Betrayal. War. Guns. It's a tale as old as time. Literally.
In Call of Duty: Black Ops III, you play as a soldier fighting a war some 50 years into the future. While in a firefight, you get yourself pretty messed up by a robot and are in need of some heavy cybernetic enhancements. This is where the campaign of Black Ops III takes off.
The first thing you'll notice is how darn pretty it is. Sparks fly off of walls, guns are heavily detailed and refined and the characters and cutscenes move seamlessly in and out of live gameplay.
Voice acting is superb and the acting is at peak COD form, bringing in Hollywood talent like Christopher Meloni and Ron Perlman and coupling them with the best of the best in video game voice acting, like Nolan North. Also, Seattle Seahawks player Marshawn Lynch is totally in this game.
The campaign clocks in anywhere from six to eight hours depending on difficulty level, though difficulty isn't much more than a few more enemies that seem to be able to see you through walls, cars, ten feet of concrete, etc. It can be awfully frustrating.
But let's be honest, you showed up for the multiplayer.
Taking notes from the Multiplayer Battle Online Arena genre, or MOBA, Black Ops III introduces Specialists, essentially hero characters that the player will unlock over time. When you boot up multiplayer for the first time, you'll select your first hero and that's where your character base starts.
There's Outrider whose equipped with a superpowered crossbow, Ruin, your typical cybernetic soldier, Prophet, specializing in energy weapons, and a handful of others.
With rumors that Treyarch and Activision plan to support Black Ops III with two years of content, one would expect new heroes to show their faces over time. It's kind of ingenious actually, and gives the game legs.
The rest of what you'd expect is also here. The multiplayer suite is packed with core, hardcore and bonus game types, including Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed and my personal favorite, Gun Game (players cycle through timed weapons and have to basically be great with every one of them.)
Create-a-Class is back, along with Gunsmith, a studio that allows you to completely customize your weapons. Though, you may want to refrain from painting anything phallic or obscene on your guns. Oh, and Scorestreaks are back too, rewarding players for collecting kills without dying.
New to the series is Black Market, a mode that uses in-game currency called 'Cryptokeys' for random supply drops. Players can purchase said drops and gain some cool weapon, attachment or equipment loot. Borrowing from games like Borderlands and Destiny, some of the loot may be rare, though that's totally up in the air.
Ten Cryptokeys net you a common supply drop and 30 will score you a rare one, and yes, they do seem a lot like microtransactions. The thing is, you can't actually use real money to buy these, though that can always change in a future update.
And if campaign and multiplayer just aren't enough, Black Ops III brings back the ever-lovable Zombies mode, which is a blast to play with friends. There's also a new Freerun mode, which is kind of like a poor-man's Mirror's Edge. You can run on walls, jump and roll and act like a total badass, but you can do that in multiplayer as well.
Overall, Black Ops III packs a lot of punch for its $60 entry fee. With tons of content planned for at least the next year and already so much stuffed into the game, it's more than worth it. The campaign and multiplayer offer new, exciting experiences that the last few entries have lacked.
Sure, the game is a far cry (heh) from the golden age of the series, but it's still fun. And at the end of the day, what more can we ask for from a video game?
