What Is Call of Duty Scared Of?

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Black Ops 7‘s campaign is the most interesting a Call of Duty story has sounded in a long while. That’s because, for a change of pace, Black Ops 7 is confronting an entirely new and impossible theatre of war: the mind. While parts of the upcoming Call of Duty will take place in the real world—or at least the alternate reality timeline of conspiracy theories come true that the Black Ops games have erected since 2010—much of it will apparently take place in the mind of, at the very least, David Mason, the game’s protagonist, as it tackles his own fears and anxieties.

That’s right, Call of Duty is now officially going the way of Christpher Nolan and dropping its roguish, no-good good guys into Inception. That is, if the scant few glimpses of the game’s campaign we’ve had are to be believed. And although it appears to be more or less the parody of itself that you might expect, it does raise an excellent question: what is Call of Duty scared of?

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The setup appears to be as follows: David Mason, the son of a previous Black Ops protagonist, is now leading his own task force against Raul Menendez, a returning baddie with a grudge he’s held onto for a long time now. As part of the new war he’s waging (for undetermined reasons as of now) he is also deploying a new (actually old) chemical agent called Nova 6. After trapping Mason and his team in a chamber and exposing them to it, things start to get loopy and surreal as the squad bounces between Call of Duty’s typical range of locations all around the world with odd and surreal bents.

In its own overwrought way—the only way this series knows to do this kind of thing—this is Call of Duty trying something new, which I can appreciate. The fare of most of these campaigns is the stuff of bog standard blockbusters. You are a dubious character belonging to a dubious task force carrying out dubious operations across dubious country lines. There’s a stealth mission, a sniping mission, a vehicle mission, and lots of setpieces where shit gets blown sky high. I like to think of these games as the mindless action movies you put on after work at the end of a long day. They’re often deeply regressive works, but I usually don’t care enough to get too bent out of shape about its political impropriety when I just need a shooting gallery to dig into for an evening or two.

Given this latest turn inward, though, I thought I might try and take it a wee more seriously this time. Unfortunately, that’s pretty hard to do at all given what has emerged from the trailers.

The most enduring image of Black Ops 7‘s campaign so far is that of a building-sized knife flying through the air before plunging into the ground of a Nicaraguan battlefield, sending bodies flying and kicking up a plume of blood-red smoke. The second most is of a distinctly Los Angelan highway under siege from an unknown enemy (likely Menendez’s own private military) as the road spirals into the air.

The most ridiculous of them all comes near the end of the trailer: a giant hand seemingly emerges from beyond the horizon and plummets through a building it grabs onto before it’s revealed that a kaiju Michael Rooker is the said monster. Rooker, who plays a member of the core squad and returns from Black Ops 2, then launches into an attack against his own teammates.

With some context—meaning I’ve played Black Ops 2 at some point in my life—some of this passes the smell test. Los Angeles and Nicaragua, not to mention a glimpse at Angola, seem like explorations of the series’ past, particularly segments in the aforementioned predecessor that are set there. In Black Ops 2, Menendez launches a full-scale drone attack on Los Angeles, making an attempt on the president’s life and leveling at least one skyscraper, which makes sense of some of the dilapidated imagery in the newest game. From the trailer alone, we get a glimpse of Menendez also brandishing a knife, which looks pretty similar to the ones that can be seen cutting up the landscape.

It seems quite apparent to me, at least, that the thing that strikes the most fear into Mason is the enigmatic warlord that’s been dogging him for years and is singlehandedly responsible for the death of his father. That and being betrayed by his closest ally, kaiju Michael Rooker.

What really strikes me about it all though is just how deeply familiar Black Ops 7 looks and sounds despite this new and strange angle. 13 years have passed since Black Ops 2, this newest game’s most direct narrative predecessor, and look how much has stayed the same. Tech and weaponized fear itself still weigh heavily on the minds of Call of Duty’s writers, so much so that they’ve now written a game that retraces their own steps more than a decade on.

Much as this new game might try to reinvent the wheel—at least aesthetically—man does this series seem like it’s still largely about a dubious character belonging to a dubious task force carrying out dubious operations across dubious country lines. One which I’m sure will once again feature a stealth mission, a sniping mission, a vehicle mission, and lots of setpieces where shit gets blown sky high. Maybe it’s silly to want anything more. To expect the Call of Duty machine to produce any real semblance of change. Maybe that’s what it’s really scared of?

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.