Activision released the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, on Tuesday. To some people, the series feels repetitive and stale, but to the rest it is another year of fun and competitive gameplay.

The last game (Modern Warfare 3) received mixed reviews from dedicated and casual gamers, so the developers needed to create something new and innovative in the next installment.

With that in mind, Treyarch Studios set Black Ops 2 in the year 2025. While the timeframe is new in the franchise, it isn’t necessarily an innovative feature in the first-person shooter genre.

With the new changes, there is skepticism about whether or not Black Ops 2 is worth purchasing.

From my experience, I think the game does a great job in several areas, but it fails in its most important feature: multiplayer.

First of all, Call of Duty is not famous for its campaign, but that all changes with Black Ops 2. The campaign is relatively short, but it packs a great story and a variety of gameplay. The story takes place between two time periods. Some missions are based off the Cold War era, which features characters from the first Black Ops, while the rest of the missions are set in 2025 and feature the protagonist David Mason.

All of the characters in the campaign have a correlation with the main villain, Raul Menendez. Menendez is the leader of a terrorist organization called the Cordis Die, and he attempts to cause chaos in the top two superpowers in the world: the United States and China.

The story isn’t about the good guys killing the bad guys, but rather a tragic character (Menendez) and how the player can choose the fate of several characters.

In the end you get one of four endings based on the choices you made along the way, and it is a rewarding experience because you have the option to alter the story to your choosing, which is a first in the Call of Duty franchise.

The variety of missions in the campaign makes the pace smooth and quick. Along with the campaign missions, there are missions called Strike Force missions. In these missions the objectives vary and the results of the missions do affect the outcome of the story, so I recommend playing these missions. From the storytelling to the variety of gameplay, the campaign of Black Ops 2 is one of the best this year.

I truly believe the multiplayer is the biggest flaw of this game. The maps feel smaller than the maps of Modern Warfare 3. As a result, some game modes have been affected negatively. Domination has been drastically changed because of this. The objective is still the same but now the teams have two rounds with a five-minute time limit each round. The maps are poorly designed and unbalanced, which makes the game frustrating instead of fun and competitive.

A good addition to the game is the Pick Ten system. In this system you have the option to customize your class with 10 different things, from weapons to perks.

Another new feature is the Scorestreak System. Instead of having a kill streak in order to get a game-changing weapon, now you can attain the same weapon by achieving a certain score. This rewards the players who actually play the objectives and don’t try to boost their kill/death ratio. Also, the inclusion of League Play and Multi-Team offers more options for teams or clans to play,

Finally, Zombie Mode is back and better than before. When Treyarch announced that Zombie Mode would be back, it claimed a campaign would be incorporated. That announcement made me get my hopes up for the mode, as I thought we were going to get a story while killing zombies, but it turns out that’s not the case. Instead, the zombie “campaign” is a mode called TranZit in which the player can drive a bus through what seems to be the biggest zombie map around. Aside from that, Zombie Mode remains the same (which is a good thing, because why fix something that isn’t broken?).

Overall, I think Call of Duty Black Ops 2 is a good game. Certainly not the best in the franchise, but it does have the best campaign. Zombie Mode is fun, but the multiplayer needs improvement.

3/5 Stars.