Black Ops II: WE GOT OUR ASSES HANDED TO US

Don't worry, this'll be my last Call of Duty: Black Ops II post for the time being. I wasn't going to follow up my last video spam so soon, but Maximilian's clip underlines a lot of the issues I've been having with the game post-patch. For all of Treyarch's tweaking, assault rifles might as well be one-shot kills for all the good they do in certain situations. If you're trying to track a fleeing lightweight user on the right side of lag, it can be difficult to put one bullet in him before he disappears into the level's warren like layout, never mind four or five. Having to always dedicate one customisation slot to Stock to stay competitive is bad design. Assault rifles have sixteen attachments available, why is one so necessary?

It's a bore to go on about, but unfortunately most of Black Ops II's issue rest with this failure to provide accurate on-screen information. Map design that resembles something off the back of a McDonald's placemat aside, Black Ops II has a suite of theoretically excellent toys to rival the master, Modern Warfare 2. The level to which guns can be customised is incredible, particularly when you start limit breaking certain properties with the Select Fire attachment. I've just ran a game with the AN-94 assault rifle, a fully automatic gun that can be transformed into a semi-auto to take advantage of a lower recoil pattern afforded by the gun's ability to fire its first two rounds from rest almost simultaneously. This also means if the player can twitch his trigger finger quick enough they can actually fire the gun faster in semi-auto mode than they can full-auto. Black Ops II is full of neat little features like this, but there's no incentive to use them if the game can't clarify basic latency.