special weapons. Fortunately, it seems many other people had no idea what they were doing either...though I think the guy who crawled everywhere might've been trolling...

Oh, and if your internet is unstable then you can't play the game. Once again, the Triple A industry assumes that everyone has constant access to fibre-optic broadband. Only the elite can play the elite games, and everyone else must go back to Candy Crush.

The game itself has about six modes, but they're all the same. Each mode recycles the same few maps, and in the end it all boils down to who can shoot the most people. There isn't a time-limit, or in fact any indication of how soon the round will be over and as such there's no teamwork involved in the modes that require it; such as 'capture the flag.' Again, because the game lacks any kind of tutorial then all I did was running around trying to shoot people whilst getting air-striked and backstabbed...somehow.

You can also pick from several different classes, but at least two thirds of these are locked at the start...and there's abosolutely no difference between the two. When I first stated, I selected a woman with a bow and arrow because she looked really cool (props for actually including women guys). However, I was then dumped into a team deathmatch and handed an assault rifle. So I might as well have been playing as a cyborg Charles Dickens for all the difference it made.

Perhaps only showing the multiplayer works to the games advantage. I know many people who admit the story mode to Call Of Duty is crap and they only play it because they enjoy getting yelled at by twelve year olds. The whole xenophobic context is removed, and the game simply becomes all about killing everyone you meet. Whilst I'm the sort of person who always buys a programme before watching a play, sometimes I too just want to unwind by massacring a series of polygons.

HOW THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT?!

On the other hand, making the multiplayer available free to PC gamers is it's biggest fault - because on Steam there's this little game called Team Fortress 2. It's also free, and it offers more content then several full-priced games put together. Yes, there are micro-transactions; but I've never needed to spend a penny during the 500+ hours I've sunk into the game over the years. The game also has tutorials and an offline mode against bots for pratice. As an addition to a single-player game, the Call Of Duty multiplayer has always been solid enough - but when you package it as a separate game then it just doesn't hold up.

Maybe I'm just spoilt. When I play multiplayer games, I usually play as a mad German doctor hitting an angry Australian with a frying pan. That, or I'm pretending to be a passenger of a 1940's cruise-ship before beating a flapper-girl to death with an umbrella. Compare this to roaming around a grey industrial environment shooting grey nameless faceless people in the face and you can see why I was never invested in this franchise.

Overall, I'm interested to see if Activision are releasing the beta so they can get feedback before the official release. If so, all I can suggest is that the multiplayer is torn down and started again. Make the maps more vertical, give each mode more variety, and whilst you're at it then maybe make a whole new game.

"Wah wah waaaaaaaahhh"