Call of Duty: Black Ops II Review

Black Ops II remains the only mainline Call of Duty brave enough to let the player actually change the story. Branching decisions, permadeath-capable characters, and multiple endings turn the dual-timeline campaign, Cold War flashbacks feeding a 2025 drone-war crisis, into something with genuine stakes, and Raul Menendez is the franchise's one villain with a coherent grievance, radicalized on-screen by events you play through. The optional Strike Force missions wobble, but the ambition holds.

Multiplayer's Pick 10 system was quietly brilliant, reducing every loadout to ten interchangeable points and freeing theorycrafting from slot dogma; competitive players still cite it as the series' cleanest design, and the scorestreak rework rewarded objective play at last. Zombies went sprawling with Tranzit's bus routes and buildables, messy but generative. The engine was creaking by 2012, hence visuals at B, yet the design risk-taking everywhere else makes this the most forward-looking entry Treyarch has produced.