The major weakness is the AI – the lamentable pathfinding is all the more visible in the top-down view – but its incompetence obligates you to get your hands dirty, and so creates the delightful tension between strategy and ground tactics. At any point you can dive into the brain of a soldier or robot and take direct control. Using a high-altitude view, you capture points, defend them, protect convoys and rescue hostages. Their power is most visible in the radical addition of Strike Force, a simplistic RTS gamemode which runs in parallel to the campaign. You can target enemies with a fleet of drones or hunker behind shambling quadrupedal mechs. Turret sections are subverted almost the instant they begin, as are other staples: the slow-motion breach and clear, the last-second gun-toss.Įlsewhere, futuristic gadgetry brings welcome variety. Indeed, the game sidesteps many of the series' clichés. Except this time, there are no egregiously annoying infinite spawns. Its set-pieces become more coherent (if not the plot) and the majority of its novelties work. That we are only encouraged to worry about American foreign policy inadvertently creating Menendez-like monsters is itself troubling, but I suppose people whose lives were just quietly and terribly fucked don't make exciting antagonists.Īfter this calamitous introduction to the campaign, however, Blops 2 settles down. Menendez is not a nice man (you can tell because he has a scar) and his response to his violation by America is to go around yelling and kneecapping people, so it's hard to sympathise with him. The game's arch-villain, Raul Menendez, is a product of American interventionism gone awry, but if there's a warning there, it's subsumed by the batshit fervour of his personal quest for revenge. In this version of reality, Islamic terrorists are elided with South American socialists, hackers and anti-capitalist protesters. Despite all the techno-gobbledegook, conspiracy, brainwashing and betrayal, Black Ops 2 presents a paint-by-numbers world, in which the primary colours are fear, jingoism and self-righteous aggression. Still, such pivotal moments, when they work, do perk interest in the otherwise daft plot as it maniacally flings itself around history, occasionally stamping on the bits of it wingnuts don't like. Deciding whether or not to kill someone should be dramatic, but here it felt more like attempting to interpret faded washing instructions. I tried to wait the decision out, but eventually I assumed there was only one interactive option available. I tried shooting other people in the room, but the gun just didn't fire. When the opportunity arose to execute someone, I couldn't work out how to decline – or even if I could. But so trammelled are you in the interim that you may not realise your own power. At key points during the game you are given choices which dramatically change its outcome. This seems like a shame because it torpedoes one of Black Ops 2's most ambitious endeavours. Several reloads later, I discover that I have to press F on my companion and initiate an ending cutscene. “Keep running, Mason!” shouts my AI partner, apparently unaware that we are hemmed into this tiny sandy deathzone by invisible walls. I'd been told there were some boats on the beach, which would seem like a mission-critical observation, were it possible to interact with them. The sign above my AI partner said, 'Follow'. The very first level kills you if you stray outside the invisibly defined battle zone later you are gifted with an entire canyon to roam – assuming your horse remains above ground level.Īt one point, I found myself stuck on a beach while angry locals swarmed through the jungle behind. Playing it is to tiresomely re-analyse the ever-shifting boundaries of interaction. It's not even that Blops 2 is buggy: it's just so inflexible and brittle as to splinter at the most gentle pressure in any direction other than the one in which it is ordained to move.
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