Bonus: the core crew of Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Rooker, Frankie Adams & John Eric Bentley, along with a scenery chewing turn from Kiernan Shipka were an entertaining group to listen to, even if it was all very standard military action cheese. Adams’ 50/50 particularly was underserved in a fun role

Yet despite my own meandering thoughts? As with the lingering feeling that most of the narrative was in lead David Mason’s mind? If potentially nothing was real, I’m left feeling at a loss… are there going to be answers to lingering questions via Endgame updates? If not, what was the point?

On its own merits, viewed as what it is, not what many expected, it’s an entertaining few hours leading into the next of CoD’s continued attempts to build an extraction game… let’s just hope this time they actually build upon it.

After DMZ, Outbreak, MWZ and now this, it’s the least barebones

Direct comparisons to prior single player experiences in the series of course fare terribly for BO7. Especially if you attempt to compare features. This is much closer to an evolution of MWii’s Raids, another flawed-with-potential experiment.

lack of in-game vs pre-vis cutscenes particularly irks

A choice that for me? Mostly worked. As a silly, psychedelic co-op romp I had fun. Boss battles - something the series has experimented with of late - were (imo) suitably absurd.

Actually having multiplayer operators all (I think?) exist as characters from the narrative is a positive change too.

Unlike with the prior “expand-alone” that Activision released two years ago as MWiii, I didn’t find BO7 a functionally unfinished feeling, incoherently-written mess, tho there is plenty to criticise.

Having the entire narrative (potentially) be one extended hallucination was… a choice.

Trying to Stockholm users into “accepting” smudgy AI slop-looking visuals in a shitty effort to limp towards this unreachable end goal of profiting of the tech? :s

Depressingly Lost Crown didn’t make it close to that many players on Ubisoft’s PC launcher, barely made that in the launch window across all platforms and stores :/