The Worst of 2012: Games
While it wasn’t something I scored a 0 or 1, I will say I have played games I would scarcely define to be good. Here, it’s a tie between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II.
Once you played one, you played ’em all.
It was clear after Infinity Ward struck gold with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, with its modern setting and addictive multiplayer with an almost RPG-like depth. So what do they do? The release a new Call of Duty every year with minimal changes to the formula. Granted, as I said in my reviews, they weren’t fair or relevant since I only played the campaigns since I lack an Xbox Live account; game reviewers compared playing Call of Duty for its single player to reading a porn magazine for its articles. It’s the online multiplayer everyone wants. Still, from what I played in the campaigns, there was next to nothing I hadn’t already seen before in basically every game since CoD4. As I said in my Black Ops II review, the problem with tried-and-true formulae like Call of Duty is that they will never make a game that is really bad, and thus will do really poorly in sales. As every game does very well in terms of sales, a new Call of Duty gets launched every year.
Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to weep by the grave marked “Innovation,” where games like Okami and Heavy Rain lie.