![]() ![]() This preoccupation with gore isn't just for show. The terrorist attacks depicted in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 may be upsetting, but their effect is created without the same attention to physical torment as any number of maimings and executions from Treyarch’s work. It's a studio trademark, deliberate in the way Black Ops shows militarily inflicted death as an agonizing, horrific process rather than the simple end of life. Other Call of Duty games made by Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games are violent in their own right, but none of them detail the various wretched things that can be done to a body quite like Treyarch. Even for the hyper violent standards of most first-person shooters, these moments stand out as pointed, included to set the tone of a series intent on portraying the physical horrors of war. Throughout the series, audiences have witnessed everything from a prisoner having his eye gouged out with a knife to soldiers vomiting to death as a nerve agent blisters their faces from witnessing a protagonist’s legs broken in half and arms ripped off from a first-person viewpoint to a woman’s face pressed into roaring flames, her flesh melted off to the bone. Part of this is subseries creator Treyarch’s love of gore. The Black Ops games have always traded in brutality. A Journey Through Call of Duty: Black Ops This, despite what it may sound like, is Black Ops 4's greatest success. The result, despite being the most thinly plotted Call of Duty to date, is a nasty depiction of war that revels in unending violence for its own sake. All of it, from Woods’ hyper macho banter to the ruined environments of every multiplayer map, is intentionally, loudly vile. There is nothing to hold onto, then, but the certainty of killing and killing and killing some more across the game’s modes. Once revealed, without going into specifics, the player learns only that they're part of a cynical, manipulative plot that involves lots and lots of simulated warfare. Its thin plot sees Savannah Mason, "the world’s first trillionaire," recruiting the specialists for a private war whose purpose is only uncovered by completing these training missions again and again. A hologram of the first two Black Ops' Frank Woods teaches the player how to use their combat moves, making fun of Ajax’s call-sign (“What were your parents thinking?”), spouting unconscionable one-liners (“Hickory dickory dock, health and ammo rock”), and ceaselessly insulting enemies in the stupidest possible terms (“Ah, look,” he says after teaching how to use a cluster grenade, "It's dipstick and his buddies doing bomblet boogie.") Notably, even the scraps of narrative context provided by the Specialist HQ tutorial missions-the closest Black Ops 4 comes to a single-player mode-are hilariously over-the-top in their ugliness. The map Gridlock in Black Ops 4 shows an area of an unidentified "Japanese metropolis" in fiery turmoil. The world is a hellish vision of endless war. There is no room, outside of lobby menus, for anything but combat. Instead, there is only a suite of largely plot-agnostic multiplayer maps, from the classic kill ‘em all deahmatches and the cooperative objective and zombie-focused modes to a dog-eat-dog “battle royale” closely modeled after PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite. There is no downtime or anything like peace. Black Ops 4, though, has done away with the usual “campaign” mode and its trappings. In previous games, players would often begin and end missions by listening to another character speak, maybe wandering through the halls of an opulent resort or listening to a briefing on a military ship between firefights. The player, as one of a series of international soldiers with names like “Ruin,” “Firebreak,” “Battery,” and “Torque,” is given no downtime to view their surroundings as anything other than a series of firing and cover positions. Always viewed from behind gun sights, its levels consist of a series of battlefields where coastal villas, arctic research installations, and old stone forts have been blasted apart by ceaseless warfare. ![]() The world as we see it in Black Ops 4 absolutely sucks. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |