Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 campaign receives mixed reactions across critic reviews

Black Ops 7’s campaign draws mixed reactions, with critics highlighting experimental design and key shortcomings

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has launched to a mixed critical response, with reviewers noting significant changes to the series’ traditional campaign structure. Publications report that its shift to a fully online, four-player co-operative format has had a notable impact on solo play, raising concerns about accessibility, pacing and design choices.

Forbes’ Erik Kain describes the campaign as “a huge disappointment”, citing the always-online requirement, absence of pause functionality and lack of checkpoints as central issues. Kain highlights that solo players experience missions without AI squadmates, creating what he refers to as an unusually empty campaign experience for the series. His review also notes confusion around co-op design decisions, such as cutscenes featuring full squads while actual gameplay removes accompanying characters.

IGN’s Simon Cardy calls the campaign “one of Call of Duty’s most intriguing, yet flawed”, praising its movement abilities, visual variety and fast mission structure, while criticising uneven enemy scaling, repetitive objectives in its open-zone Avalon segments and an endgame that he argues “adds little to the excitement that leads up to it”. Cardy states that the four-player structure often leaves solo players disadvantaged and describes the overall pacing as inconsistent.

Polygon’s impressions echo similar concerns, noting that the campaign lacks non-hostile NPCs and often resembles a series of wave-based encounters. The publication highlights that this absence of downtime or grounded locations reduces the sense of world-building traditionally present in Black Ops campaigns. Polygon also points to the heavy reliance on hallucinatory sequences and the Cradle gas narrative device as contributing factors to an experience that feels disconnected from the series’ previous storytelling foundations.

Across reviews, critics broadly acknowledge the strengths of Black Ops 7’s gunplay, technical polish and co-operative potential, but consistently identify structural and design departures that have divided long-time fans of the franchise.