The other single player components of Declassified come down to a series of survival missions and time-trial runs through environments filled with shooting range-style targets. Even on Regular difficulty you die surprisingly fast, making it so I had to sit through the same unskippable intro sequences before levels all too often. The levels only last a few minutes, but because the enemies seem to have some sort of X-Ray vision they’ll be shooting at you as you round corners, and whole rooms of them will pour entire clips of ammo onto your position, meaning you’ll be getting shot. The repetitious nature of the stages is due in part to the lack of any sort of checkpoint system whatsoever. The levels couldn’t end fast enough, because, despite their short length, they feel monotonous and repetitious. You’re always on the hunt to gun down waves of cloned enemies whose atrociously bad AI will have them shooting walls or cars directly in front of them or getting stuck on parts of the environment.
One mission you’re rushing through to rescue some hostages, the next you’re sniping to cover an ally. Each stage is a two to five minute distillation of something we’ve all done in every other Call of Duty game, with no pacing changes or moments of spectacle to provide a hook.
The campaign levels themselves don’t do anything interesting with either the Vita or with their design, either. It’s simply a device put in there as an excuse to connect it to the Black Ops games. The story never builds up to anything, and there’s no progression or development of the characters. Instead of a coherent plot the “story” is a series of random events that happened to characters from the Black Ops series, with some shoehorned tie-ins to plot points from the first and second games.
Play Black Ops 2 shows that Call of Duty games can have great narratives, but Declassified’s is a mess.
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