Why you'd buy Black Ops 2 on the Wii U if you own an Xbox 360 or a PS3 like I do is beyond me, but I decided to try it out on my new console because it's worth a shot, right?
Whilst the game really doesn't differ from the PS360 counterparts much (as with the PC edition, I'd assume) The Wii U version of Black Ops 2 has a number of bugs and glitches that are flat out crippling to the experience. I'll get to those in a minute, but I'd best go through the rest of the game first for consistency's sake. The Campaign mode is standard Call of Duty affairs - you play as a generic soldier called David Mason, and his father from the original Black Ops game, Alex Mason. Thoughout the campaign, you jump between post-Cold War sort of era (late 60s/70s ish) and the more futuristic 2025 missions. It works to break up the pace nicely, I have to admit - instead of being greeted with the same dullish brown corridor in a country that's clearly supposed to mimic a middle eastern location, the gameplay is kept fresh with nice grey corridors in some future compound somewhere. It all serves to follow the main bad guy through the years and attempt to explain why he wants to terrorise the rest of the world. Or America.
I can't really tell which one, because the story is so vague and there's so many things going off it's really difficult to follow exactly what's happening. I suppose it's testament to how Call of Duty is, and always will be about following the icons and shooting things in your way. Whilst I'm not going to spoil the whole thing, it's a fairly generic sort of ending as you'd expect from Call of Duty but the small number of story-changing elements serve to be moderately intriguing, even if they are quite limited. You can get a number of different endings, but they're usually just compilations of cutscenes that play whether event X or Y was chosen in the campaign mode. They're not obvious, however, which is a rather nice touch - instead of having press A for ending X device, it depends on your actions in a certain event, which will become obvious after you've played, but it's interesting nonetheless. It can't really save the story on the whole, however, which sort of scrambles things up a bit by moving across various timezones and locations, not going chronologically like other Call of Duty games.
Unlike other Call of Duty games however, you get loads of admittedly rather cool gadgets, like the flying squirrel suits and other nice things that only seem to be used once or twice in the Campaign, which really is a shame considering that this is the only really 'new' bit of the game, and if they'd have managed to use them more, and more freely as opposed to the almost cutscene like uses of most, it might have been a vastly more interesting experience. Multiplayer has no such niceties and is just a copied and pasted version of the old CoD multiplayer from last year. And the year before. And the year before that. And the year before that... Whilst I've noticed no major problems with the game apart from the distinct lack of innovation on other consoles, the game on Wii U is damn near unplayable due to Activision only providing funds for an old toaster to use as the 'Black Ops 2 server'. Every five minutes I'm thrown out of a game because 'the server is unavailable' or that the game cannot migrate host in a game that was perfectly fine without a host migration, with nobody leaving or having their connection spontaneously give up on them to warrant said host migration.
Not only that, but it takes a ridiculous amount of time to actually find a match and half of the playlists might as well not exist, because you'll never find a game in them. Truth be told, the only times I've ever managed to find a game have all been when I've searched in the 'Team Deathmatch' playlist which as you'd expect is the most popular playlist out of all of them. Not to say that the other playlists have no people searching for games in them, however - there's plenty of people in each playlist, so I'm going to put it down to horrifically bad coding. Speaking of which, when you're in a game you'll often experience really bad lag issues, or the bullet hit detection will fail, so much so that I used 15 bullets, all of them hit but only 3 registered overall. That's inexcusable, and the thing is that it's random, so there's no way of knowing whether you'll manage to lose a gunfight due to a clearly broken game mechanic - I could get into detail about this being because Call of Duty runs on the age old Quake 2 engine that's older than the dawn of time, but there's not enough space for that in a single post. Heck, there's probably not enough space in 2 posts.
As for the actual multiplayer, I can't comment too much. It seems to run much smoother than previous games, and the weapons definitely feel more unique to one another, with the 'pick 10' class modification system actually proving to be a rather intuitive system for choosing your weapons and game modifying perks and all that. It's just a shame that the multiplayer flat out doesn't work at the best of times.
And the final part of the package is the Zombies 'mini game' that's spawned a massive amount of support from fans since the days of World at War, and has a bigger community than most other AAA titles, which is impressive in itself. Much unlike the Black Ops 2 incarnation of Zombies, which feels like a bit of a dud in comparison. If you've never played the Zombies mode before, it's like your typical horde type mode, zombies come at you in waves, you kill them to gain points which can be spent on opening up new areas, better weapons so on and so forth. Black Ops 2's only real contribution to the mode is the introduction of a new 'Tranzit' mode, which is extremely vague in what you're supposed to do. Yes, it's the biggest map thus far in the history of Zombies, but it's still just a load of smaller maps sellotaped together with a bus that will allow you to move between them. Of course, you can run between locations without the bus, but you'll likely get savaged to death by a particularly annoying creature that spawns out of nowhere and proceeds to remove your face.
My main issue with this particular game mode is that it not only does nothing to innovate, but also leaves absolutely no clues as to what you're supposed to do, which was alright for the optional easter eggs in earlier games, but certainly not for the main portion of the game. As a result, it's very inaccessible for newbies to the series, and incredibly confusing for anyone who's not scoured the internet for clues regarding the mode prior to playing it. Of course, it does add buildable items to the mix, which are all rather average and don't really do anything to change the game up at all. Again, there's no hints as to what goes with what and where you can build it, it's all trial and error which is pretty poor in a game where you have to start all over again if you simply get caught off guard by a zombie that you couldn't quite take down because you were sellotaping a fan to a tyre or something. Again, that's another complaint - there's absolutely no way to even guess what's being built unless you've done it before, so you don't know what you'll need to find to be able to build something. For instance, to turn the power switch on in one portion, you have to build the power switch itself, which you'd think is simple, but one of the parts is a generic zombie arm (because apparently you can't turn the switch without the zombie arm attached) and so you have to literally hold the Y button over anything that vaguely looks like an arm in the hope that it's the one that you're looking for. Not any arm will do, it's just one specific one that looks no different to the others. That's annoying.
So, overall impression on Black Ops 2 aren't very good. Yes, it's probably in part due to the fact that I played the Wii U version of the game but at the end of the day, the game should not be released unless it's functional and the best it can be, regardless of the system it's on. A rather glaring issue that I should note along with this is that the framerate occasionally and somewhat randomly drops from a steady 60+ to below 10 for no reason, sometimes sustained periods, on all game modes. As a result of these kinds of issues, and the general lack of innovation across the board I'd highly recommend that you avoid this game like the plague, or at least until they fix the blatant issues with it. Which they won't, because Activision would rather Treyarch dedicate their time and resources to making (urgh) paid DLC.
Final thoughts:
Some interesting ideas, but a greatly missed opportunity and horribly broken finished product means you'll have more fun skimming the disc down a driveway.
4/10Oh, and a little sidenote too - I forgot to mention the Wii U Gamepad functionality in this review. Because there is none. Apart from being able to play on the little screen on multiplayer co-op whilst someone else uses the TV, there's really no gamepad support at all. The touchscreen doesn't even work in menus, and the only real thing it does normally is display your minimap and/or mission objectives, thus showing that this is nothing more than a tacky port.
