Treyarch studios have finally delivered for Wii owners. Their previous efforts for Nintendo's diminutive white box may have been fun, but they always had glaring flaws. Call of Duty 3 suffered from a terminal case of launch title-itis. World at War was a tease, its promise overshadowed by a limited online component. Modern Warfare: Reflex raised the bar higher, but was still hamstrung by a few nagging issues -- some problematic hit detection, no voice chat support and the utilization of Nintendo's archaic friend code system. It also launched a full two years after the original version hit the 360 and PS3.

 

Call of Duty: Black Ops remedies all of these problems. It may have taken four years, but the fine folks at Treyarch have finally dragged Wii first-person shooters into the current gaming generation.

 

Voice chat? Done, and with a headset (not the echo-y, speaker-phone quality Wii Speak peripheral). No, it's not wireless, but it's an improvement.

 

Hit detection? Much, much better.

 

Friend codes? Nearly gone. You can still use them to add a specific friend, but you can send an ally request to anyone you play without needing to punch in any numbers.

 

While Black Ops' feature-rich online component is the star of the show, its singleplayer campaign is noteworthy for a very different reason. Namely, a wide chasm in quality. The campaign has a promising set up: Mason, the game's protagonist, is being interrogated by shadowy figures probing his memory. As Mason takes a stroll back through his past, you play those events. You'll visit Cuba during the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam in the heat of the war, Russia during a typically frigid winter, and many other locales. Variety isn't the problem. Execution is. Typical to the COD series is the "enemies spawning endlessly until you cross an invisible line" scenario, but you'll run into far more annoying bugs along the way. Occasionally, you'll run into a foe frozen in the game. At first I thought there were some dummies set up, but then they sprang into action after I had walked past them (shooting them before they began movement caused no damage), resulting in a few cheap deaths. Head shots sometimes don't register, the on-rails sections used up their usefulness about three CODs ago, the opening level is an eye sore and a plot that was straining credulity all along goes the full Bruckheimer in the final act. It's worth playing through once, but only once.

 

Thankfully, the online suite of modes more than makes up for the singleplayer's stumbles. Very little was sacrificed along the way from the 360/PS3 version -- the Wii's player count is capped at 10, a few killstreaks aren't here, and the killcam and weapon clan tags were lost in translation. But just about everything else is intact. Core, classic, hardcore and prestige modes are all accounted for, with an exhaustive set of match types. Wager matches (where you can gamble your accumulated experience points) and contracts (in which you have a set time limit to accomplish a task to gain even more experience points) also make their way over to Wii, as does Combat Training (where you can play alone or with friends against AI bots). The four-player, co-op Zombies mode? Also here, albeit with only one map.

 

It's a staggeringly comprehensive package, with a perfectly-tuned pace for leveling up. I'd dig deeper into the minutiae of the online's gameplay and features, but this review would turn into a novella. And although it sounds overwhelming, the menu system is so well done that you don't even have to pay attention to all of it if you don't want to. The pace of unearthing Black Ops' myriad secrets is all up to you, and you must play it yourself to appreciate just how deep Treyarch has mined the COD4 formula.

 

 

The level of control customization is also deep. If you want to play the game with dual analog, you now have the option to. However, the remote/nunchuck combination is exceptionally well implemented here, and you can customize nearly everything. From reorganizing the button layout and gestures, to altering the size of your dead zones, to changing the camera and cursor sensitivity, this is a tweaker's delight. It's a stable interface, and I was able to find a comfortable setup within minutes of picking up the game. Eurocom's GoldenEye nailed hip fire and the "weight" of the aiming reticle, but Black Ops nails ease of customization. However, it should be noted that Call of Duty's controls feel a bit lighter, overall. You may need to turn down the cursor sensitivity somewhat if you want the game to handle in a less twitchy manner (although the performance ceiling is quite high if you want to explore it).

  

Of course, the visuals on Wii take a hit, as Black Ops' level of detail looks pretty close to last year's Modern Warfare: Reflex port. But whereas Reflex's color palate was purposefully washed out a bit (something that looked great on the 360 and PS3, but not on the Wii), Black Ops is bolder overall. Whether it's the bright and summery Nuketown or the numerous winter maps, this game manages to look impressive. It doesn't have nearly the level of detail or polish as GoldenEye, but the scope is also much, much bigger here in the 14 maps on display. The framerate is also solid, something that can't be said for GoldenEye. And there are some impressive flourishes -- car explosions, smoke effects, blood splatter (you didn't like those drapes, anyway) and some truly pretty particle/weather effects. The aforementioned winter maps are the show stoppers here for the falling snow alone.

 

A special note on the sound package -- it's extremely punchy. If you have surround sound, you'll be in for a real treat. The guns all vibrantly pop, vehicles and grenades brashly explode and the guitar riff announcing that you've leveled up rips through your speakers. The singleplayer's voice acting is actually a high point, too.

 

So, is Black Ops the Wii's definitive online first-person shooter? I'm not sure. It's definitely the most comprehensive (by a wide margin; it's not close), and you could pour a hundred hours into playing online without even completing all of the gun challenges or achieving every prestige level. But you'll run into plenty of controller-throwing frustrations along the way -- cheap deaths (the game values aiming down the sights to a fault, even if you've hip fired three shots into a target), campers galore, hackers and a few stray hit detection problems. You'll also find bugs, the most common being the "unbound" bug, which takes away your designated sprint/use button and makes you reassign it. However, the title supports patching (Treyarch has obliged with one already) and the server has been updated numerous times, helping out with quicker matchmaking. It's mostly smooth sailing, and should only get smoother in the future (fixing the "unbound" bug takes a matter of seconds in your pause menu).

 

However, those issues do exist, and they're layered on top of a forgettable singleplayer campaign, which knocks the score down a little bit.  But when Black Ops fires on all cylinders, it is sublime. Even with a few offline caveats, the online is a gratuitous feast of win. Seconds, please.