The first game I have ever given a rating of 10.
The campaign has you taking turns playing through two separate storylines. One storyline is set in 1986, during the cold war; the other is set in 2025. The 1986 storyline establishes the back story of the antagonist, Raul Menendez, leader of Cordis Die (latin: Day of the Heart), and his relationship to Alex Mason, the protagonist of the 2025 storyline.
Throughout, you are given opportunities to influence the story. How many times have you been playing a modern FPS, attempting to prevent a kidnapping, only to see the bad guy fly away with his hostage at the end of the sequence? Well, in Black Ops 2, is you are fast enough, you can catch up to and gun down the bad guy before he gets away. Should you fail, you will have to play another mission in which you attempt to rescue the hostage, and if you fail THAT mission, the hostage is lost forever.
The fact that you can screw yourself later on by manifesting your ineptness early in the game adds a certain tension and weightiness to the action that is missing in most games. There are about a dozen different ways to influence the outcome, even if you aren't aware of the decisions that your making. For example, the difference between shooting a guy in the head or in the chest might not be apparent at the time, but it can lead to a very different ending.
It has to be noted that it doesn't seem possible to lose. Yes you can die, but you just go back to the checkpoint. No matter how badly you botch every task you are given, as long as you can competently continue to shoot people in the face, you will reach the end of the campaign. Similarly, no matter how skilled you are, you cannot end the campaign early. Raul Menendez can survive getting shot, exploded, burned; he anticipates your every action and has a response ready. In fact, the only reason you win in the end is because just when he is about to wipe out everything that could oppose him, he almost literally self-destructs for no reason at all. It is an extremely infuriating ending after all the build-up leading to it.
Lots of talented people were on the ticket for Black Ops 2. Doing the music are Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails, The Social Network) and Jack Wall (Mass Effect 1 & 2). Well-known actors include Sam Worthington, Tony Todd, Robert Picardo, Nolan North, and Michelle Rodriguez (the last three I didn't come across in-game; I found them on the credits).
Speaking of the credits, the results of many of your in-campaign decisions become clear in cinematics during the credits. There is also one very special cinematic after the credits, courtesy of Neversoft, collaborators on the Guitar Hero Franchise, in which the characters from the campaign rock out with Avenged Sevenfold in a packed nightclub.
You don't need to hear about the rest from me - multiplayer is still awesome and I still suck at zombies, but I would like to take this opportunity to make I point that I feel needs to be made: Where are the women? I see enemies in front of me; they're all dudes. I see my allies around me; they're all dudes. I appreciate that the people who make these games don't want to show women being violently murdered, but there's a point where covering your ass becomes disrespectful to the women in uniform who do the exact same job as the men of the armed forces.
Have you noticed that all the helicopter and jet pilots in these games are women? This is a trend that goes back as far as Halo 1, if not further. It's because developers want to have female characters, but they don't want to put them on the ground, in harm's way. I call bullsh*t. This is something the industry needs to fix immediately.