Call of Duty Black Ops III Review

Call of Duty Black Ops III is the next installment in the Call of Duty franchise after Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.  It was released in November 2015. Developed by Tryarch and published by Activision, Black Ops 3 is a science fiction first-person shooter.

Set in 2065, years have past since the events of Black Ops 2. Climate change and technology seem to be the biggest challenges the world faces as well as a third cold war. In this era soldiers are enhanced with cybernetics and robots are starting to replace soldiers in many forms of combat. 

The story follows the actions of a group of black ops soldiers. During one of the early missions the player is severely injured while escaping a combat zone. To save their life, the player is operated on and given a cybernetic body as well as a direct neural interface to control their new body. 

Before every mission the player starts at a safe house. This is where you choose your weapon load out and special abilities. The special abilities include the ability to run on walls, disrupt the enemies hardware, making machines turn on each other and others. These abilities can only be used for a short time before recharging.

At the beginning of the game the player can choose to play as a male or female character. This does not effect the story, just the voice acting. The game play is much like the previous Call of Duty games. Shoot the enemy, push forward to the next way point. This time the player can use their direct neural interface to hack into computers and open doors. There is even a situation where you hack into the enemies head through their DNI, but most of these actions are performed by just holding the F key on the keyboard. I have found this a bit boring by now in the Call of Duty games. This is because the game is also made to be played on a controller so it is easy to interact with things and to keep the game flowing.

One thing the game does well is keep you in the action for most of the time. The only time this is interrupted is when you complete a mission and are taken back to the safe house to choose your load out for the next mission. I would rather just continue on to the the next stage rather than being taken out of the story like that.

The game engine they used was a modified version of the IW engine they used for Black Ops 2. The graphics have improved slightly as well as the physics in the environment. The game looks really good on a recent graphics card with all the details turned up.  

The story was good. It was a bit confusing because of the SCI-FI nature of the game. It just didn't  interest or captivate me as much as the modern warfare series for example. I don't know if that is because its getting a bit long in the tooth or because some of the previous games were hard to top. There are some great moments where you a flying futuristic fighters and controlling other military hardware but I didn't enjoy the game play as much when you are shooting wave after wave of robots. I played the game on the regular difficulty and there was plenty of content for hours of game play. To some people the ending might just be confusing. 

The game is rated Mature

I give it 8.1/10