Call of Duty: Black Ops III Review

Treyarch took the boost jump and turned it into a movement language. Wall running chains into slides and thrust jumps, and the maps are laid out as circuits rather than corridors, which is why this remains the entry competitive players kept returning to years later. Specialists gave every operator a signature weapon or ability, a structural change the series has never fully walked back. Zombies reached its high-water mark here, with Shadows of Evil building a Lovecraftian noir city more carefully designed than most full games.

The campaign is the problem. It is nominally about neural interfaces, memory and the loss of a self, and there is a genuinely unsettling game buried inside it, but the delivery is so scrambled by four-player co-op scaffolding and unexplained shifts that almost nobody finished it with a clear account of what happened. The previous-generation versions shipped without the campaign at all. Judged on what people actually played, this is one of the strongest packages the series ever assembled. Judged whole, it is brilliant in three places and lost in a fourth.