Here’s what’s wild. You can’t pause. At all. Need to pee? Mission restart. Doorbell rings? Restart. Cat knocks your drink over? Restart. It’s a campaign that behaves like an online Warzone lobby - complete with no difficulty settings, no checkpoints, and idle players getting kicked. If you want the old school COD “pause the game, grab a snack, contemplate existence” vibe, forget it.
And because the missions are designed for four people, playing alone means doing everything four times. If a mission expects four people to plant C4 charges, congratulations, you’re now doing all four charges yourself. Characters you’re supposed to be fighting with even speak in the cutscenes… despite literally not being there.
The whole campaign structure pretty much mirrors Warzone. Enemies have armor and health bars, you gain XP for every kill, and many missions are reworked Warzone maps. Reviews are saying it feels more like a Warzone story mode than an actual Black Ops campaign.
Then there’s the boss fights, zombies, cyborgs, ninjas, a tree that’s alive, and a giant you take down with killstreaks. It’s like the campaign raided a Fortnite thrift shop.
Players are also calling out AI generated art in the calling cards, some of which look suspiciously like Studio Ghibli knockoffs. Unsurprisingly, the Steam reviews are mixed. Black Ops 7 had a day one Steam peak of 86 thousand players, while Battlefield 6 pulled over 747 thousand. That’s not a gap, that’s a canyon.
To be fair, Game Pass complicates the numbers, since COD going to Game Pass cost Microsoft a theoretical $300 million in sales. But the vibe is clear: players aren’t thrilled.
This feels like the weirdest COD identity crisis ever. A franchise that once built immaculate campaigns with multiplayer as a side dish has now fully flipped the formula, and the “campaign” is basically a set of online missions that kindly allow you to suffer through them alone.
Call of Duty didn’t just lose the pause button. It might have lost the plot.
