Call of Duty: Black Ops II
My favorite COD game!
I have a lot of love for this game. It was the first COD game I have ever played, Had a blast playing the multiplayer, gun game was especially my favorite. Now that I'm older, I was able to enjoy the campaign a lot better than I did my first time through. And I gotta say, this game is fantastic!
The last COD I played was MW2 (2009), and while that game has the better story, this one is no slouch either. This has my favorite gunplay out of all of the CODs I have played. I played through the campaign on Veteran, and while I died a fair amount of times, there was never a section that was impossible for me to get through. A lot easier than MW2 in that regard. This did make it a lot more fun mowing down enemies with a nerfed recoil, flinch & enemy AI.
The campaign is just a fantastic story. Where the choices you make in it, and your actions determine the ending of the game. I really like the main character, David Mason, and I always have. It's weird, but David Mason has always felt like the most human character in a video game I have played. He's not a particularly interesting guy, (though a lot of interesting things have, and do happen to him in the story), he just seems like someone I would meet in real life, and I really appreciate that about him.
The game has a very well crafted villain. He gives off the presence of a man that's insane but always two steps ahead. You feel sympathy for what has happened to him and his hatred of the US is justified. He is able to get more than one over on the characters and steals the show whenever he is on screen. However, if I did have one problem with him, it would be that he is nearly always magically able to get out of a bind.
You nearly capture him twice, but he escapes via a grenade. You finally capture him, and he escapes again. At the very end when you have the option to capture or kill him, he can still escape in a lot of the endings! The man is a master escape artist and I wish they just toned it down slightly.
All the levels are fun to go through, except one of the FOB missions, but considering that's 1 out of 16 levels, it's doing well for itself. Something I don't like, is that the game doesn't bring you into the action straight away. When replaying levels to get through challenges, It can be annoying going through what feels like a three-minute in-game cutscene. I probably wouldn't have hated these if I could just skip them, but you can't. Nor can you reload from checkpoint.
Overall, it's my favorite Call of Duty. I really enjoyed being able to play in both the past and future, and liked how there isn't such a huge technological leap in weaponry. I wrote a guide for 100%'ing it because I just enjoyed it that much. You should pick up this game if you can, just get it on sale. Sadly, the price never goes cheaper than 20$, infuriating for a 12 year old game, but it's still a very fun one.
I recommend this game wholeheartedly. Here’s a link to the guide I made for this game if you are looking to 100% it:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3404598541
