At this point you should be ready to play online, though prepare to be underwhelmed. As mentioned above, online is limited to 5 modes on roughly 5 different maps, so expect to do a lot of the same. Once you reach rank 4 you gain the ability to create your own class, but you’re not given many choices. While you’re given a vast selection of guns (20+) and attachments, it seems that every other type is extremely limited. For starters you’re stuck with 12 different perks, which are broken up into 3 groups of 4 and are pretty standard fare. After this you’re given a choice of 7 different kill streak rewards, though a few are pretty similar. Finally you have the choice of 4 lethal and 2 tactical grenades and that’s it. Naturally all these options need to be unlocked by leveling, but you’re given most of the useful items upfront. However, as you kill people your weapons will level up adding increased stats, so this might prevent you from changing weapons down the road.
Good luck with Hard Mode
While Declassified does a lot of things poorly, it’s most apparent in the game’s single player. At first you might not notice the problems, but over time they will become more apparent. This is most apparent with the games AI, since the game always seems to know EXACTLY where you are and the AI will implement a “spray and pray” playstyle. This basically means once the AI is alerted, enemies won’t stop shooting on your location till they’re dead or need to reload. This problem is only amplified by the absurdly high auto aim on enemies. While this will cause problems on any difficulty, it makes hard mode virtually impossible on some missions unless you memorize every enemy spawn and neutralize them before they’re a threat.
Besides the almost godlike AI, most of the levels are designed to put you at a serious disadvantage in virtually any given situation. These can range from a sniper waiting to kill you from a distant window; to some enemies you might expect raining hell from above on you. My personal favorite is any time you need to run into the open, only to spawn more enemies to kill. These constant ambush attacks get old fast and really only serve to elongate the single player experience.
In addition to the problems above, hostiles mode feels poorly planned. This is due to 3 key problems, which honestly ruin the mode as a whole. The biggest problem is that all 5 stages have at least one choke point, so you can pretty much shoot enemies as they come after you. Over time new enemies will appear with different guns/skills, but they have fixed designs. So when you see a masked enemy, you already know he’s going to martyrdom, which makes the experience less tense. Thankfully the mode tries to capture this by giving you very low ammo or forcing you to chase after the AI, but there are plenty of tricks to come out alive.
Bugs, Glitches and Annoyances
If there weren’t enough fundamental problems with Declassified, there are also some technical ones too. For instance it’s not uncommon for enemies to stand still and do nothing or hitting you in some illogical way, like through a wall (I’ve killed people like this too). It’s also not uncommon to have issues connecting to a room online, getting randomly disconnected or experience a missing animation online (like seeing no explosion with a grenade). I’ve also discovered it’s completely possible to spawn camp someone in Declassified, so don’t be surprised if someone gets lucky due to the small map size. Finally for some reason there are some hefty load times. It took me 52 seconds to load a multiplayer map and 37 seconds to load the first operations mission. When you consider most of these stages can easily be done in 3 minutes, you have to wonder why it takes so long to load the stages.
VERDICT
Similar to Resistance Burning Skies, there are just too many problems with Black Ops: Declassified. No retail title should have an offline mode that can easily be finished in 2 hours or as many obvious problems as Declassified has. With this being said, don’t assume the game is completely unplayable either. The controls are good enough that you have a fighting change against the AI and the online is pretty fun when it works correctly. While I wouldn’t suggest buying it at $50 or even $40, you can probably get your moneys worth out of $20 or less. Hopefully Nihlistic will fix some of the issues by that point, but till then wait for a price drop.
[Editor’s Note: Black Ops: Declassified was reviewed on the PlayStation Vita platform with the latest patch. The game was provided to us by the developer for the purpose of the review.]
