Just thought I'd quickly post up my first impressions of Call of Duty: Black Ops before I go back to play it some more :D

I picked it up this morning before school for the bargain price of £28! Unfortunately I had to wait until after school to play it, and I have to say that while I wasn't expecting great things from it after the disappointment of MW2 those 6 hours were still torture.

So I got back home, said hi to the dog, got changed and sat down with a bottle of Coke and the game. Seeing as I was only an Xbox Live silver member, I couldn't play online and so decided to play a load of Combat Training and learn the maps before starting for real when I renew my Gold subscription at Christmas. This is the only major problem I've found so far - you must have an Xbox Live Gold account to play Combat Training, which involves no other online players! Why Treyarch, why? There's going to millions of disappointed fans who have been looking forward to playing against these AI Bots because they don't have an online account, and if I was one of them I would complain to Treyarch and try to get them to fix it, making it playable offline too. Maybe just add some bots into split-screen or something.

Anyway, the game came with a 48 hour trial which I quickly tapped in after that disappointment and settled down for a 2 and a half hour session online. Most people are under level 20, so everybodys reasonably well matched although when you're up against a party of elite players you're probably gonna struggle ... the guns are reasonably well balanced, and the big concern I had which was how effective the RC-Car would be disappeared into nothing. You only have a short time to control the car, and it can also be blown up with a single shot (I believe) but when you get a multikill with it it is very satisfying! The main addition is the CoD Points which I think is a good idea but it's an idea that hasn't been executed well enough to make it a worthwile addition to the game.

I've yet to play any of the other game modes (i.e. zombies and campaign) but I'm going to have a quick go on zombies now and may report what I think of it later. I'll probably try and do at least half of the campaign over the weekend.

See ya!