Take Call of duty – World at War and stick it in bed with a ready and waiting Modern Warfare 2 and you get the bastard child; Call of Duty – Black ops. It’s an fast paced, emotional and anus puckering ride through Cuba, Vietnam, The Arctic, Russia and America. Not to mention when you’re done saving the western world from certain peril, you can go online, find a random sniper and ram the dirty end of your AK47 somewhere small and uncomfortable (not the back of a VW beetle) and pull the trigger and forcefully insert thirty 7.62mm full metal jacketed rounds. Beautiful.

The campaign, whilst not the longest piece of string, is thoroughly gripping and makes you continue playing until you end up face down in whatever can of energy drink you’ve chosen to prop your eye lids open with. Self sacrifice, torture, explosive car chases, the way the great escape should of happened… all in this game. The campaign is very well made, the computer AI is sufficient and the game play is both enjoyable and challenging. Whack it on veteran and its more than a challenge.

The multi-player is both brilliant and irritating, the majority of the game-play can be enjoyable, however the game still retains most of the flaws with all the previous Call of Duty titles, the terrible spawn points, the weapons being over or under powered. The biggest problem, unfortunately, is the people that play it the spawn campers, drop-shotters and general rabble of genderless hysterical fools. Problems aside however the maps are fantastically made and the level/unlock system whilst a little annoying (having to unlock THEN pay for everything) is clever and makes for a balanced game.

All in all Call of Duty – Black Ops is a fantastically made, brilliant to play masterpiece of game design, unfortunately the areas that let it down, let it down in such an irritating way that it almost ruins the whole game. The rest of the game is enough to compensate and make this game awesome.

Mister Nox – out.

Games: Call of Duty: Black Ops, Platforms: Xbox 360, Genres: Shooter, Publishers: Activision, Developers: Treyarch