At this point, when seeing a Call of Duty game, it’s assumed that you’re going to be in an aircraft of some sort while looking at a grainy and indistinct monochrome screen. Hey, you’re the gunner guy in an AC130 for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And then you’re a gunner on a PBY Catalina for Call of Duty: World at War. And looky here, you’re controlling a UAV for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. So when Treyarch is demonstrating a mission from Call of Duty: Black Ops’ campaign called “WMD,” you can imagine my complete lack of surprise in seeing the player hop into a SR-71 Blackbird. Here goes another plane level.
Except this time, as the Blackbird is taxiing up the runway for takeoff, I honestly am surprised to see the following prompt: “Pull left-stick to pull up.” Yes, you actually take off and guide the Blackbird for a few minutes — for the first time, I’m not just seeing the player be a passenger or gunner on a plane, but the player actually pilots the plane this time. In fact, Community manager Josh Olin teases that there might be more player-controlled aircraft within the single-player campaign.
The pilot then looks down onto his screen, and the familiar “look at the ground from way up high” perspective comes up. But in another small tweak to the expected, instead of gunning stuff from above (after all, the Blackbird was an unarmed spy plane), you’re actually commanding the squad below a bit. Your technical task is providing “tactical recon” for a squad of black ops badasses below, and you use the right stick to point out safe spots on the map for them to move to. But the moment that a bunch of Russians park their jeeps and trucks in front of the house your buddies are hiding in, your perspective shifts to that of being the guys on the ground.
The mission is simple: you’re looking for, and disabling, a Soviet weapons depot deep in the Ural mountains. And no, this isn’t the same alternate world where an ultranationalist Russian triggers an active war in the US in the near-future — this is during the freakin’ 1960s, a.k.a. the heart of the Cold War. The demonstration shows off a lot of signature COD gameplay: tightly focused medium-to-close-range infantry combat for the most part. There’s a little bit of sneaking around early on, but, unsurprisingly, everything goes to bedlam later on, and there’s a whole lot of running, gunning, and avoiding of sweet explosions.
But even during this typical COD gameplay scenario, I’m spotting a few more tweaks and additions to the core gameplay. At one point, you have to rappel down the side of a mountain to breach the base, and while a comparative rappel/ice-climbing scene in Modern Warfare 2 was largely automated (save for some trigger pulls), this instance calls for actual timing and thought. Here, you have to balance between pulling one trigger to descend, and pulling the other one to brake — otherwise you might end up falling and breaking your neck on impact like the demo player.
Or when the player whips out a crossbow for the last leg of the mission. First off, it’s a crossbow — something I don’t remember seeing in previous Call of Duty games. But more importantly, it’s a crossbow that fires both standard and explosive bolts. The fact that weapons now have multiple ammunition types adds a small, but interesting wrinkle to the gunplay. It’s not just a simple matter of aiming your assault rifle and shooting, now you can adopt different tactics based on ammunition. For this demo, the tactical choice is to either use the normal bolts to take out foes silently, or switch to explosive bolts and either blow them apart, or take out structures and vehicles with them. As I said, it’s a small change, but it looks like it could add some tactical variety.
It’s after a scene where the player has to jump off a mountain that Treyarch personnel then load up another mission, “Slaughterhouse,” which takes place during the Vietnam War. I steel myself. I’m not the kind of person who gets angry, or knocks over magazine racks, on principle when I hear that a game has the player spend a fair amount of time shooting people of my ethnicity or race. If you’re going to see or play a conflict that has pretty clear racial/ethnic divisions, then you’ll need to expect to see a lot of the people in question getting shot. I’m actually more concerned about whether the sides are portrayed as sheer caricature or if there’s a semblance of sensitivity with the subject matter.
And so I’m kind of glad to see that Treyarch seems to be taking things seriously when it comes to showing the Vietnam War. I remember how harsh their portrayal of the Japanese was for World at War, and, well, that is pretty similar to what the Vietnam War scenarios will be like. Though, thankfully, Treyarch doesn’t go for the stereotypical “black pajamas and rice hats” look for the Vietnamese; they’re just dressed up like typical soldiers. In fact, I don’t even hear any stereotypical screeching that usually passes for Vietnamese battle dialogue in movies and games — I’m pretty sure the American NPCs in your group yell more than the enemy does during this demo.
Anyhow, the actual mission takes place during the Battle of Hue, and while that chaos is happening, your objective is to guide your squad through the streets and obtain some CIA documents off of the American base and get the heck out of dodge. Another alternate ammunition type shows up here, where you have shotguns that fire Dragon’s Breath shells — these are crazy incendiary rounds that make your shotgun act more like a one-button flamethrower. Basically, you have more signature COD combat, but this time, you don’t merely kill enemy troops, you kill them with fire.Treyarch personnel conclude the COD: Black Ops demo with a sequence where you call in air support (a good ol’gun-toting Huey) to provide cover fire for an M113 on the ground. It’s the expected “grandiose and explosion-filled Call of Duty moment.” These are just two levels plucked from a campaign that, in Olin’s words, “will span decades.” While I expect the majority of the game to be focused on Russia during the ’60s to the maybe even the awesome ’80s, Treyarch can surprise us with something crazy. And on top of that we still haven’t seen any multiplayer — whether traditional adversarial stuff or any of the “unique online co-op with four-player online and two-player splitscreen support.” While Call of Duty: World at War did show that Treyarch is a damn fine developer that can get out of Infinity Ward’s shadow, it’s encouraging to see that the studio is putting its all into Black Ops, and that it has the capability of actually surprising us.
