Game Week, Day 2 - Call of Duty: Black Ops

Day two of Late Night's Game Week treated us to some hands-on footage of Call of Duty: Black Ops, which looks to be the best Treyarch-branded entry in the dual-company game series. Heretofore, Treyarch has handled the odd-numbered installments, while partners-in-war Infinity Ward have handled the evens. The problem with that for Treyarch is that IW emerged as the more skilled developer with the release of CoD 2 and so every game which Treyarch released was inevitably compared to IW's previous release, and usually fell well short of the mark.

Now, personally, I've always enjoyed the Treyarch games, but have always found the multiplayer to be lacking compared to the IW installments. Storyline of single player has never been a problem. I think the smartest thing for Treyarch to do was to pick a completely new location and time period, and that's exactly what they've done with Black Ops.

I've been beating a drum for a couple of years, saying it would be smart to see Call of Duty visit Vietnam. In Black Ops we are set in Southeast Asia in the late 60's, likely playing a part in Cambodia, Vietnam, and as demonstrated on Jimmy's show tonight, Laos.

Historically, this will be a great time and location in which to set CoD. Add to that the fact that it's entirely new territory for the franchise, eliminating the damaging comparison's to IW's entries, and this could be the best thing to happen to Treyarch since they first became involved with the series.

We didn't have much time to see a lot of different things in tonight's demo, but what we did see was VERY appealing. Vehicular combat makes a return, but whether that will include tanks is unclear. What we DID see were Hind helicopters being flown and controlled by the player. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Visually, the graphics look stunning, and it would be cool to hear a couple of more guest voice-actors, like Keifer Sutherland and Gary Oldman in Treyarch's last installment, the WWII-themed World at War. The developer was very closed-mouthed about any details other than Laos, 1968, so it's unclear what else this entry has in store for us Gamers, but I look forward to finding out!

The only other thing I can say is, I hope they have spent as much time on storyline in this one as they spent on figuring out how to make people realistically blow apart in World at War....