A look at Call of Duty: Black OP's.

 I'll be brutally honest right out the gate: I'm one of the few gamers on Earth that doesn't really care for online multiplayer in my first-person shooters. I'll take an epic single-player story over little kids screaming racist epithets in to my headset over Xbox Live any day of the week. But it's a testament to how addictive the Call of Duty franchise's multiplayer is that such a large majority of players decide to skip over the single-player entirely. It's a shame too, as the franchise has continuously provided an excellently paced, albeit way too short, series of single-player campaigns over the last few years. Yet aside from getting repeatedly murdered on veteran mode, there's little incentive to replay it after the four or five hours it usually takes to finish them. But why hire voice actors, create detailed environments and script out a story when it's all over so fast? I'd love to see a more elaborate, slightly slower paced single-player campaign that favored depth and story over people screaming at me and telling me to run towards things before, after and while they explode. 

 Call it blind retro fetishism, but it's sort of baffling that a game like Goldeneye 007 for the N64 tackled its single-player mode better than most modern shooters. Playing on different difficulty settings meant branching paths with distinctly unique objectives, environment exploration and gadgets to interact with. And that was in 1997. Black Ops could totally benefit from a similarly structured experience and would inspire players to revisit the single player side of things multiple times. I'm not asking for paintball mode or big head mode, but throw in some cool single and multiplayer unlockable rewards for finishing the story on multiple difficulties and the deal will effectively be sweetened. 

Treyarch surprised everyone with the introduction of the Nazi Zombie Survival modes and the three downloadable expansion packs that took World at War to a whole new level. These wacky add-ons brought a much needed balance to the main game, so why not expand on them more? The initial Nazi zombie mode took place in four different survival maps – complete with different weapons, player perks and an underlying story that had the enthusiasts gripped from start to finish. And since they're already confirmed to return, we'd like to see a lot more from the Zombie multiplayer modes in Black Ops. How about team deathmatch with the undead as bystanders, or objective based survival scenarios with lots of brand new maps to experiment with?