Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified is a major disappointment. For those of you who were hoping to get a real first person shooter on the Playstation Vita, keep waiting. Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified was the beacon of hope we had for real first person shooters on a dual analogue stick handheld and it failed horribly.

Video Review

Starting with the campaign, there’s ten missions total making up the campaign. Each mission can take up to 8 minutes to complete ultimately making the campaign beatable in under or just about an hour long. The campaign’s ai is horrible. They’ll constantly run into walls, shoot at walls, they’re just a mess. However, despite their stupidity they’re able to shoot you through walls very accurately. Most ai enemies are clones of each other, making the overall gameplay feel even cheaper than the gameplay already is. As we mentioned before each mission is about 5 to 8 minutes long but despite how cheap the campaign is, you’ll experience some deaths here and there which is ok if there were any check points in these missions. While the missions are short, having to view the same cutscenes over and over again after deaths gets really annoying. Some midway check points would be really appreciated despite how short the missions are. Story wise, Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified is a disappointment. Each mission has you play as different characters from the original Black Ops and each mission is a short piece of Black Ops missions ported to the Vita.

Controls are decent but aren’t steller. Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified plays exactly how it does on the console version except you have to use touch screen buttons to throw grenades and to knife people. These touch controls are horrible. They’re placed too close to each other and I often touch the wrong button during fire fights. Additionally using these touch screen controls will kill you during online battles. You can be in a fire fight online and have to use a grenade  this will cause to to drag and drop a grenade on your screen leaving you vulnerable. It’s a horrible control scheme and makes me wish Sony would make some sort of trigger shoulder attachment for the Vita that adds some extra shoulder buttons.

Multiplayer is the major reason why most of you are excited for Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified and sadly it’s also a disappointing. Online Multiplayer is a mess! If you’re in what seems like the 25% of people that are actually able to get online, the multiplayer feels cheap. Controls are still bad and online server issues just kill the online experience. Maps are also very small with constant spawn kills making the online multiplayer a more annoying than enjoyable experience. Nihilistic did a good job recreating the Call of Duty feel with the menus in Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified. You can create classes and earn kill streaks but that’s pretty much the closest you’ll get to a good Call of Duty experience on the Playstation Vita.

Overall Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified feels like a missed chance at getting the Playstation Vita’s must have title. Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified is a major disappointment and it’s a wonder how Activision was happy with Nihilistic’s final product. Do yourself a favor and don’t pick up Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified. For the $50 price tag, you’d be paying just for the name of the game, not what’s it’s actually worth.