One of the most anticipated games of the year came out in November, and that game is Call of Duty: Black Ops. I haven't gotten a chance to get to the campaign aspect of the game yet, so I'll split the review into two parts. I have a total of about 4.5 days played online and I'm 3rd prestige rank 50.

The game abandoned the old way of getting weapons and attachments by leveling up and getting a certain amount of kills for each weapon, and replaced it with cod points. You get points for kills, challenges, and even things called contracts. Contracts are certain callenges that spend cod points on to unlock. An example of a challenge would be to get 3 kills without dying in the next 45 minutes of game time. You still level up to unlock weapons, but the attachments you buy are solely based on cod points. Same goes for perks, you can buy any perks you want once you unlock create a class at level 4, you just need the points to do it. I personally really enjoy the new system because I can have what I want pretty much whenever I want it.

The perk stopping power was taken out for Black Ops, which is a welcome change for many. Stopping power increased the power of your guns, allowing you to kill in less shots. This makes killing people take a little longer, and requires more skill. All the guns feel pretty balanced, with the exception of the AK-74u and the Famas. These are the most used, and arguable the best guns in the game. Another welcome change to Black Ops is the reduced power of "noob tubes" or M203 grenade launchers. They are much less used now, and the game is much better because of it. The snipers of Modern Warfare 2 are struggling with quickscoping with Black Ops. Slight of Hand no longer applies to snipers, making it harder to scope in and kill people quickly. The snipers feel a lot less powerful on top of that, usually taking 2 shots to kill, unless it's a head shot.

The maps in this game are mostly great. They range in size from small maps such as Nuketown, medium maps, such as Cracked, all the way to bigger maps like Array. The maps aren't very sniper friendly, but are very leveled and fun to play on.

Overall, I would give Black Ops' multiplayer a solid 9.5 out of 10. It fixes a lot of what Modern Warfare 2 had wrong with it, but the urge to prestige just isn't there for me. If you like Modern Warfare 2 you'll definately want to pick this up.