Every Saturday night right before my 4 day work week starts, I try to put lunches together for that entire week to eat at work. A few weeks ago, I cooked some rice in my rice cooker, but didn’t know what I would add to it to make it a full meal. My parents had left town to see my little brother play football in a different state, but they left some cooked ground turkey in a pan in the fridge. After ensuring it was free to use, I put a little of it and the rice I cooked into meal prep containers along with a side salad, and heavily seasoned the mixture. The next day, I took my lunch, heated up the food, took a bit and…grimised. It wasn’t quire repulsive, but it immediately tasted stale, and the seasonings didn’t quite complement the turkey I added. But I was hungry, and I was kinda looking forward to eating right now and didn’t wanna go out and pick something up hours later after work. So I finished the dish, and once I got home, I tossed out the other containers as I didn’t look forward to eating that again.

Black Ops 7 is that meal.

It is reheated leftovers with some added spice to make, if not better, then at least different. The characters, the plot points, the structure, the levels, and so much more are pulled from earlier entries in the series, or other modes entirely. The gameplay is fine, as CoD has never not been fun to play on a base level, which makes its flaws easier to swallow. But that base enjoyment is all you get, as nothing about the narrative, visuals, or other aspects of the wrapper make the candy bar inside taste any more exciting. And as someone who tends to enjoy all CoD campaigns to different degrees, the fact this is an unpausable party style campaign rather than something more linear and curated makes it the worst CoD campaign since Black Ops 3.

But hey, if you don’t care about single player campaigns, or even stories that say something at all, Zombies and PvP multiplayer is still here, and I can say they are just as good as you expect them to be. In the same way Modern Warfare III (the reboot) followed up Modern Warfare II (the reboot) by refining movement, making the package more accessible and appealing to new players, and fixing the aspects most complained about in the prior entry by the community, Black Ops 7 follows up Black Ops 6 a year later without any massive changes. The new Endgame mode (which was only unlocked by beating the campaign until Fri, Nov 21st.) is the big new feature, but it is literally just a giant gumbo pot of mechanics, enemies, and environments from not only other CoD games, but other live service shooters on the market. It is, again, fine to play, but it is just so goddamn souless to experience.

With nothing to say and really no reason to exist outside of earning money for a morally corrupt corporation, Black Ops 7 seems like art without a purpose. But that’s’ the thing, I don’t think Black Ops 7 is art, it think it’s content. Once you see you time with this $70 (or $30 a month) product as the cultural equivalent of a TikTok or Bluesky scroll session, it’s purpose comes to focus. In the same way that hours on TikTok will eventually lead you to the shop to buy something, Microsoft is hoping that the pleasant enough malaze of hitmarkers and high frame rate action can lull you into spending even more money beyond initial access on a skin or battle pass.

I can admit, I often fall victim to the neutral, consistent allure of consuming content. I lose more nights to YouTube binges than I care to admit, to the point where I’ve put limits on those apps so my time on them doesn’t get out of control. But when it comes to games like Call of Duty, or Fortnite, or even my beloved The Finals, I have to minimize my time with them if I care to experience the parts of the artform that made me a fan. I love watching numbers go up and enemies go down as much as the millions that play these games, and in the case of Black Ops 7, the gunplay, balance, and gunfeel is incredibly solid. But if I look back at my favorite games of all time, or even my favorite experiences of all time, Black Ops 7 has nothing in common with any of those games.

In the same way that I probably shouldn’t have put hundreds of hours into Cookie Clicker over the last few years because that time could have been spent more impactfully, I think I could play way better games than Black Ops 7. Not only is the game soulless on a level way deeper than just it’s AI generated calling cards, but it’s all in the name of some pretty transparently uninspired goals. But I will inevitable scroll one day, and I will inevitably hop back into matchmaking again one day. Hell, apparently I’ve played so much CoD in the past that I have nearly a weeks worth of double XP tokens saved up that I just never used. But I have to just remember that games do get better than this, a LOT better than this, and to spend too much on my time on content when art is out there waiting would be a massive disservice not only to the medium, but to myself.

Final Score: