Call of Duty: Black Ops blurb

I will preface this by saying I played and loved Modern Warfare 2. I thought they had great crafting skills during their campaign, great design, etc.

I played Call of Duty: Black Ops just for a little bit and thought I'd chime in. Keep in mind, I played maybe the first 3 levels in the campaign before I sent the game back, so this isn't close to what I'd call a reasonable review.

I'll typically play any game I can find that's reasonably good, play it often too much and then talk about it. I planned on doing the same for Black Ops, but after playing for a little while I realized that there's a lot of annoying things in Call of Duty's campaign that I'm surprised don't get butchered in most reviews.

For one, why in the hell does your character need to flinch and the screen go red when you get shot? Often times you won't even know where you're getting shot from but you'll be contesting enemies and get shot a few times while trying to return fire, but can't because your screen is shaking all over the place and it goes red so you can't see!! I can't even express how annoying that is. It makes me want to hit somebody in the face.

Secondly, I know they do a lot of things in the game for the sake of realism, but realism != fun. These are things like iron sights, flinching when you take damage, smoke/flash grenades, not being able to tell who is an enemy and who isn't, etc. They're just not all that fun of game mechanics and I'd rather have a clean-looking and clean-playing game instead of utter chaos where I feel like I need to hide for half the time so I don't die.

I also feel like every army-style game is the same game over and over. This and Modern Warfare 2 have essentially identical gameplay mechanics. I don't know what low-tech shooters nowadays can offer that hasn't already been done a dozen times over.

And I call it "low-tech" because they use real-world weaponry, which I guess is part of the appeal, but it doesn't have many or any new gameplay concepts, as opposed to shooters I'd call high-tech like Halo or Shadowrun that use new gameplay concepts for the sake of new experiences, while sacrificing realism in order to make the game more fun.

And some might say the real reason is that I played through the first 3 or so levels and stopped was because I played without realizing that I wasn't signed in to a profile, and lost all of my progress as a result. So, rather than having some sort of alert to say you're not signed in, how about FORCING somebody to sign in so they don't waste their time. FAIL.

Anyway, that's it.