About the game: This is your standard new fps where you control your person in a first person point of view. You have a variety of weapons you can choose to spawn with and if you look down the sights of the weapon you get better accuracy.
Controls: Your standard fps controls. Mouse fires/looks down sights. WSAD move around. Etc...
Graphics: The graphics were ok, I found Modern Warfare 2 to have much higher quality graphics, but as I understand it the graphics in black ops were very similar to world at war which was made by the same developer.
Sound: Sound can be very important in a first person shooter and in this game it really is pretty awesome. Great music and sound effects for when you are listening for that grenade that fell near you.
Gameplay: The game borrows quite heavily from previous COD's but there is quite a bit of variety here to make it unique.
Firstly everyone can rest easy the dedicated servers are back and its a welcome change to the system that was in place for Modern Warfare 2. While, the game had quite a few issues when it came out (see below), it was still an incredibly engaging and addicting online experience.
The game follows like MW2 where you gain experience as you kill other players or complete objectives. As you gain levels you unlock a variety of new weapons, decals, and a whole bunch of skins for your weapons. The difference here is that you pay for these rather than just unlocking them and being able to use them.
As you level you will gain these points which are used to purchase the unlockables. It is not difficult to gain points, but it will be difficult to master the variety of weapons available for purchase. The higher level you attain the better the rewards (generally true, but not always). Once you reach the max level you can choose to lose all your unlockables but gain an extra character slot this is called prestige.
Now character slots work as follows: You can deck out a total of 5 characters (as you reach the max level you can choose to lose your unlockables you can gain an extra character slot, you can do this 5 times to gain an extra 5 character slots). with a mishmash of weapons. The thing is, that once you choose, you cannot change while in a game, this can only be done outside of a game.
Your character will have 2 weapons, a variety of grenades and what are called perks. These perks are generally something that go against the norm in the game. They allow you to hit harder or run for a longer period of time or even allow you to take less damage.
Also, the more kills you get in a row the better the killstreak reward is. You choose these for each character slot and they range from a helpful crate dropped from sky to a seat in a chopper. You can have a max of 3 per character slot.
Challenges will help you level quicker and will not be lost when you prestige. Each weapon has a variety of challenges and as you complete one, more open up. For weapons they generally mean you need to get x number of kills with the weapon, but everything in the game has a challenge associated with it. They give you experience or unlock something new for you as you complete them.
The game has a variety of modes, but the newest and coolest mode are the wager matches where you wage a certain amount of your points and try to compete against others in some cool modes. One in the Chamber is the coolest mode, where each player is armed with a pistol with 1 bullet and a knife. As you kill others you get another bullet.
There is plenty more to the game, but you will just have to discover it all for yourself!
I had quite a few technical issues with the game but, I was not alone in having these issues. I felt that the game might have not been tested quite as much as it should have. There was quite a bit of stuttering occurring during gameplay, not to mention the fact that the game would cause my internet connection to drop. These did not stop me from playing, and I do think Treyarch worked out most of the bugs/glitches.
Verdict: Playworthy!!!
