My wife and I recently got this game and a PS3 for Xmas. We like to play games together, such as, adult action based first person shooters with lots of great co-op campaigns and engaging visual environments and an engaging storyline so good that you totally forget you are playing a game, but immersed in their world. Some of our favorites have been the Gears of War, Rainbow Six Vegas, Army of Two and Left for Dead franchises and the apocalyptic semi-RPG, Borderlands. But we were quite disappointed with Black Ops, especially being one of the most anticipated first person shooters of the season, and how much co-op play that it lacks.
I believe we felt the same frustration in previous installments such both of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. There is no real co-op campaign with these shooters, and that to me is very unfortunate, as my wife and I and other couples that love the camaraderie of a split screen shooter, but our options become limited to a zombie level, or running around and shooting each other in a variety of versus matches.
We are still getting used to the PS network and gamer ids, and how it differs from the pre existing knowledge on Xbox Live. We first played the game on the network, but the multiplayer options that were available were just my wife and I running around and shooting at each other in team death matches, capture the flag, free for all and several other options, with tons of maps to boot. But unfortunately, there was no co-op campaign mode.
So our option to get this done was online multiplayer and it would be “friends only party.” Even though we were playing a local connection on the same PS3, this game still required the use of a network connection, which was unfortunate on the following night when we played this at the old mother-in-law’s who only has a dial up connection – blah!
The total number of available friends players is up to eighteen, but we couldn’t even figure out how to get my wife and I to be simultaneously signed in so that we could both earn trophies, achievements, recognition, etc. In Xbox Live, my wife normally signs under my gold account as a guest if we want to play something on Xbox live. But we only do that because we feel paying for two accounts is unnecessary. In fact, we rarely play online, and I really only pay for the gold membership so that I can use Netflix on the Xbox (for more on Xbox and Netflix, read my article here.) But the PS3 comes with free access to Netflix as if it were an app installed on their network. So, I will now take the money that I spent on a gold membership, and will instead pay an additional two dollars a month so that Netflix can stream and send me Blu Ray movies.
But I will have to tinker around more with the network and features in the game. If you do pick one of the split screens battles, you can add up to nine computer opponents, but once they are dead the level is over. That just doesn’t seem like enough variety nor usage of the AI in these games as they should continuously come at you from various spawn points (which is awesome in the zombie level of the game when you are overwhelmed by undead Nazis, but you can only play with one other person). But aside from the zombie level, I didn’t really dig much of this game and due to the fact that it doesn’t have a co-op campaign, I will probably trade it in, because spending over sixty dollars isn’t worth one zombie aspect nor the ability to turn around and kill my partner. If I wanted to hurt my wife so badly, I would have divorced her a long time ago.
References:
http://www.callofduty.com/hub
