By Anthony Lucci—

Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the next big first-person shooter (FPS)—I don’t think so. It’s more like a tiny stepping-stone at best. The campaign storyline, as expected, is not as exciting as it could have been for a Call of Duty that is set in the near future.

The story is a bit tricky to follow because you have to play a retelling of past events and than jump back to the future and see how it all connects to the final climax of the game. But this isn’t really what Call of Duty has been known for.

Zombies and multiplayer make call of duty fan boys feel right at home. Zombies have made a come back in a pretty big way. You start out in a random room, like always, but this time zombies start in the room with you.

Being that it’s round one, you should save that precious lead and just use your knife. You can manage to get away with staying in this room for a few rounds because there are weapons that you can buy, but you truly want to start making your way by round four, at the least.

This is where it gets different; there is a bus waiting for you outside to take you to a new destination on the map, because with out going around the map you will not be able to turn the power on. Something else to take into account is the introduction of a whole new zombie game type called “Greif”.

Now, Greif adds a completely different dynamic to playing zombies. Two teams of four battle for kills on the undead horde and the last man standing wins it for his team. It’s very fun to try and be your team’s hero and save them from the overwhelming swarm, and to watch and laugh as the opposing team gets eaten alive.

The multiplayer can be unforgiving at times, especially when you join a game that’s already in progress. With the addition of hardpoint (an objective where an area in the map lights up and teams battle over the location), which is like Halo’s king of the hill (an objective where, to win, a team must hold down a location for the longest time), the multiplayer now has a wide variety of game types for all of us to enjoy.

This is not to say that there still aren’t times where I want to throw my Xbox out of a window, but that’s just the nature of competitive multiplayer. The game lends itself to a faster style of play, but there is and always will be those people that ruin every shooter; we all have a name for them, names that can not be said in this review, but the general public knows them as “campers”!

There is a new way to customize your classes (a way to customize your soldiers). You can have up to ten items of your choice: guns, perks, primary and secondary grenades, and wildcards.

All and all, the multiplayer experience is varied with ups and downs. If there is one piece of advice I can give, it’s to use a sub-machine gun; nine times out of ten, you will come up with a victory.