u/Takoshi88

With all their tech and weapons and gear, has Mason's team never before heard about the invention of 'Gas masks'?

All throughout their time in Avalon they are constantly being dosed up by The Cradle like absolute crack-fiends, and yet not once do any of them think to shut their fuckin' mouths or cover their face to avoid exposure? Despite how much more difficult it makes their mission by losing their damn minds and spazzing out all the time.

There's even a bloody finishing move in Multiplayer where they pop a 'Cradle' grenade and then cover their face to avoid exposure before shooting the victim.

Ai wrote this story, right? Surely. I find it hard to believe any qualified writers received an actual payment of actual wages from actual employment at Treyarch after writing this.

And how do they share hallucinations? They have cybernetic implants, yes, but The Cradle is a chemical weapon, not a digital virus, it should have no bearing on their neural chips, and should only be able to affect them through direct exposure via their bloodstream/airways 🤔

I know Activision doesn't know we exist, but I'm one of those rare players that was actually born before Black Ops 1, and Modern Warfare 2, and even before CoD 4. Yes, wild, wild stuff.

So I have very fond memories of the Black Ops series, hell, I even really enjoyed the mind-bending Ghost in The Shell/Deus Ex stuff in Black Ops III, sue me 😅

I heard this campaign was a dumpster fire, I saw it looked like a dumpster fire floating down a river of human faeces, and that seemed to be the general consensus, but I played through Modern Warfare III (remake) so surely it couldn't be worse than that...Or so I thought.

Well, I've just been kicked for inactivity (in the singleplayer campaign), so I've got time to pen some thoughts 🙃

This might be a decent length, so grab yourself a snack, a cuppa, and enjoy.

Right from the get go we have a JSOC team led by David Mason that only somewhat justifies its own existence with the inclusion of Harper and Samuels (who was apparently present for Black Ops II.

So unlike MWIII which lulls you into a false sense of security with a genuinely great opening mission, we instead open into gameplay with an audible line of dialogue from David 'Section' Mason "keep things quiet as long as possible", so you might be fooled into thinking this means you can remain in stealth, undetected during the first part of this mission. Which 'is' possible, but you (the average player) actually cannot do this.

This is further aggravated by the on-screen 'tooltip' that even discourages you from being detected for fear of 'reinforcements' being called in.

Well, too fuckin' bad, because it is made painfully clear that nobody at Treyarch actually playtested this (or possibly anything here), because in order to go undetected in this section, you have to know where everyone is, will be, and when through multiple attempts of trial and error. Oh, and these guys have insanely acute senses, so even if you are under a staircase in foliage, if they are looking, you are being seen.

So maybe you can kill them with stealthy takedowns? No, no you cannot. There is no reliable way to quietly take them down as unlike previous CoD games where armoured enemies were a late-game challenge, this game ONLY has armoured enemies (because let's not mince words; the whole campaign is Warzone with Zombies and Endgame thrown in).

So if you try to headshot them, they will shrug it off (anything but the Sniper shot) and become alerted. You cannot do cool scripted knife kill animations like you used to do in EVERY COD before this one, which is odd because even that shitty MWIII campaign had fast stealth finishers.

Anyway, it 'is' possible to ghost this crap, but it sucks and it's not even rewarded or acknowledged when you do it hahaha.

Moving on.

There's a sequence in a big server room where Mason and the lads plant C4 (yes, C4 in this day and age) and later use it to 'surprise' the badguy by detonating it to escape a trap. Now, this might go under the radar for most players, but why in the damn hell does this high-tec facility that manufactures robots, ai, and chemical weapons not have a single CCTV camera in their bloody SERVER ROOM?! 🤣🤣🤣

Arguably, Mason and his team are DIRECTLY responsible for infecting the entirety of Avalon with The Cradle fear toxin, but none of them show a lick of remorse or awareness of this major fuckup.

But wait, it gets worse. Despite the Cradle being a weapon that plays on the victim's fears and anxieties, there are very, very many times where the toxin will group the JSOC teams consciousness into a single 'hallucination', or worse, where a single person's fears will somehow account for concepts, memories and even beliefs that they do not hold personally. Most notably, Mason somehow is able to dive into Frank Woods' mind, despite Woods being dead, and Mason not even being privvy to some of the shit that goes down in the 'Woods' hallucination. It's such utter nonsense, and that's not even touching on the stupid inclusion of spider and plant monsters that look straight out of the Zombies mode. It's so unbelievably dumb.

Okay, next up, the 'Avalon' missions.
Let's call a turd a turd; these missions are just restricted exploration chunks of the Endgame/Warzone map 'Avalon', and they play damn near identical to the Endgame gamemode. It's arguably even lazier than it was in MWIII, and at this point, it makes even the worst CoD campaigns look like fucking masterpieces...It really is 'that' bad.

The overuse and downright reliance on Multiplayer maps and pre-made assets to build this campaign is truly remarkable. From Hijacked to The Forge, to Sake, to Takei, so much of this shit is just a Multiplayer map with some minor tweaks that couldn't have taken more than a week to build, given all the preset assets that are clearly already there.

Anyway, there are more than a handful of moments in this game that attempt to connect Black Ops II to this game, and sure, they make callbacks to things, but I can't help call them disrespectful and ignorant at best. 'Oh, remember when we had to save Woods from the shipping container?' 'Oh, how crazy was that highway bit at the end of Black Ops II trying to transport the POTUS?' But none of it was very considerate to those actual Black Ops legacy events. The hallucination segments are filled to the brim with weird zombie-like red spectral enemies, but they function identically to the Guild soldiers, then there's robots, regardless of the context, and even VTOLS that will drop off Guild soldiers...Even in a hallucination 🙃

The whole affair is such a mess of semi-coherent ideas thrown at a wall and then shuffled up with a mad-lib generator. Multiple times during the story I found myself going "what, when did that happen?"

I'm close to the end now, so I'll be sure to note any extra bullshit I encounter during this sorry affair.

I'll finish with this statement:
This is a CampIgn that you can play solo, but if you do you cannot pause, cannot leave to do anything until a mission is complete (or you will be kicked), and despite there always being a JSOC team present in cutscenes and even dialogue, they do not exist in moment-to-moment gameplay, so you are ALWAYS outnumbered and constantly up against an insane number of hostiles because the enemy count is no different between Co-op and solo lobbies (yes, lobbies).