The day is here, Call of Duty Black Ops is released. It’s right about the time you’re shooting a well-known communist leader in the head that it all clicks into place. Here we are in Call of Duty land again, where insane Boy’s Own battle action and precise historical detail weirdly conjoin. This long-running series of million-selling military shooters is essentially the Inglourious Basterds of the gaming world – a strange, ridiculous, entertaining, fanciful and bloody celebration of man’s interest in violence. And it still works. By some considerable margin, Black Ops works.

Call of Duty: Black Ops quite probably represents the pinnacle of the linear military shooter experience – and you wonder where the sub-genre can go from here. Treyarch’s game is exhilarating and beautifully orchestrated, but it feels like a full-stop, it needs to be a full-stop, because toward the end of the campaign, bombardment fatigue begins to set in. As CoD players we have travelled the world, killing people, following orders, hunting down madmen … many of us have had enough. Call of Duty should go out on a high, or at least come back totally re-invented. Perhaps that’s what we’ll get with Modern Warfare 3. But for now, and for the next two-years of multiplayer engagement, revel in this game’s mastery of its well-trodden domain.

Black Ops for iOS devices is here as well…. download it on your portable device.

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