In first instance, Black does what it promised: it whipes away all recent trends of tactic and realistic games and places one Hollywood-like exaggerated action scene after the other. Rambo, Commando and Jean-Claude Van Damme would get jealous of it!

Forget worrying about your ammo, throw away taking cover, sniping is for pussies and shooting everything to pieces is completely back! Everything in the game breathes that one point: the weapons are over the top (but do feel nice), surroundings can be completely destroyed, reloading is an attraction as such, there's plenty of bullets and enemies are overwhelming. On top of that you'll need to pump tons of lead in them before they decide to hit the ground.

You're Jack Keller, a Black Ops Soldier, but despite the oldfashioned, and actually bad, cut-scenes that play in an interrogation room, the storyline doesn't interest us one bit. And to be honest: neither did it interest the developers. Black is about only one thing: blasting! Weapons shake in your palms, let your drums trill and make surroundings crumble off, explode, bearn and collapse. Over the top it certainly is, and satisfying even more; never was pulling a triffer so sexy and were explosions so intense. The first time an RPG rocket crashes next to your ears, and you answer with blasting an entire floor (and 9/11-like also the accompanying building) away, you think of only one thing: "Wow!..."

It may be clear: if you kick on shooting, then you now need to run to the store as games don't get any better on this part. If you look a bit further though, you discover a lot of aspects in the game that are less fun. The level design is sometimes pretty awkward and often you don't know whether you need to stay and kill all opponents or just have to walk past them. Forget any storyline or plot twists in the missions, something that adds so much to the atmosphere of Call of Duty 2 or Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

As previously suggested, there's little variation to experience. You sometimes get a silencer to work quietly, but after about 43 seconds you're tired of that and just blow up a fuel tank. If I want good tactical gameplay, I'll get Sam Fisher! Variation in opponents is also pretty meagre and they don't know different strategies. Also the blasting itself can start getting boring sometimes, but the game isn't long enough to make a big problem of that.

Indeed, although multiplayer is absent you'll finish the singleplayer campaign in about one day. The missions in Black don't last longer than about 7 or 8 hours and although you can replay them on a higher difficulty degree (which needs to be unlocked and brings along also other weapons), it remains very thin.