The day is finally here Call of Duty Black Ops 2 or “blops 2” for the sake of this review.  The strongest part of the game is the storyline, at times it is truly epic and for most of the game you play as David Mason, Alex Mason’s son.  But where this game shines is your ability to influence the game in every facet based on what you do IN mission.  Treyarch calls it video game choose your own adventure.  You are hunting down Raul Menendez who is the game’s super terrorist, or is he?  You see at one point in the cold war Raul was an ally and then through the course of the game things happen and his passion becomes the source of some terrible set pieces in the game.  If you have read Ghost Wars you might be familiar with the source material.

Raul is probably one of my favorite characters in the COD franchise because it is hard to tell at times if he is truly evil or someone you can sympathize with because of his story arch.  But once you move away from the campaign the game suffers…a lot.

I got the game home around 8p and jumped on to play the multiplayer, I had heard about the pick 10 loadout system and was ready to start tinkering.  Except the server was down so off to the campaign for a bit, when I got back the server was up and I was ready to start my first game at level one.  Problem two was my first game was populated with 12 other players level 18-28.  Let me repeat that, my first game consisted of playing with people who had played for 18 straight hours at that point and looking at the players online I had ¾ of a million players to choose from so terrible matchmaking has returned.

I will say once I jumped in with my friend Chris we had a LOT of fun with the new weapons and the pick 10 system.  So if you have a regular group of guys you play with, this game is a lot of fun.  But Blops 2 is a lot faster than the prior games so maps like Nuketown 2025 fall a bit flat as everyone spawns on top of everyone else and it becomes a strategy-less blood bath.   On top of Nuketown the other maps seem VERY familiar in a modern warfare 2 sort of way.

Probably the weakest cog in the machine is the zombie portion; it doesn’t live up to the hype and feels tacked on.  The main issue is there are about 25 games that do zombies MUCH better this portion of the game has become a characterture of itself

All in all if you are a call of duty fan you will like this game, will you love it?  Depends on how warn you are on the franchise but if you are like me and rarely play the campaign, start there and you will see the replay value instantly.