It's not easy to do justice to war. Make a game too realistic, and you threaten to make it so brutal that it's simply not fun to play. Make it too bombastic, and you risk making a mockery of the soldiers that risk their lives every day in the real world. In this writer's opinion, Modern Warfare 2 is guilty of the latter. "Heart" was replaced by in-your-face Bruckheimer-inspired drivel that made me swear off the Call of Duty franchise for good. I went into Black Ops knowing full well that I would hate it.

I was wrong.

In many ways, Black Ops is everything you'd expect from a Call of Duty game. The gameplay certainly looks unchanged: duck, take cover, fire down the sights and throw back grenades. It's still a heavily scripted experience, with set piece after set piece. And, of course, there's no shortage of explosives -- The Expendables would be jealous of Black Ops' abundance of helicopters and missiles. At first glance, Black Ops struck me as "just another Call of Duty." For series stalwarts, that's enough to buy back into Activision's annualized franchise. For me, I needed more.