Black Ops 7 single-player doesn’t allow pausing or mission checkpoints on top of being always-online

The rough beast that is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has cracked its shell and slouched towards the wincing light of day. They’ve released it, I mean. No verdict from us yet: our reviewer is still picking their way among the exploding motorbikes and mocking spectres of deceased Nicaraguan terrorists. But I can at least tell you with some confidence that if you’re a fan of pausing games or mid-mission checkpoints, you might want to give it a miss.

As reported by Eurogamer, neither pausing, nor mission checkpoints, nor playing the game offline are allowed in the new Blops, thanks in part to its heavy focus on four player co-op play. You cannot look away from Blops anymore: it has become the Eye of Sauron, transfixing you from across the coffee table as it zooms to flaming close-up. Your time belongs to the cod! It sleeps with the fishes. Damn, I could see a mafia-themed Call of Duty set in Mordor, actually. It doesn’t sound like this would be wholly out of synch with the endgame, which entangles maps from Blopses gone by. Collage Of Duty, they definitely aren’t calling it.

This isn’t the first Call Of Duty campaign to be always-online. Black Ops 6 went there too, and that game sold like hot yellowcake uranium, so clearly a significant proportion of you aren’t fussed. Still, no mission checkpoints?

There are other and more pressing reasons to no-sell the new Call Of Duty. It’s being published by Microsoft, who like buying studios for billions and then laying loads of people off, and who continue to do business (despite some individual divestments) with armies participating in what the UN has formally termed a genocide. We did a big report on protests against the company’s Israeli military connections earlier in the year.