Call of Duty: Black Ops II

[Mr. Analog]

I just got this on Saturday night and man I am very disappointed so far with the main campaign setting.

To be fair it's been a while since I played a CoD game on computer (I played MW3 on XBox and it was pretty easy for the most part until it got glitchy in later levels and I just stopped playing) but still there were a lot of things that pissed me off right off the bat.

Controls:
GOOD GOD the controls... not all controls are mapped on the keyboard when you load the game, and while the first level more or less shows you what buttons to push it sometimes flashes the instruction so fast you don't know what to do. For example, early on you have a rescue mission the NPC you are with tells you to lay down some tactical grenades... okay how do I do that?? I'm kind of busy in a firefight and there's no hint that comes up for it. So I had to tab out, go looking online for several minutes find the grenade button is "G" and even then I still don't know what the tactical grenade button is.

As I said not all controls are mapped or mapped in weird places, I think melee weapon is "V" or some stupid @%&#, I remapped it to my mouse side button.

Lean left/right are still not mapped (by default) I'm not sure I'll need them, I guess we'll see.

Gameplay:
Mostly standard run 'n gun but occasionally you get treated to minigames like taking out tanks with drones, defending a PT boat with machine guns or flying suit... again this stuff happens so fast you don't know what do to, it's kind of like Wario Ware... oh I'm in the sky now I wonder what mouse1 and mouse2 do.

So far the worst was the flying suit as it didn't really tell you that you can't go up/down just left/right, it says to hold shift for more turning but that didn't seem to work or was imperceptible.

The AI is pretty stupid, just guys running at you, standing out in the open firing at you... kind of like Serious Sam in a way haha, I would have much preferred a smaller number of guys who were smarter, but whatever it's a CoD game, the only time you end up in bad situations is if you advance too far too fast and end up with a giant horde of bad guys to deal with.

I also seem to have some problems with the waypoint system, I don't know what I was expecting but I like to DO things and a lot of the time I get to a waypoint and a cutscene starts... this actually caused me some grief as I got myself into a point where I didn't realize that all I had to do was wait for the right time and then get on the waypoint. I was leading the NPCs to an area for extraction and... thought I had to do some stuff at the LZ but it turns out all I had to do was stick on the NPCs...

I was in a RAEG when I hit this part, so @%&#ing annoying to actually get to the point where I'm looking up a let's play to find that all had to do was stand there like a dope rather than scout ahead of the NPCs

Summary so Far:
I got this game mostly for the multiplayer components so I wasn't really all that interested in the Campaign mode, but so far I've been frustrated by how dumb it is. I was also hung up several times not knowing what the controls are, I'm sure for people who play CoD PC this isn't a problem but for me who hasn't touched a CoD game on PC for a few years it was annoying not knowing how to use your knife or find the button mapping for grenade... The minigames are annoying and will likely keep getting annoying, there's just not enough time to learn what you are supposed to be doing, for a game that jerks off to military stuff there's ZERO training.

The gunplay is fun, everything works the way it's supposed to, you can pick up new weapons through the game just as with previous CoD games which is fun as different guns have very different play styles, so you can find what you like generally on a level.

The graphics are ... brilliant. I was very impressed with how good everything looks and just how many enemies they can get on screen. Framerate never dipped even with my scrub CPU/RAM haha

I have high hopes for multiplayer though I already know about the weapon unlock system with points, but since I don't even know what guns I like yet it doesn't matter I guess

I'll take a second crack at Campaign this week sometime, maybe I was just overly tired when I played on Saturday but so far, not a shining example of fun yet...