The multiplayer suffered from some major connection issues and glitches at launch.
When the AI is as inept as it is here, you’ll still be able to dispatch foes with ease no matter how many are cluttering up the screen at once.įurther exacerbating Declassified’s online issues are some connectivity problems. Declassified makes the mistake of equating endless waves of enemies with difficulty. Raising the difficulty doesn’t spike the challenge all that much: You’ll lose health more rapidly, and your weapons won’t be as powerful, but the computer AI routines still subscribe to the same poor judgment. Enemies will also run straight at you, even past you at times, with weapons down, seemingly ignorant of your very existence. Frequently, you’ll be faced with enemy soldiers that are able to blindly fire at you through the boxes, barrels, or walls they are hiding behind. The short-lived missions also suffer from truly atrocious enemy AI, which acts as more of an annoyance than a challenge. But there’s little semblance of a cohesive narrative between the missions, let alone between Declassified and the two console titles. The campaign follows returning Black Ops characters Alex Mason and Frank Woods, and is supposed to bridge the gap between the first game and the recently released sequel, Black Ops II. There are no checkpoints in each of its 10 levels, which isn't particularly a problem, considering each mission only takes two to five minutes to complete. A small number of maps can work if they’re great, but all of Declassified’s feel tiny even with 8 players.Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified’s uninteresting single-player campaign lasts for all of an hour-if that. Things swiftly fall apart after you get into a match, though, with bugs that include players appearing mid-air and terrible spawn issues that make you start right in front of enemies.
First, the good: the menus look like the console Call of Duty titles, and I dig how Declassified manages to bring slightly less feature rich takes on custom classes and other multiplayer staples to the Vita. Multiplayer on the go should have been the reason for Declassified to exist, but it stumbles at almost every turn. Survival might be worth it if you could play cooperatively, but alone it’s just an excuse to sit in a small map and fight both the enemies and the bad controls. Extra content wouldn’t be a bad thing, except that both are hampered by the same control issues as the story missions, and, in the case of survival, idiotic enemies.
#CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS DECLASSIFIED NO SURVEY SERIES#
The other single player components of Declassified come down to a series of survival missions and time-trial runs through environments filled with shooting range-style targets. Even on Regular difficulty you die surprisingly fast, making it so I had to sit through the same unskippable intro sequences before levels all too often. The levels only last a few minutes, but because the enemies seem to have some sort of X-Ray vision they’ll be shooting at you as you round corners, and whole rooms of them will pour entire clips of ammo onto your position, meaning you’ll be getting shot. The repetitious nature of the stages is due in part to the lack of any sort of checkpoint system whatsoever. The levels couldn’t end fast enough, because, despite their short length, they feel monotonous and repetitious. You’re always on the hunt to gun down waves of cloned enemies whose atrociously bad AI will have them shooting walls or cars directly in front of them or getting stuck on parts of the environment. One mission you’re rushing through to rescue some hostages, the next you’re sniping to cover an ally.
Each stage is a two to five minute distillation of something we’ve all done in every other Call of Duty game, with no pacing changes or moments of spectacle to provide a hook. The campaign levels themselves don’t do anything interesting with either the Vita or with their design, either. It’s simply a device put in there as an excuse to connect it to the Black Ops games. The story never builds up to anything, and there’s no progression or development of the characters. Instead of a coherent plot the “story” is a series of random events that happened to characters from the Black Ops series, with some shoehorned tie-ins to plot points from the first and second games. Black Ops 2 shows that Call of Duty games can have great narratives, but Declassified’s is a mess.
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