It might be time for the Call of Duty franchise to move past its annual release schedule and give us a game that’s actually good in the aftermath of Black Ops 7. For a brief while, we did have a bit of hope for this one. But, between its campaign being all over the place and its iterative innovations failing to keep up with the franchise fatigue that’s now a major concern, Black Ops 7 isn’t winning any prizes this year.
But we would be remiss not to give the game a chance to rectify its faults in future updates or perhaps the next instalment in the franchise. And since we’re on the subject, we think the game’s bosses are a good place to start. There are a number of reasons why we think so, but suffice it to say that as a part of the campaign that should have been awe-inspiring, all of the game’s bosses got from us were a few fond chuckles and the occasional eye-roll.
Why, you ask? Read on and find out.
Too Much Spectacle, Too Little Substance
When we discussed why Ready or Not was a better shooter than any Call of Duty title, one of the aspects we commented on was how that title strips away spectacle in favor of an authentic experience with real stakes and real consequences for its operatives. That authenticity has long since left the chat as far as Call of Duty is concerned.
However, in a narrative about trained soldiers looking to avert a global disaster, fighting enemies that vanish into thin air, complete with a puff of smoke, does push the boundaries of suspended disbelief. You could forgive it if the story justifies its presence on an enemy, making it a part of their training and a valuable skill at their disposal.
But when multiple enemies with relatively stale gimmicks unique to them come with the ability to reposition themselves almost instantly, the boss fight in question becomes more about your thumbsticks than your triggers, something a shooter from a franchise as established as Call of Duty should have been wise to avoid.
But supernatural teleportation abilities aside, there’s also the question of boss health bars. They’re massive, requiring a frankly obscene amount of bullets before you can bring them down and proceed towards the next uninspired idea that has taken over a large area of your map and stands in the way of your next objective.
It’s almost as if the bosses exist just to pad out the main campaign’s overall playtime, padding it out thanks to drawn-out battles against gigantic enemies that have no business existing in a game that’s about espionage and military operations. The bosses in this one might be more at home in a dark fantasy title.
Which brings us to an important part of the problem: their reason for existing. In case you’re playing through the campaign of Black Ops 7, the next couple of sections are going to have spoilers, so be warned, or come back to this one if finding things out on your own terms is important to you.
It’s All In The Mind
You see, deception and lies are the real antagonists of Black Ops 7. What about Raul Menendez, you ask? Turns out that was a red herring from the developers, and the story involves a treacherous conglomerate of corporations with shady intentions, whose main method of causing the mayhem that villains do is the Cradle.
That’s a toxin that causes shared hallucinations between people who inhale it, filling them with terror and making them encounter nightmares based on their fears and insecurities. Pretty convenient, right? We’re guessing you can see where we’re going with this. Many so-called bosses in Black Ops 7 are merely hallucinations, brought on by exposure to the Cradle, and used as a way to put you in conflict with some familiar faces.
It’s also a great way to introduce the scope for some of the more extraordinary designs you see in the game, considering that each one is a manifestation of your team’s collective fear. Unfortunately, the problem with that is that the designs themselves are rarely anything you haven’t seen before, and it’s very likely that the game you’ve seen it in did things better.
Take the fight against the giant, multi-headed tree that the hallucination of Woods pits you against. I’ve fought the thing in Shadow of the Erdtree, a 2024 DLC expansion, and that take on this design was far more exciting. It’s a very similar design with familiar attacks on a boss whose massive health bar is further protected by its thick bark, forcing you to target open growths on its body to cause damage. We’re not saying that it’s an exact copy, but it almost feels like Mason and his team play a lot of the same video games when they’re off duty.
How does that translate into gameplay? You run around the battlefield, dodging attacks and trying to get a good line of sight on an outgrowth. You then unleash a magazine into it before you move on to the next one. Rinse and repeat. There are barely any new attacks and not enough variety among the existing ones to make this fight any sort of challenge. It’s the case with most of the bosses in the game.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re all for developers trying different ideas in their games. But those massive designs and the narrative framework that justifies them must also be stretched enough to make them more imaginative and connected to the adventure. Instead, the bosses in Black Ops 7 are tone-deaf set pieces that do little in the way of innovation.
Disappointing Encounters
Going into the game, we were quite excited for our showdown with a certain familiar face from Mason’s past. Raul Menendez was among the more exciting parts of the game’s promotion, after all, and we wondered how the franchise would justify his return right from the jaws of death at Mason’s hands.
But when the time came to finally take him on, that excitement had already fizzled out. The game’s story is the main culprit here, and is why we maintain that deception is the real villain. We were lied to, and Menendez’s role in the story is nothing more than a fake-out, allowing the actual antagonist to hide behind his shadow. The version of him that you fight in the game is nothing more than a creation of your mind, and a rather poor one at that.
That’s because Menendez is our first culprit when it comes to teleporting bosses. You don’t get to fire more than a few shots at him before he vanishes, repositioning himself at the most inconvenient angle he can find to make the fight a truly annoying battle of attrition that had me planning out an elaborate dinner as I went through the motions of fighting an opponent I was so excited about.
In another boss fight, you take on a sniper whom you fight with a sniper rifle of your own while your Section One teammates take flanking positions below you. But lo and behold, this sniper teleports as well! It becomes an insipid, uninspired loop of taking a shot, waiting for your teammates to call out the sniper’s position, locating them, firing a shot, and back to step one.
It’s almost as if each boss fight is designed for repetition instead of actually challenging players with unpredictable attack patterns and perhaps some innovative twists to either the boss or the arena. The fights you take on in this one are too generic in the best case, derivative at their worst, and simply too lazily written to be of any narrative value.
To The Drawing Board
Black Ops 7’s bosses are merely symptoms of a larger problem: a worrying lack of innovation from a long-standing shooter mainstay. Yes, the improvements and new level design that the game brought to the table deserve credit for bringing meaningful tweaks that improved the player experience.
But what if that experience wasn’t worth it to begin with? I’d not want to replay any of this one’s bosses, not unless they miraculously become interesting. It isn’t fun to just run around and shoot stuff, after all. What’s interesting is having the stuff you’re trying to shoot at send you scrambling to find safety when it decides it has had enough of you, even as you formulate a plan to fight back.
Instead of a desperate tug of war for momentum in a fight, Black Ops 7’s boss battles look like juvenile attempts to introduce some drama into the game’s campaign; their narrative justifications are too flimsy to hold up under scrutiny, while their mechanics quickly betray just how boring the encounter is going to be quite early on.
It’s a shame, really, and probably a gripe that’s contributed to the campaign’s poor response both among critics and players. It’s time for Call of Duty to take a step back, refocus its efforts, and come back stronger in its next title, no matter how long that one takes to create.
