I cannot stress how much I detested High on Life when its loser-ass jiggled out of its mum's basement in a suffocating cloud of weed-smoke. Squanch Games' 2022 FPS was a cynical, jabbering mess that overcompensated for its limp gunplay with meandering, interminable stoner humour. Eurogamer's High on Life review rightly lambasted it for its failings, and I personally would have been happy to never look at one of its grinning guns ever again.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's multiplayer is better than its awful, terrible, abominable, ghastly, hideous, not very good campaign. But 'better' in this case does not necessarily mean 'good'. This year's anxious flurry of maps, modes and zombies achieves the base requirement for a satisfactory shooting experience, and there are a couple of ideas that are interesting if inconsistently successful. But the overall quality is wildly incoherent, while the whole package is overshadowed by the spectre of generative AI.
The biggest change to this year's multiplayer is also the least interesting to discuss, its approach to skill-based matchmaking. Call of Duty's habit of matching you with players allegedly on your ability level has come under fire in recent years for flattening the experience. So this year, Treyarch offers you a choice, letting you play with 'standard' SBMM, or in a pool where SBMM is 'minimally considered'.
