Parapolitical, climate doomer, cyberpunk thriller disguised as a Call of Duty game. Treyarch presents gamers with their toughest challenge yet: Be able to read.
I think that there is an important discussion to have about how much of your plot, setting and world-building are supposed to be shown/told, but I won't bother with it right now. I'll only say that winks and nods towards a deeper, richer world in the actual game that you are playing are probably not actually enough to engage most people and this is a legitimate criticism.
BUT, if you are interested in what the campaign is about, there is a whole in-game wiki which explains the setting and backstory of the plot, factions, history and characters, its actually insane. Down to the caliber of each weapon in the game, what metal alloys the robots are made out of, which countries form part of the Winslow Accord (super NATO, basically) and the CDP (super BRICS, kind of) and even WHEN they were incorporated.
And that still is not the whole picture. The collectibles you find unlock extra lore which amounts to little more than flavor text, but I personally love stuff like that. You can tell that a LOT of effort went into the setting of this game. One collectible in particular that you find in one of the Egypt levels unlocks a wiki link that takes you to a fictional blog of an Egyptian soldier before the NRC invasion, which is crazy since you can only access it through the link in the collectible entry inside the data vault. The only explanation you are given about the importance of the place you visit is given two lines in a cutscene and they are basically: We need to find a guy here and people are fighting over water. That's it. The wiki gives some very welcome context and personality to the game. Another collectible gives you information regarding the implanted chips the main characters get: How they, in essence, allow full VR-like experiences down to extrasensory phenomena like melding memories, what the hallucinations that you see in the game might be and why they look so real to the main character. Again, nothing explained in depth during the main story, besides some allusions to things.
Why did they choose to hide so much of the game? I don't know the real answer, but I speculate that it was two things: The way that the community engaged with the Zombies game mode easter eggs and the fact that if a lot of the background writing was translated into gameplay it would have been easily three times bigger than it is, I'm talking RPG levels of size and something like that was likely way too ambitious for a Call of Duty campaign. They most likely expected a similar level of engagement with the story from players, but fans certainly made it known that this is not what they were looking for, unfortunately.
The campaign itself is perfectly fine at worst, I genuinely do not understand the hate it got. Most COD campaigns (I would argue a lot of FPS games) are trite! At least here they designed more open levels and you can progress your character by unlocking stuff for your loadouts like in the multiplayer mode which makes it immediately more interesting than previous campaigns since there are now abilities and perks tailored to aggressive, passive or movement heavy playstyles. Cloaks, boosters, charge attacks, multi-target stuns, anti-robot abilities, possession mechanics(!), gear suited for robot or humans enemies. Tons of ways to play. Also, a scoring system and challenges are in there if you like replaying levels that way as well.
From the amount of hate the campaign got one would think that it was completely broken or unfinished or something, but it totally is the opposite of that. The other COD games only really stand out by having big set-pieces or very scripted, linear missions which are fine and what the majority of fans want, I suppose, but none of those stuck with me more than this game. Finding out that the game is basically about a second cold war with a bipolar world created by actual conflict and tensions around today was so fascinating to me, no other COD game even tries something like this one.
This game makes me a bit sad knowing how much talent and creativity they had at Treyarch at the time and how they are relegated to making Call of Duty games seemingly forever. They clearly wanted to do more, but we can only imagine what could have been if their situation was different.
Oh and by the way, this was easily the best "jetpack era" Call of Duty muliplayer mode.
I think that there is an important discussion to have about how much of your plot, setting and world-building are supposed to be shown/told, but I won't bother with it right now. I'll only say that winks and nods towards a deeper, richer world in the actual game that you are playing are probably not actually enough to engage most people and this is a legitimate criticism.
BUT, if you are interested in what the campaign is about, there is a whole in-game wiki which explains the setting and backstory of the plot, factions, history and characters, its actually insane. Down to the caliber of each weapon in the game, what metal alloys the robots are made out of, which countries form part of the Winslow Accord (super NATO, basically) and the CDP (super BRICS, kind of) and even WHEN they were incorporated.
And that still is not the whole picture. The collectibles you find unlock extra lore which amounts to little more than flavor text, but I personally love stuff like that. You can tell that a LOT of effort went into the setting of this game. One collectible in particular that you find in one of the Egypt levels unlocks a wiki link that takes you to a fictional blog of an Egyptian soldier before the NRC invasion, which is crazy since you can only access it through the link in the collectible entry inside the data vault. The only explanation you are given about the importance of the place you visit is given two lines in a cutscene and they are basically: We need to find a guy here and people are fighting over water. That's it. The wiki gives some very welcome context and personality to the game. Another collectible gives you information regarding the implanted chips the main characters get: How they, in essence, allow full VR-like experiences down to extrasensory phenomena like melding memories, what the hallucinations that you see in the game might be and why they look so real to the main character. Again, nothing explained in depth during the main story, besides some allusions to things.
Why did they choose to hide so much of the game? I don't know the real answer, but I speculate that it was two things: The way that the community engaged with the Zombies game mode easter eggs and the fact that if a lot of the background writing was translated into gameplay it would have been easily three times bigger than it is, I'm talking RPG levels of size and something like that was likely way too ambitious for a Call of Duty campaign. They most likely expected a similar level of engagement with the story from players, but fans certainly made it known that this is not what they were looking for, unfortunately.
The campaign itself is perfectly fine at worst, I genuinely do not understand the hate it got. Most COD campaigns (I would argue a lot of FPS games) are trite! At least here they designed more open levels and you can progress your character by unlocking stuff for your loadouts like in the multiplayer mode which makes it immediately more interesting than previous campaigns since there are now abilities and perks tailored to aggressive, passive or movement heavy playstyles. Cloaks, boosters, charge attacks, multi-target stuns, anti-robot abilities, possession mechanics(!), gear suited for robot or humans enemies. Tons of ways to play. Also, a scoring system and challenges are in there if you like replaying levels that way as well.
From the amount of hate the campaign got one would think that it was completely broken or unfinished or something, but it totally is the opposite of that. The other COD games only really stand out by having big set-pieces or very scripted, linear missions which are fine and what the majority of fans want, I suppose, but none of those stuck with me more than this game. Finding out that the game is basically about a second cold war with a bipolar world created by actual conflict and tensions around today was so fascinating to me, no other COD game even tries something like this one.
This game makes me a bit sad knowing how much talent and creativity they had at Treyarch at the time and how they are relegated to making Call of Duty games seemingly forever. They clearly wanted to do more, but we can only imagine what could have been if their situation was different.
Oh and by the way, this was easily the best "jetpack era" Call of Duty muliplayer mode.