Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Photo / Supplied
Call of Duty has become so horribly mainstream that some core gamers see it as a sort of corporate killing series only the most unimaginative would be caught playing - and then they play it.
No matter how many hundreds of millions each title makes, CoD is still really the
benchmark of shooters. It's the king of online multiplayer, and though campaign modes have been shrinking in recent years, it still offers a solid single player experience that far exceeds expectations.
It follows two timelines in typically convoluted style - one through the Cold War in the 1970s and another in a new stoush between the US and China in 2025. It jumps between characters - in the early years there's Alex Mason and Frank Woods, in the latter, Alex Mason's son David trying to find out how his father was killed - and focuses on a common enemy, Menendez.
He's perfect for a game like this, admittedly pretty evil, but the product of a tragic past that makes his nastiness, at times, almost forgivable. These intertwining narratives mean a nicely varied main mode, leaping across locations and seeing players wielding rattly old weapons in the Afghani sands and in Nicaragua and super-tech hardware, toys and wingsuits in the future.
Instead of waves of soldiers, you could be fighting murderous rolling robots or quadcopter drones as well - if you imagine it'll be part of future warfare, chances are it'll be trying to kill you. A cutscene where a situation is being explained might fade out to put players in the thick of that incident, adding huge weight to these video breakaways.
