Yeah, I’m playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Not the weird campaign or the extra-large Zombies offering, but the multiplayer. Team Deathmatch, mostly, maybe some Kill Confirmed. A few hours a couple of days a week, ass parked on the couch, brain on autopilot, cranking some CoD. This describes me recently, but it could also describe versions of me stretching back more than 15 years ago.
It’s not nostalgia as much as it’s resignation, or the quiet reliance on something familiar. Halo Infinite feels empty and sad. Battlefield 6 is too big and tactical for my twitchy shooter preference. Fortnite and Apex Legends and Arc Raiders are much longer time sucks. In this regard, I suppose I’m Activision’s ideal consumer: a tired millennial who just wants to shoot shit quickly.
When playing Black Ops 7, I am pulled into a parallel universe like the one from Interstellar. Every Call of Duty that has ever existed or will exist is here, and I can press all of their buttons at once. The pre-game lobby music sounds identical to the music from Black Ops 6, several of the Operators are from last year’s Zombies mode, and the map I’m playing on is a recreation of one from 2012’s Black Ops 2. Nuketown 24/7 is here, and it’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It always has been.
The various bells and whistles that are supposed to make this version of Call of Duty worth spending another $70 on are mostly lost on me (Activision gave me a code, plus it’s on Game Pass). I sink into comfort, into the pre-made loadouts or the singular one I build myself (a kitted-out AR, Semtex, Cold-Blooded), into cooking a sticky before throwing it into a crowded room, into reloading after every shot fired to ensure I have a full clip, and I relax into repetition.
I queue up in a lobby. Someone calls someone else the r-slur. I go 25 and 4. The lobby automatically queues up for another game. Someone calls someone else the f-slur. I go 18 and 9. I do this on repeat for a few hours, before dinner or bed beckons. Am I having fun? I guess?
There are new things in Black Ops 7 multiplayer, of course. The most noticeable is the wall jump, which the sweatier players have already perfected in a particularly irritating manner—imagine your standard Call of Duty but with the vertical leap of a Halo game that’s far more erratic. Skirmish, the 20v20 mode that sees players glide into a larger map on suited wings to try and capture various points, keeps me occupied for a few rounds. Then I return to TDM.
The new maps are fun, but they all blur together into a vague, Call of Duty-shaped smear. This doesn’t deter me, though it should. Instead, I am almost soothed by the banality of it all. I realize after a particularly dominant match that, out of all the shooter franchises I’ve played throughout the years, I am most attuned to these former pseudo-mil-sims turned power fantasies. While playing Black Ops 7, I enter a flow state that I can’t mimic in any other game: my fingers move without me willing them to, my body relaxes like I’m neck-deep in a sauna, my eyes glaze over as if under a spell.
Though it’s difficult to argue the artistic merits of a gigantic video game publisher annually pushing out a hoo-rah shooter (with at least some help from generative AI), I can’t lie and act like I’m not playing them. But like the comfort breakfast I would eat every day in elementary school to exercise some control over my life, I will eventually grow tired of this taste. First, it was Entemann’s corn muffins, then it was Eggo waffles. Now it’s Black Ops 7, tomorrow it might be Halo Infinite again. For those of us who love first-person shooters with fast queue times, the pickings are slim, and Call of Duty is there every year.
