Beebom Score
I have always been “that” Call of Duty player. The one who finishes the campaign first, who still replays ‘All Ghillied Up’, who can quote Reznov more easily than real-world leaders. For me, the series has always been about the rollercoaster story first and the K/D/A later. Which is why the last decade has hurt.
We watched the campaigns slide from tightly scripted war dramas into messy spectacle pieces that were trying to be everything at once. Black Ops Cold War finally felt like a correction. It was not perfect, but it understood pacing, choice, and classic mission structure again. Despite mostly being average, Black Ops 6 campaign still felt like Call of Duty at its core.
Black Ops 7 looks at all of that, gulps a lungful of fear gas, and walks straight off the cliff. This campaign is not just a stumble. It is a full identity crisis. While the co-op structure has real potential and the game runs beautifully on even modest hardware, the story, mission design, and overall direction feel like a franchise trying so hard to find diamonds that it throws away the gold it already had.
Black Ops 7 looks at all of that, gulps a lungful of fear gas, and walks straight off the cliff.
This review is only about the BO 7 campaign. Multiplayer and Zombies are a different conversation. Sadly, you have to drag yourself through this story to unlock some of the best PvE content, and that choice defines the whole experience. So, without wasting much time, let us dive right into the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 campaign review.
A Big-Idea Plot Delivered Like a Drunk Jenga Tower Collapse
Black Ops used to be the “wall of red string” series. Conspiracies, unreliable narrators, brainwashing, and plot twists that were ‘Absolute Cinema‘. Black Ops 7 goes the other way. The story is simple in the worst way.
You get a warmed-over sequel hook to Black Ops 2, a villain setup that the game immediately undercuts, and a Saturday morning cartoon cabal called “The Guild” cooking up fear gas and quantum computers with names like The Cradle and The Forge. It is the kind of writing that feels like it came out of a lorem ipsum generator trained on edgy YouTube thumbnails.
It is the kind of writing that feels like it came out of a lorem ipsum generator trained on edgy YouTube thumbnails.
The main gimmick of the plot is the toxin that sends your team into a shared hallucination. On paper, that is a neat excuse for surreal missions and wild visual tricks. In reality, it turns the campaign into a blur of floating memory islands and Avalon set pieces that never build to anything. You bounce between nostalgia chunks from Black Ops 2 (a lot of them) and half-baked open areas, while the script shouts exposition that never lands.
Worse, there is no rhythm. Missions are long and broken into different segments, like you are completing some Warzone missions. Each chapter is stuffed with waves of bullet sponge enemies, then ends abruptly without a sense of escalation.
The whole story lasts only four to five hours, that too thanks to me taking a dinner break in the middle. Despite that, BO7 campaign still somehow manages to feel boring in the story department. By the time the final mission throws endless ultra-tanky enemies at you in cramped arenas, the only real twist is how fast your patience evaporates.
Stylish Worlds, But Sloppy Identity Weakens the Plot
Visually, Black Ops 7 is not ugly. That is part of the problem. There are genuinely striking moments. The city of Avalon has some great angles. The toxin sequences bend reality in fun ways. There are flashes of “this could have been something” all over the place. Then you look a little closer.
Character models do not feel like they belong in the same world. The cinematics and gameplay faces don’t even carry consistency. Lighting on faces and gear can shift dramatically between scenes. Some environments have clear art direction, while others feel like kitbashed leftovers from half a dozen internal projects stitched together.
Throw in some visible asset reuse from earlier games, and the campaign starts to look like a mood board instead of a cohesive world. And I will not get into the part where the game, in most parts, looks like an alpha version of Apex Legends. Did Activision only take inspiration from one game set in the future?
The presentation outside missions does not help either. Menus remain busy and awkward. The overall UI still feels like it was built for a live service launcher first and a focused story second. It constantly reminds you that the campaign is only one piece in a crowded content machine, not something that got dedicated, obsessive love.
The overall UI still feels like it was built for a live service launcher first and a focused story second.
A Lot of AI, Lack of Intelligence
Although using AI in the right way means no harm, Activision blatantly goes for the generation route. You can feel the AI discourse in this game even without checking social media. Achievement art, challenge icons, and various bits of campaign adjacent art have that suspiciously smooth, slightly off quality that screams automated generation. Activision has already admitted it is leaning on AI tools for production support, and that attitude bleeds straight into how Black Ops 7 feels to play.
The campaign already suffers from this generation formula. It officially begins with the copy-pasted enemy archetypes, the repeated encounter structures, and a script that reads like it was assembled from focus-tested buzzwords. Layering AI-flavored art on top of that does not cause the deeper problems, but it does underline them. It all feels processed, efficient, and bloodless (mostly soulless, too).
Call of Duty has always been corporate, sure. But the best campaigns still felt like there were humans in the room fighting for specific moments and ideas. Here it often feels like the game was made by a spreadsheet that occasionally lets the art team out for fresh air.
Here it often feels like the game was made by a spreadsheet that occasionally lets the art team out for fresh air.
Co-op Campaign That Wants To Be Its Own Game
If I am honest, there is one thing that hooked me for the four hours of campaign, and that takes me to this segment, the gameplay loop. Here is the cruel part. At the center of this mess is an idea that absolutely deserves a proper shot.
A full co-op Call of Duty campaign that is replayable, progression-driven, and supported like a long-term PvE mode is a strong pitch. Black Ops 7 technically does that. You matchmake into a four-player squad, you push through missions together, you unlock a post-campaign extraction-style endgame in Avalon, and your weapons and rank carry across modes. On a design document, that is exciting.
In reality, the structure suffocates the story and annoys anyone who just wants to sit down and play a campaign like a normal human being. The “campaign” is always online. It defaults to squad fill (which I hate, as an introvert). Even solo, you are locked into a match structure that does not allow proper pausing. Missions are long enough that losing connection means replaying huge chunks from scratch. There are barely any checkpoints. It feels less like a narrative mode and more like a playlist in the wrong menu.
Co-op itself is awkward. Certain puzzle segments only really give one player something to do while the others stand around (sometimes shoot the air like me). Cutscenes are often unskippable, forcing the whole squad to sit through clumsy dialogue again and again. If you join randoms, pacing becomes pure chaos. If you bring friends, there are far better co-op games out there that respect your time more. Shoutout to the GOAT; Arc Raiders.
The frustrating thing is that the core idea of a PvE multiplayer is good. The extraction-style endgame you unlock in Avalon is genuinely fun if you like PvE grinds. Moving around that city with a grapple, wingsuit, and high mobility kit feels great.
This whole structure would make a strong standalone “Black Ops Operations” mode sitting next to a classic curated single player campaign. Instead, it replaces the campaign and then forces story fans to endure it just to see the interesting parts.
Boss Fights are Basically Dollar Store Fortnite Live Events
Some of the wildest clips you have seen on social media are real. Black Ops 7 turns major Black Ops characters into hallucinated boss fights that feel like rejected ideas from three other Activision projects. Even at times, these boss fights made me feel like I am in the world of Slim Shady in a Fortnite live event, thanks Harper!
Black Ops 7 turns major Black Ops characters into hallucinated boss fights that feel like rejected ideas from three other Activision projects.
You fight a Menendez boss that plays like a basic action game encounter. You battle a monstrous vision of Woods that literally blooms into a flower-like weak point phase while zombies swarm the arena. Harper shows up later as a towering kaiju-scale figure, as I said before. Health bars float above enemies. Attacks are heavily telegraphed.
Mechanically, a few of these fights are not awful. They are extremely fun as an arcade zombie shooter. You dodge attacks, burn down weak spots, and cycle through mechanics. There is a certain dumb thrill to it in the moment.
The problem is context. None of this feels like Call of Duty. It feels like Zombies and a bit of Elden Ring and a superhero boss rush all mashed into one, but without the depth any of those modes demand. In a dedicated co-op PvE game, these would be mid-tier raid bosses you forget in a week. In a Black Ops campaign, they rip whatever tone is left to pieces.
Instead of elevating key story beats, the bosses turn your emotional connection to old characters into meme fuel. And trust me, they really did our boys, Mason and Woods, a disservice.
Familiar Names and Empty Soul Leave a Massive Hole
Black Ops 7 drags Woods, Menendez, Harper, and Mason back out of the vault, then uses them like props. This does not sit right for a fan like me who even knows every dialogue these characters utter from Black Ops original to Cold War. But the nostalgia jokes are not the only concern.
The new squad members have almost no identity. You are thrown into missions with random soldiers that the script insists are important, but never actually develops. Banter is thin. Motivations are even thinner, like paper. Without the ‘fear gas’ excuse, you could mistake half of them for generic store operators from the multiplayer mode. And god, that Winter Soldier moment where Leilani “50/50” Tupuola uses one hand to block off boss attacks; ‘cinema’.
The older icons do not fare better. The campaign expects you to care about the second Woods appears on screen simply because you know his name. Younger players who started with Warzone or Modern Warfare reboots have no context. Older fans get that context turned into a hallucinated boss arena. Nobody wins.
Black Ops stories have always been convoluted, but they usually had a pulse. There was a sense of obsession behind the madness. Here, the writing feels blunt, rushed, and often unintentionally funny. When you are laughing at villain names instead of with the script, the spell is broken. Speaking of the villain, I wish they did something with the main antagonist, Emma Kagan, other than making her look cool and take 100 missiles upfront without shedding a drop of blood.
The Only Thing It Nails: Performance
Don’t worry, not everything is broken in this new Call of Duty campaign. Here is the big bright spot. Black Ops 7 runs very well. And I mean it. With a 5060 Ti, I got a solid 100+ frames on 1080p high settings. That is a great performance for the COD standard (sadly). But that’s not all.
My PC Specs CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900x
CPU Cooler: CORSAIR H150 RGB
Motherboard: GIGABYTE B650M Gaming X AX
GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB
RAM: 32GB (32GB x 1) ADATA XPG DDR5 5600FSB LANCER
SSD: 1TB AORUS Gen 4 5000E NVMe storage
Monitor: 1080p @180hz
Network: 100 Mbps
On a “decent” PC, the kind of mid-range rig you would expect from a regular Call of Duty buyer, the campaign holds high frame rates with very few drops. Streaming in the larger Avalon spaces is solid. Visual settings scale nicely. Loading is fast enough that retries do not add insult to injury.
Gunplay still feels like Call of Duty. The feedback on Black Ops 7 weapons, the hit reactions, and the basic mechanical feel of aiming and shooting are as polished as ever. When the servers behave, latency is low and inputs feel tight.
There are packet loss and stutters in certain cutscenes and during matchmaking transitions, which tie back into the always-online structure. But purely in terms of raw performance and optimization, this is one of the smoother entries in years. If you are the kind of player who cares a lot about frames per second, Black Ops 7 does right by your hardware.
The most fun part about the visuals is the different scaling options. Although the game runs ‘always online’ for the campaign, upscaling tech is almost flawless. While I prefer playing with more frames, you will get good performance without the frame generation mechanics, too.
Verdict: A Brave Experiment That Goes Off the Rails Fast and Loud
Call of Duty needed to experiment with its campaigns again. On that level, Black Ops 7 is not lazy. It swings hard at co-op structure, at trippy visuals, at long-term PvE progression. It absolutely refuses to be another safe, linear, five-hour rehash.
The problem is that it tears out the things that made these stories matter and replaces them with a confused multiplayer mode that happens to have cutscenes. At this point, either Call of Duty needs to recommit to making real campaigns again or admit that the story ship has sailed and build around what it actually wants to be.
At this point, either Call of Duty needs to recommit to making real campaigns again or admit that the story ship has sailed and build around what it actually wants to be.
As a lifelong Call of Duty campaign fan, this one hurt in a very specific way. Not because it is simply bad, but because you can see the shape of something interesting buried under a pile of bad decisions. The co-op format could shine as a separate mode. The Avalon endgame could anchor a proper PvE offering. They usually have been in a few the payment is due performance groundwork is there.
As a campaign, though, Black Ops 7 is a failure. The story is nonsense, the pacing is exhausting, the mission design leans on repetitive dialogues and a broken twist (yay ‘Razor’ is the mole). And the tone feels like it belongs to three different games welded together. The heavy reliance on always-online systems and AI-flavored production only makes it feel more clinical and less human.
If you buy Call of Duty for the campaign, keep your money. Watch a compilation of the wildest moments, shake your head, and move on. If you are here for multiplayer or Zombies, you may still find value in the full package, but that is another review.
