Nobody cares about this story, or about these clichés of sweat and balls who bark nonsense such as “All kinds of shit here intel everywhere” when crashing through an operations room or “We hit the f***ing hornet's nest” as the next line of identikit enemy soldiers file in through some side-door.īut the plot usually provides some justification for a tour of exotic theatres of war (and in the case of Captain Price and John MacTavish, a welcome seasoning of real character). Black Ops Declassified is billed as a segue between the events of the two main Black Ops titles, placing you in the jackboots of Frank Woods and Alex Mason. However, zoom out and the game's wider problems shift uncomfortably into focus - problems covered in the frantic fingerprints of a team straining against time and budget. At every turn, your Call of Duty muscle-memory remains unchallenged: Black Ops Declassified is a functionally convincing expression of Infinity Ward's ageing template, at least at the most basic level. Approach a closed door and you must plant a pack of C4, breach and clear the room as the splinters and bodies drop in slow motion. Swipe at the front touchscreen and you'll slash a knife upwards, melee-killing any enemy within arm's length, while stabbing at the grenade icon on the HUD will lob the projectile down your line of sight, driving a huddle of enemies from cover or decimating an unsuspecting room. The sound levels throughout the game are unusually quiet. The left trigger brings up the iron-sights of whichever of the scores of weapons you've plundered from the trail of dead, while a tap of the right fires a shot. You move through the game's pocked streets with familiar quickness and precision, the Vita's stiff, pleasing analogue sticks allowing you to wheel around and pick out targets on a dime or to line up squinting headshots in a pinch. Black Ops Declassified may be short, it may be devoid of spectacle, it may be missing that spark of creative life force that keeps the annual routine of Call of Duty games from truly stagnating - but the two games undeniably share a soul and a structure.ĭeveloper Nihilistic has ably replicated the feel of Call of Duty.
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Nevertheless, it would be dishonest for any critic to breathlessly praise its heavyweight PC and console brother, Black Ops 2, for its vainglory before gasping in indignation at this handheld expansion to the fiction.
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But while Black Ops Declassified casts out the set-piece (or, more truthfully, hasn't the budget to pay for it), the game maintains the underlying Call of Duty format: a series of unyielding play corridors that must be trudged through en route to the mission's exit - an exit that isn't punctuated by nuclear explosions or toppling landmarks. Of course, for some, the set-piece has destroyed the first-person shooter in recent years: an invasion of Hollywood showmanship that has robbed soldiering games of their flexibility and tactical breadth in favour of a tightly controlled pyrotechnical show.
And for a series that has placed almost all of its energy into developing spectacle over the past few years - the snowmobile leaps over famished ravines, the horseback charges into tank fortresses, the collapse of the Eiffel Tower - this leaves us with something of a flaccid anachronism, one that exposes the tired heart beneath the bluster. Black Ops Declassified is a Call of Duty game minus the spectacle.
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