Black Ops 7 Review: PS5 & Xbox Guides, Release Date

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a head-scratcher of an entry—especially at a moment when the series really needed to land something solid. After Black Ops 6 helped rebuild confidence following a rough 2023 for Modern Warfare 3, it’s frustrating to see Treyarch and company repeat the same kind of misstep, as if the franchise didn’t just learn its lesson.

Instead of leaning into a big, flashy, set-piece-forward campaign in the classic sense, Black Ops 7 turns its campaign into something closer to a reshuffled version of the Modern Warfare 3 experience. The problem is that it doesn’t feel like a focused vision; it tries to stitch together systems pulled from across the franchise’s many modes, and the result reads less like a coherent story effort and more like a bundle of mismatched parts.

There are plot threads that borrow from Black Ops 6, but the overall “previously on” feeling comes off like a budget pseudo-remake of the last game rather than something you truly need to engage with. What makes it worse is how it feels internally: it plays like a cry for help, as though the studio that made Black Ops 6 had too much on its plate and now Black Ops 7 is the pressure valve—spitting out content that never quite stabilizes.

Black Ops 7 Campaign is a Total Disaster

Black Ops 7’s campaign has already driven a noticeable portion of players away. Nearly every design decision seems engineered to be irritating, and the campaign’s original purpose—to function as a semi-tutorial for the more open-ended Endgame mode that unlocks after completion—has been undercut. That “tutorial” is now available even if you don’t finish the campaign.

It’s also always online, and jumping into solo sessions is described as a chore. On top of that, the enemies are among the most bullet-spongey the reviewer has encountered recently. Entire magazines can vanish trying to remove certain tougher targets, and the familiar “lightning pace” feel the series relies on turns into an ugly tangle of health bars, stats, and sustained attrition.

What should have been a tense chase becomes a sequence of narrow arena funnels designed to drain the room’s energy by funnelling enemies into you. Even when weapons are improved or more fantastical elements show up, the game still makes opponents feel unnaturally resilient. The pacing and punch never really arrive—every small difficulty becomes massive because the campaign seems assembled from leftover components instead of built with conviction.

Structurally, Treyarch splits the campaign into sections. A linear mission sends you into a larger space, where you and the squad you’re essentially forced to join travel toward a single goal until the next linear chapter. The game also avoids the usual cinematic swagger and specialized set-up missions Call of Duty is known for, in part because the presence of four possible players moving around makes it harder to stage the kind of dramatic, controlled moments people expect.

One of the early missions has the team led by Alex Mason from Black Ops 2 infiltrating a base quietly. The reviewer’s group immediately goes loud after a teammate decides running into the crowd with a grenade is the correct approach. On some level, it works—at least it helps push through each firefight faster rather than lingering.

Mason’s squad has been poisoned by a mind-bending mist that causes their linked brain chips to hallucinate through the lens of PTSD. That’s where the game occasionally turns unintentionally hilarious and genuinely surprising, but that interest doesn’t translate into a campaign that feels well-made overall.

Giant Michael Rooker

Black Ops 7 does have intriguing set-ups, but it squanders them because everything ultimately funnels into rooms where you hold out against waves of enemies. In practice, every mission starts to feel like the same framework: international pulpy intrigue and espionage are what Black Ops does best, yet this version spends too much time converting its mind-bending ideas into monster-horde combat spaces.

Sometimes it tries to add platforming or puzzles, but those segments linger too long. The reviewer even questions who at Treyarch thought players would be comfortable with the game’s structure. In one example, a teammate takes ten minutes to fail at a hacking puzzle, leaving the rest to survive an endless stream of the same bullet-spongey enemies. Another part forces players to dodge traffic, and the reviewer claims two players behave as if they’ve only ever played Call of Duty multiplayer—suggesting a lack of adaptation to what the campaign is asking for.

There’s also a boss fight against a giant, Godzilla-like Michael Rooker—who plays Harper in the campaign. That encounter is framed as a clear demonstration of the campaign’s deeper issues, particularly the lack of emotional or narrative weight behind what’s happening.

The fight also demands the player remember Rooker’s character from Black Ops 2, and the reviewer notes that caring about the story is difficult when characters often deliver lines that feel like they’re borrowed from Jerry Bruckheimer-style quotes—spoken with a bored tone. During the battle, the player who is controlling Rooker’s character simply joins the group and fights alongside them without explanation or a convincing reason for their presence. There’s no attempt to justify it; the game just expects acceptance.

Beyond that, there’s yet another boss encounter involving a plant monster.

Co-op Campaign Blues

The reviewer says they’re generally open to expanding reality-bending ideas in these games—Call of Duty can be too cautious when it sticks to what it knows. Treyarch’s efforts to push the series forward are, in principle, something to applaud, but Black Ops 7 isn’t presented as the right way to do it. The blend of horror monsters with military combat, paired with heavy nostalgia for earlier games, is described as a deliberate choice—but it’s undermined by design that feels both boring and plainly excessive.

Solo play options are effectively buried, there’s said to be a total absence of checkpoints, and the whole campaign relies on online connectivity. That combination means the campaign is likely to become worse the longer it sits in rotation. Entering the game’s second week, the reviewer reports campaign match loading times already take too long. They predict it will eventually be abandoned—especially now that Endgame has been unlocked for everyone.

Call of Duty’s Endgame is a Surprising Extraction Shooter

Endgame is where the conversation shifts. It’s described as Call of Duty’s extraction shooter, or at least a test run for the real thing. Even though it’s treated as an extension of the troubled campaign, the reviewer finds it more compelling. The mode is entirely player-versus-environment: no player-versus-player action. Instead, you swing through different objectives you choose, either teaming up with whatever squad you’re assigned or attempting survival on your own.

Difficulty ramps as you complete missions and eliminate enemies, and the reviewer notes that opponents are still bullet sponges—so the gunplay isn’t magically fixed. However, the mode is at least quicker to reward progress with upgrades once you get into its rhythm.

Black Ops 7 also links all four modes together into a single pool for experience points. The reviewer interprets that as a move toward flattening mechanics so everything fits one size. As part of that, armor appears in the campaign, pulled from Zombies and Warzone. Multiplayer is said to remain largely unchanged in comparison.

20 vs 20 Skirmish

Multiplayer is presented as the saving grace of Black Ops 7. One of the year’s biggest changes is the 20 vs 20 mode called Skirmish. Rather than sticking to smaller maps and familiar team structures, it drops players onto the campaign’s large map and tasks them with fighting over control points.

The reviewer says it’s genuinely a standout, delivering a tactical kind of fun that the main multiplayer can’t always replicate. Respawns come with wingsuits, giving players a fast way back into fights and setting up moments like hunting snipers or catching groups off guard. One match included a sniper camping atop a tall tower, mowing through players and disappearing. Then, as the reviewer waits to respawn, a wave of blue-outlined wingsuits arrives and wipes out that plan.

The chaos is described as different from standard multiplayer. Instead of feeling purely random, Skirmish has ebbs and flows similar to what’s seen in Battlefield, creating tension as the score nears its final point.

Even so, a major portion of multiplayer is still unchanged. In a bleak snapshot of the franchise’s direction, Nuketown 24/7 is called out as the primary playlist being promoted. It’s been in every Black Ops game, and Black Ops 7 is portrayed as keeping it essentially the same.

The reviewer still characterizes the multiplayer as exhilarating and dependable—brain-friendly, “popcorn” fun. They also mention that the pooled experience point system helps smooth progression: when they finally got in, they were already high enough level to access a buffet of gun choices. That system is framed as trimming the tedious early multiplayer grind where players start with too few options. It also offers a tradeoff for anyone who prefers to pour time into the problematic campaign or spend time in Zombies.

Black Ops 7 Zombies Mode

Zombies continues to improve accessibility for newer players and casual audiences, while keeping the obtuse, wave-based survival setup that longtime fans like. The reviewer adds that solo players aren’t forgotten, since the save feature remains so you can return to runs instead of being forced to abandon them entirely.

That said, the mode is described as largely “more of the same,” with only embellishments and small shifts that most casual players won’t notice—changes aimed at the hardcore crowd.

AI Usage in Call of Duty

The article pivots to another concern. Treyarch is said to be doubling down on generated AI art, but not by placing it prominently where players would immediately notice it. Instead, the generated images appear in the style of cards behind usernames in multiplayer—an approach that, for the reviewer, feels pointless rather than meaningful.

The reviewer describes these AI-generated pieces as resembling the washed-out yellow tone associated with many image generators that have “poisoned” their look while pulling from the internet. The overall criticism is that the AI art doesn’t add anything useful and feels like a hollow reflection of the state of Black Ops 7 itself.

There’s also a broader argument here about what Black Ops 7 represents in the post-Microsoft acquisition release landscape. The reviewer says the game should have been an expansion or downloadable content, not a full-priced $70 product. Instead, it’s presented as an update and refresh of last year’s formula—now charging that full price, with generative AI included, and with a campaign so full of issues that fully unpacking it would take another thousand words.

Black Ops 7 Final Thoughts

If the franchise has to put out something this rough every two years just to keep the machine running, then the reviewer suggests Microsoft and Activision should reconsider the whole approach. They avoid the idea of “taking a leaf from EA’s book,” comparing it to how EA handles annualized racing entries—then noting those F1 games won’t get a 2026 edition and will instead ship a major update one year, followed by a full release the next.

Black Ops 7 may still offer some enjoyable moments, including the unexpected appeal of its extraction-style Endgame mode. But the reviewer insists none of it is worth the entry price unless you absolutely must buy it. The verdict is a resounding disappointment—and framed as a wake-up call for the people making the decisions behind the scenes.

Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software

Release date: November 14, 2025

Joel is a freelance writer who bounces back and forth between different websites. His fascination with how games are actually made and his love of bad video games have driven him to write about the industry for over a decade. He was previously E-Commerce Editor and Deputy Tech Editor at Dexerto and has appeared in PC Gamer, PCGamesN, The Escapist, and ReadWrite.