‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’ Is Weird, For Better And Worse
Call of Duty is in its “Friendslop” era.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a very, very weird video game. As many were quick to point out on release day, it features surreal boss fights, nonsensical powers such as calling in destructive, building-sized machetes from the sky, and zombie hordes you can control as minions. It’s all a far cry from what the series once represented, something the franchise has inched further and further away from over the last 10 years.
But while the series' most jilted diehard fans (and biggest haters) are harping on the dissonance between Black Ops 7’s co-op campaign and the series’ already flailing identity, I can’t help but appreciate that its developers tried to shake things up. It’s a campaign that swings hard, misses the mark in many ways, but still manages to deliver a mostly fun experience that at least tries to shake things up from the malaise of both its past and its biggest competitors.
If you’re not caught up to speed, Black Ops 7 is a direct sequel to 2012’s Black Ops 2. It hones in on the protagonist David Mason and his new squad as they track down the thought-to-be-dead international criminal Raul Menendez.
As someone who only returned to the Call of Duty bubble last year, these characters mean nothing to me. And based on my four hours with the game so far, I imagine even long-time fans will be a little disappointed with how this tale unravels. There is little humanity to how these characters are portrayed, their personal problems, or the world-ending stakes at hand. They’re all ushered from one mission scenario to the next, with constant, contextless references to events from past games. Even the campaign’s big mystery of how Menendez has returned from the dead is a twist most players will predict mere seconds into the game’s opening cutscene.
Much of this campaign’s narrative weakness can be blamed on Black Ops 7’s campaign being designed for co-op, full stop. It moves at a breakneck pace, barely stopping to deliver meaningful story beats. It’s more focused on delivering barebones context for interesting co-op scenarios.
In the same way four-player co-op spoils Black Ops 7’s story, it spoils its playability and immersion for those jumping to this mode alone. The campaign makes zero concessions if you start it by yourself. You can’t pause the game, as if you’re in a multiplayer session. The size of enemy hordes doesn’t adjust based on solo play, nor are there difficulty modes. Even the game’s more open-ended levels feel like (and probably are) reworked Warzone and Zombie mode maps.
There are also no AI companions for those playing alone. Mason’s squadmates are all over the game’s cutscenes and even talk to him while players are in the field shooting enemies. But they aren’t physically present and fighting alongside you unless you have a friend or three filling their roles. The result is a jarringly empty campaign for solo players: levels feel too big, enemy encounters can feel overwhelming, and the constant chatter of characters you can’t see makes this barely function as a “campaign” in the traditional sense.
If you do manage to get a full squad as it was designed for, however, this campaign gets elevated considerably. Suddenly, enemies having floating health bars above their heads makes more sense, as does the Destiny-like weapon rarities. Boss fights with one-off mechanics are now fun tests of coordination instead of lengthy, challenging slogs.
In that same breath, the surreal setpieces that people have been picking apart on social media are easier to accept for what they are. Yes, fighting a giant Michael Rooker in a red hellscape with guns is very, very dumb. But it’s also a good laugh when fighting alongside friends. And at its core, these insane moments make for creative use of the game’s co-op structure. The game’s first boss fight, for example, demands three players fight off waves of bum-rushing enemies, to protect a fourth player raining giant machetes from the sky onto a superpowered Menendez. Yes, this is stupid for people with zero imagination. But in co-op, it's a joyously good co-op scenario that’s mechanically interesting.
The term “Friendslop” has become all the rage in 2025, thanks to the huge success of titles like Peak and R.E.P.O. It’s a term for games that are best played with buddies, as their janky or bizarre mechanics don’t quite work without real-life social interactions to underpin them. These games may not reach the satisfying highs of a game like Expedition 33 or Hideo Kojima’s latest hit. But I’d be hard-pressed to say these games don’t offer experiences that are just as fulfilling.
This year’s Call of Duty “campaign” feels designed to be the franchise’s take on popular games like Peak.
Black Ops 7 is clearly the series’ take on the “Friendslop” phenomenon. And while it’s startlingly far removed from the excellent, traditional campaign we got from Black Ops just a year ago, it doesn’t change the fact that Black Ops 7 is also very fun and very replayable on its own. Clearly, the developers have replayability in mind, as Black Ops 7’s final mission is literally a take on the increasingly popular extraction shooter genre, a type of game built on emergent moments and social interactions.
I’m hard-pressed to fault Black Ops 7 for its big, weird shake-up when it seems like that was the entire point. While I am disappointed the game forces you to play with others to maximize its fun, I can say definitively that I am having a much better time with Black Ops 7’s weird-ass campaign than I did Battlefield 6’s boring (and offensively toothless) retread of familiar waters.
This bizarre and trippy co-op campaign isn’t what most Call of Duty fans asked for. But I can’t say in good conscience that Black Ops 7’s campaign is bad. It’s weird. It barely delivers a coherent story. And it falls on its face the second you try to play it in a way it wasn’t designed for. But I admire Raven Software and Treyarch for taking a big swing focused on fun. I’ll take that any day of the week over something as boring as a by-the-numbers military shooter campaign with nothing to add to the 20-year-old formula.
