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Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Campaign Review: A New Low for the Franchise

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Campaign Review: A New Low for the Franchise

Name: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Campaign Review: A New Low for the Franchise
Item: Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

Black Ops 7 abandons every instinct and intent that makes Call of Duty single-player campaigns great.

Written by Manas Mitul, Edited by David Delima | Updated: 31 December 2025 19:19 IST

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Campaign Review: A New Low for the Franchise

Photo Credit: Activision

The Black Ops 7 campaign features hallucinatory levels akin to Far Cry

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Highlights

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 released on November 14
Black Ops 7 features an always online co-op campaign
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 features a 32-player Endgame mode

Call of Duty campaigns are a part of tangible video game history. Perhaps no other game has pushed the medium closer towards cinematic blockbuster perfection than Call of Duty of yore. Back when the series cared about crafting an unforgettable single-player campaign, each new release helped the medium mature with bold, controversial missions that sparked discussion and debate. From the scorched aftermath of a nuclear detonation in Modern Warfare's “Shock and Awe” to the ding of the elevator door opening in Modern Warfare 2's “No Russian,” the series' best, most subversive moments are now video game folklore.

In the years since, Call of Duty has settled comfortably on the first-person shooter throne amidst dwindling competition. The franchise is an entertainment juggernaut that has sold over 500 million copies. And with Activision's focus firmly on the game's multiplayer component along with its growing neglect of the single-player experience, CoD campaigns are no longer what they used to be. The quality of the Call of Duty single-player experience now falls on a sine curve, alternating between peaks and valleys with each annual release.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 campaign forms a new trough on that curve, one that's lower and deeper than anything that has come in the series before. If you thought that things could not get worse than the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which weaved in Warzone-style open-world levels, you were — like me — wrong. Black Ops 7 abandons every instinct and intent that makes Call of Duty single-player campaigns great — the same instincts and intents that made last year's Black Ops 6 campaign great.

In fact, the campaign here isn't even a strictly single-player affair. Black Ops 7 features an always-online co-op campaign that repurposes levels from older games in the series. Yes, you can play it solo, but there are no checkpoints and no pause screen. You can't drop out of a mission and later pick up where you left off. Even if you're playing solo, the campaign puts you in a matchmaking lobby when you select a mission. And when in missions, you don't see a single AI companion outside of cutscenes if you're not playing co-op.

To make matters worse, the Black Ops 7 campaign feels less like it belongs in Call of Duty and more like it's a worse imitation of the psychedelic, fever dream-like missions from Far Cry or the hallucinatory Scarecrow levels from Batman: Arkham games. The Black Ops franchise is rooted in gritty military missions, covert assassinations and rogue CIA operations — it's right there in the name, "Black Ops." But the latest entry, with its inane power-ups and ridiculous boss fights, feels like a rehashed Call of Duty: Zombies mode that has none of the compelling storylines, the grounded action, and the explosive set pieces of a Black Ops game.

Black Ops 7 puts players in the shoes of David "Section" Mason from Black Ops 2
Photo Credit: Activision

Black Ops 7 is a direct sequel to Black Ops 2, taking place 10 years after the events of the 2012 game. As always, the world is on the brink of collapse and a military tech company that also doubles as a mercenary group with infinite resources is to blame. The co-op campaign essentially begins with a Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker-like inane premise — somehow Menendez returned. If you don't remember, Raul Menendez was the edgy terrorist villain you dispatched for good in Black Ops 2. But when a new video of him saying he's very much alive and planning his next big terror attack surfaces, the world goes into panic.

That's where the tech company, the Guild, led by its CEO Emma Kagan, comes in. The private militia, armed with its clandestine advanced technology and futuristic firepower, proclaims itself as the defender of human civilisation. But of course, its intentions are nefarious and its methods disturbing. That's where you come in. Black Ops 7 follows JSOC Commander David "Section" Mason, the returning protagonist from Black Ops 2, as he investigates the true purpose of the Guild. The campaign hops from one location to another as Section and his elite unit, Specter One, uncover a plot to upend the world order.

"Wake up, babe. New fascist tech CEO villain just dropped."
Photo Credit: Activision

All of this sounds like the standard affair for a military shooter campaign, but things take a wacky turn when Specter One is exposed to a mysterious toxin while investigating a laboratory operated by the Guild. You see, this dangerous chemical compound essentially acts like Scarecrow's fear toxin from the Batman comics. Section and his team start hallucinating their hats off, and the missions that follow become a psychedelic trip full of weird levels, jacked-up flashback sequences, and silly boss fights.

This would be par for the course in Far Cry, but in case Activision forgot, this is Call of Duty. Specifically, this is Black Ops. Fans expect a hard-boiled, conspiracy-riddled campaign, not a mind-bending circus act. That's perhaps the biggest slip-up Black Ops 7 makes: it fails to grasp its own identity. Call of Duty's multiplayer has been slipping into Fortnite territory with its goofy Beavis and Butt-Head skins and Squid Game crossovers, but the campaign is supposed to be sacred ground. But Activision seems to have embraced the much-maligned multiplayer ethos for Black Ops 7's campaign, too.

The Specter One unit investigates the Guild
Photo Credit: Activision

The execution of the hallucinatory co-op campaign is a complete disappointment, too. Several of the game's 11 missions take place in Avalon, the large open-world map introduced in Black Ops 6's multiplayer and Warzone, Call of Duty's free-to-play battle royale mode. The scale of these levels is impressive, but the atmosphere and detail seen in carefully crafted single-player missions from older COD games are missing. Over the years, Call of Duty games have featured some striking campaign locations — from the irradiated and abandoned city of Pripyat in Ukraine to the Vorkuta Gulag in the first Black Ops — that remain burned in memory. But Avalon's wide-open playground is forgettable and rightly belongs in the multiplayer mode.

Most other missions in Black Ops 7 occur in Section's hallucinations, where he experiences vivid and colourful visions that often veer into cheap horror tropes before culminating into exhausting boss fights. In an early mission, Section and his team get trapped in a vision where he encounters Menendez in a closed compound. What follows is perhaps the most baffling COD mission ever designed. You literally scurry around the compound, killing faceless and monstrous minions and picking up a special power-up that lets you precision drop a giant machete on Menendez's head. In another toxin-induced trippy mission, you're sucked into a vision of Frank Woods from Black Ops 1 and 2 as he's held captive and tortured by Menendez. The level culminates in you taking on a giant, tentacled plant monster, a manifestation of Woods' trauma, in a mind-numbing boss fight.

Many of Black Ops 7's missions take place in Avalon, an open-world map
Photo Credit: Activision

Black Ops 7 has some of the worst boss fights I've ever seen in games. In one boss fight, you take on a turret; in another, you shoot RPGs at an armoured VTOL aircraft. These showdowns severely lack imagination and quickly become a grating, repeating fixture of the campaign. Running around a poorly designed arena and shooting at a ridiculous, bullet-sponge boss for 15 minutes is just not fun. It baffles me how Activision allowed these sequences to be in the final game.

And when you're doing missions in Avalon, the exhaustion from traversing across an expansive and largely empty map sets in soon, and you start skipping through the open world bloat to make a beeline towards your next objective. And you can't help wondering: Why are there boss fights in a Call of Duty campaign? Why is the bulk of the game made up of fever-dream missions where there's no sense of grounded realism? Why does the single-player campaign include an open-world multiplayer map? Either Activision has completely lost the handle on what players want from Call of Duty, or it is purposefully pushing tired multiplayer tropes in the single-player mode.

You don't see your companions in Black Ops 7's campaign when playing solo
Photo Credit: Activision

The campaign culminates with Endgame, a new replayable co-op experience where Section and his squad take on diverse challenges in the aftermath of the game's main story. This mode is essentially a progression-driven survival mode where you level up your gear and abilities and test them against escalating objectives in an up to 32-player PvE co-op run in the city of Avalon. This is a fun and engaging co-op experience largely untethered to the main storyline of the game. In fact, at launch, the mode was only accessible to players who completed the 11 campaign missions, but Activision quickly unlocked the mode, allowing players to skip the campaign and experience the Endgame. That says something about what Activision itself thinks of the Black Ops 7 campaign.

Aside from its crisis of identity, Black Ops 7's campaign also suffers from Activision's larger approach to the mode. I'm not particularly against a co-op campaign, but not at the cost of the solo experience. Single-player campaigns in games like Call of Duty should feel cinematic and hand-crafted, not cut from the multiplayer cloth. The emphasis isn't on the story, but that doesn't mean that you abandon every good storytelling practice.

Black Ops 7's campaign lacks memorable missions and cinematic set pieces
Photo Credit: Activision

In Black Ops 7, when you start the co-op campaign, you're put in a matchmaking lobby even when you're playing solo. You can tweak your loadout before the game pushes you into the mission, and while on missions, you can complete challenges and find loot to rack up persistent rewards as part of a bloated progression system underpinning the campaign.

The silliest thing is that when you deploy solo, you don't even see AI-controlled teammates alongside you in the missions. You can see them in cutscenes, but the moment the gameplay begins, and it's just you talking to your squad on the radio. The campaign is also always online, with no save checkpoints — I lost progress in a mission on more than one occasion where I had to begin the level all over again. And because it's always online, you can't even pause the single-player campaign even when you're playing solo.

The hallucinatory missions feel out of place in Black Ops 7
Photo Credit: Activision

What Activision gets right, as always, is the gameplay fundamentals. The gunplay is what we've come to expect from a new Call of Duty. It's tight and satisfying and frenetic. Bullet impacts feel weighty and guns have a distinct feel as you cycle through an arsenal of them through the course of the campaign. Black Ops 7 also brings refinements to the movement tech that we've seen in previous games. You can use a grapple hook, jump off the ledge and activate your wingsuit to glide long distances in Avalon. Or you can use specific abilities you pick up across levels that allow you to jump higher or deploy turrets.

Performance, too, is largely solid and reliable. On PC, Activision provides a deep suite of graphical settings and presets that help you optimise image quality and framerate based on your hardware. We tested the game on a rig provided by CyberpowerPC India, which features a 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13400F processor, 16GB DDR5 RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, and 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD (PCIe Gen4). On 'High' settings at 2K resolution with Nvidia DLSS frame generation on, I was able to run Black Ops 7 at over 100fps comfortably. Call of Duty has always set high graphical standards, but Black Ops 7 lacks the visual flair of previous titles in the series. There are no standout locations or moments where the game gets to flex its graphical muscles.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's gunplay fundamentals shine
Photo Credit: Activision

Activision promised a groundbreaking co-op campaign for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, but what you get is a rehashed Call of Duty: Zombies-like mode that goes against everything that makes a COD campaign good. The series has strayed far from its grounded origins in recent years, but it has never flown out of orbit this far. With misfiring co-op systems, unimaginative missions, and multiplayer tropes, the Black Ops 7 campaign represents a new low for the series.

So, what's next for Call of Duty? Surely, the annual release cycle is not changing, but Activision has admitted that it missed the mark with Black Ops 7. The publisher has said that it won't be releasing back-to-back Modern Warfare and Black Ops games going forward, and that it knows what players want — “we know what you expect and rest assured we will deliver.” The multiplayer formula is largely fine and as long as Activision can check the series' slide towards Fortnite-style crossovers, millions will flock to play online every year. The Call of Duty single-player campaign, however, needs a fresh approach. Activision only needs to look at the series' past to find the winning formula.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

REVIEW
KEY SPECS
NEWS

Good
Excellent gunplay
Consistent PC performance
Fun and engaging Endgame mode

Bad
Co-op systems cripple solo experience
Out of place hallucinatory missions
Lack of memorable missions and set pieces
Rehashed levels
Frustrating boss fights

Read detailed Activision Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 review

Genre Shooter

Platform PlayStation 4 (PS4), PlayStation 5 (PS5), Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC: Windows

Modes Single-player, Multiplayer

Series Call of Duty

PEGI Rating 18+

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Further reading: Call of Duty Black Ops 7, Black Ops 7, Activision, PC, Call of Duty

Manas Mitul

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In his time as a journalist, Manas Mitul has written on a wide spectrum of beats including politics, culture and sports. He enjoys reading, walking around in museums and rewatching films. Talk to Manas about football and tennis, but maybe don’t bring up his video game backlog. More

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