Reaping over $500m in its first 24 hours of sale, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is officially the biggest game release this year and the fourth-biggest of all time. And it’s fine. It really is fine. 

If you liked the previous Call of Duty games, you’ll like this one. If, on the other hand, the same tricks that featured in 2007’s Modern Warfare have become a bit stale, you’ll be forgiven for taking issue with it. Call of Duty’s single player is renowned for its wildly flamboyant scripted action and spectacular set-pieces. 

Rather than break with tradition, Black Ops II has taken this to the extreme, and gameplay is frequently lost in vast tracts of cinematic, which, on more than one occasion, require their own loading screens.

Mercifully these interludes are both attractive and well-acted. Developer Treyarch’s facial animation has made a particularly large bound on from CoD’s previous iteration, capturing emotion with startling acuity – effort rather upsettingly undone by the agonizingly long periods for which control is wrested from the player. Gameplay is largely mediocre, relying on gimmicks which began to feel dated several years ago. Clear an area, take out the pursuit using mounted weapons, call in an airstrike to deal with armour, watch out for that gunship.

Credit where it’s due: the levels are graphically very rich, but they offer nothing beyond a shooting gallery packed with random militia, unmanned drones or, naturally, Russians. And for a game which treats its myriad weapons with such reverence, the gunplay isn’t half uninspiring. While the level of customization available is laudable, the shooting feels weightless and sounds timid – there’s never any feeling of physical presence in the warzone.

Of course the main event in any Call of Duty game is that deepest of time sinks, the multiplayer. Yet despite investing considerable hours of playtime since its release, I struggle to report either heinous slip-ups or praise-worthy innovation.
It’s Call of Duty, as it was last year, and the year before, and for several years before that.

This is neither criticism nor praise; the sales figures alone demonstrate the rampant demand for Activision’s magic formula, and the series undeniably fills a niche. It is, however, phenomenally generic, and those looking for evolution in the genre ought to look elsewhere. A redundant work of repetition and iteration, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is fine. It really is fine.