Worst C.O.D. Campaign Ever

Okay, so I know I'm in the minority when it comes to the Campaign Mode on Call of Duty games. I'm not a big fan of multiplayer in general, so the main Single Player mode of any game is important to me. After finishing the campaign on Black Ops III, I can honestly say that this is, by far and away, the worst C.O.D. campaign I've ever played (and I've played almost all of them). It has good qualities, but also some truly terrible ones.

Good Points:

The graphics are beautiful. This is the best looking C.O.D. game to date. Treyarch has been at the forefront in raising the bar in visuals for this series for a while now and here they do not disappoint.

The gameplay is fun (most of the time). This is one of the more innovative games in the series. The addition of a home base where you can customize your loadouts, weapons, upgrade abilities, etc., is new and unique and pretty cool. I certainly hope this element is expanded upon in future C.O.D. games. The controls are as smooth as ever and the game boasts some pretty cool weapons. My only beef is that for a large portion of the game (until you purchase the necessary upgrade), you cannot pick up enemy weapons, so you're mostly stuck with whatever you have until you find a mobile loadout station (which there are many), and changing loadouts during a chapter becomes a somewhat annoying interruption in what are mostly intense battles.

The game is challenging. Call of Duty games were beginning to get a bit too easy. The days of throwing your controller to the floor because Veteran Mode on Call of Duty 2, World at War, or Modern Warfare were just too hard seemed to be over. However, Black Ops III manages to create one of the most difficult and challenging C.O.D. campaigns in some time.


Bad Points:

The voice acting is incredibly uneven. There are several noteworthy actors/actresses on board for this campaign. The best of them are Christopher Meloni and Katee Sackhoff. Both do a fine job with their characters (though Meloni has to make do with a lot of bad dialogue near the end). Rachel Kimsey (who voices Rachel Kane) deserves the most credit as she has the best overall performance. Now, as for the main characters, voiced by Sean Douglas (Hendricks) and Ben Browder (your character), they are terribly overacted. Your character is stoic to the point where is seems he is disinterested (I don't know if the same is true if you are a female) most of the time. Hendricks, on the other hand, is so overly intense at times that it's laughable.

The game lacks signature set-piece/memorable moments. This is something that fans like myself tend to expect. There doesn't need to be many of them, but big story moments played out during the playthrough tend to be what players remember the most about Call of Duty titles. Remember the nuke going off in Modern Warfare? The airport massacre in MW2? Menendez's bloody rampage in Black Ops 2? The beach landing in Call of Duty 2? Yeah, there's nothing like that in Black Ops III. No moment seems to stand out among the others.

The story is awful. Really awful. Dear Lord above, it was painful. I thought after the weak plots of Ghosts and Advanced Warfare that this game would reenergize the series' storytelling. It's not as though fans expect them to be Shakespearian, so it shouldn't be too hard. It just needs to be fun and interesting enough to give you a reason to keep playing. Even with Advanced Warfare's weak plot, it was enough to want to take down Kevin Spacey to keep me playing until the end. Black Ops III, unfortunately, has no good villain. A vague, uninteresting plot. And amazingly, it gets worse and worse the more you play it. I swear, I think I heard the phrase "Imagine yourself in a frozen forest" about 150 times, and it was stupid every single time. Things happen that go completely unexplained, some of the levels make zero sense (the WWII level and the last one inside your head are especially ridiculous), and character deaths are mostly abrupt and meaningless and cheap. In fact, pretty much the whole story is cheap. There is absolutely no emotional payoff for any single moment in the entire game. Not a single shot you fire feels emotionally satisfying, nor does clearing any level in the game. You don't care about any of the relationships between these characters, don't care when those relationships are severed or abruptly ended because one of them dies, and some of them aren't explained at all (why does my character seem to like and trust Rachel Kane so much???).

I never thought I'd say this, but it's too long. That's right. I'm actually mad that the game was as long as it was. Truth be told, I'm not even sure it was that long. It just felt like it was. The levels are definitely much longer than C.O.D. games typically are, and while that would be a great thing in just about any other C.O.D. game, seeing as how they are usually just 5-7 hours, it makes the experience of Black Ops III's campaign so much worse. It feels like it will never end. Especially the last chapter. This is the worst chapter of the entire game (maybe of any C.O.D. game) and it takes twice as long as the other chapters, which are pretty lengthy themselves.

Overall, I would rate this game a 5/10. The multiplayer is as fun as ever and the zombie mode is super cool. And for many of you, the campaign doesn't even matter. That's totally cool and you are likely to enjoy this game a lot more than I did. However, for those like me who expect a good single player mode, avoid this game.