Black Ops is one of the most successful brandings of the already mega-successful Call of Duty franchise. The original Black Ops sold a staggering 5.6 million copies. Oh, and that was only in the first 24 hours following its release. Wind the clock forward to the present and the latest instalment, Black Ops 3, is also a commercial and critical success. This game offers up the perfect guy-centric gameplay with more of the same single-player first-person shooting, multiplayer, and zombies we’ve come to expect from Black Ops, only with additions such as 4-player co-op and additional customisation features for the FPS-hungry men of the world to enjoy.

Gameplay

Black Ops III is game that’s not shy with the content, though its developers haven’t done a great deal to provide anything ground-breaking with the gameplay itself. It’s classic Call of Duty-style FPS gameplay of course, the action viewed from the perspective of the protagonist and your selected weapon sitting towards the middle of the screen.

Where the gameplay does differentiate itself from its predecessors is its focus on the sci-fi. Though previous games’ focus weren’t focused entirely in the current reality, Black Ops III gets rather fantastical, with the obligatory super-soldiers involved in the storyline serving to make the single-player campaign both more challenging and entertaining.

Abilities

One of the notable augmentations to the gameplay, making men everywhere sit there gawping in quiet amazement, are cyber-core abilities. These add different flavours to the gameplay depending on the type of ability that you choose, with only one of these being available for selection per deployment. If you choose “Martial” abilities, you’re imbued with increased speed and close-combat abilities. On the other hand, the “Control” is a more tech-centric ability (perfect for the lad-centric nature of the game) that gives you the power to manipulate electrical equipment such as turrets.

“Chaos” is an ability that deserves its own paragraph. It’s a bit like “Control”, but in addition to allowing you to disrupt tech from a distance, it can also allow you to disrupt the enemies’ operations on a massive scale. Watching your enemies become live, walking grenades at the tap of a button is rather fun, you know, and as explosive as any man could ever want in his sci-fi FPS games.

A Lot of Content

The aforementioned generosity of content seems to know no bounds thanks to Treyarch’s comprehensive knowledge of what men want in in their first-person shooters. The campaign is comprehensive to say the least, as well as going beyond ridiculous in its plot, however enjoyable it may be.

The game modes are numerous of course, but the stand-out facet of the game is yet again the Multiplayer. The selection of maps alone is staggering, let alone the careful design that has gone into each one to put emphasis on different types of combat. There’s no pedestal-dwelling Nuketown equivalent here, but the Redwood and Hunted maps in particular stand out. The killstreaks also about in this game (obviously), as well as a weapon selection that would make most militias blush.

Perhaps most notably for the men-gamers out there, Black Ops III sees a return of the zombie mode/storyline. The format itself is highly familiar: you fight waves of enemies like in co-op horde mode, only the waves are formed of bloodthirsty zombies. You can expect to collect various power-ups while you’re completing the objectives issued to you by an unseen, mysterious character. Things have come a long way in terms of the gameplay, but it’s the graphics that have improved the most. The early 20th-century Noir-style presentation gives the zombies aspect of the game an atmosphere unmatched by any rivals, including dedicated zombie games like Left 4 Dead.

The Perfect Guy Game

There’s so much content in Black Ops III that the odds of it not appealing to the average guy gamer are very slim. If you’re a fan of single-player campaigns, Black Ops III brings on the content in spades with a staggering array of enemies as well as tinkering with the gameplay mechanics to include the incredibly cool core-abilities. If you’re more of a multiplayer fan, the game is equally as appealing in this respect since it’s got lots of modes as well as some ever-entertaining and substantial selection of weapons, both standard and futuristic. There’s even Black Ops III DLC being dripped through to players, giving a fresh set of challenges for players long after the original release date of the game.

If you’re not too fussed on what type of mode you play, then that’s all the more entertainment for you to enjoy, and as expected, the graphics are better than they have ever been, making the blood-soaked, futuristic action all the more fun for guys to enjoy.