Gorgeous to look at and cracking to play, but criminally short - especially with that price tag. [Jan 2013, p.62]

It is a tough one to call with Declassified, there is plenty of potential there, but the execution is lacking. Content feels very watered down and it appears that the wrong capabilities of the Vita have been used.

Nihilistic's take on Call of Duty is a disappointment and not something I would recommend.

The best first-person shooter on a portable but it's not exactly a high yardstick.

In the end, Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified is a pale imitation of its superior forebears. It's not bad for what it is, but it's not nearly as good as it should be.

Declassified is a mediocre FPS. The single player lasts a couple of hours, the multiplayer is mortified by lag and a clumsy matchmaking.

It feels unfinished and rushed through development. We really think it could've been polished to make it a better game, but unless an important patch comes out, it's really hard to recommend taking into account all the constant crashes when playing online and the extremely short single player modes.

Despite a familiar control scheme, movement is very "floaty" and will get you seasick within seconds. The best tactic to counter these controls is to find a nice hiding spot, step sideways out of cover and shoot and shoot and shoot. And shoot. [January 2013, p.97]

Declassified is the worst of CoD series. Poor content for single-player and irregular multiplayer netcode.

Declassified feels like a disappointing DLC bundle rather than a full release. In its best moments it proves that Call of Duty could work on the console, and it has some good ideas – earning XP across single-player for multiplayer unlocks is particularly neat – but it's exceptionally hard to justify how this ended up with a $70 price tag. The very best PS Vita games have proven that, in the portable market, size can still matter. This lesson has, ironically, been ignored by gaming's biggest franchise. [January 2013, p76]

Declassified is a sorry way to end 14 years of coding history at Nihilistic. The kindest thing you can say about it is that it's a reasonably authentic facsimile of the Call Of Duty blueprint, yet it feels like the work of an artist who is painstakingly tracing a masterpiece but lacks the craft to replicate the magical that made the original so attractive in the first place.

Declassified is brief, boring, and bland. It should have stayed locked up in the filing cabinet.

With a shockingly brief single-player campaign, and an enjoyable but inconsistent multiplayer mode, your enjoyment of Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified will depend almost entirely on your desire for a portable entry in Activision's blockbuster series. The title delivers a satisfactory first-person experience, but falls seriously short in substance. Sony Cambridge will, in all probability, better this effort in virtually every area with its forthcoming Killzone: Mercenary, which ultimately makes the shooter hard to recommend.

Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified is one of the worst chapters of this popular franchise. The short campaign and the clumsy multiplayer are lethal shots to the poor PS Vita existence.

Ultimately, it's about as disappointing as a game could be. It's less "Call of Duty" and more "cynical cash grab," attempting to con Vita owners out of their hard-earned. At a budget price, with the bugs fixed and a name that better suits the experience, things might be different; as it is, this game is less Declassified and more Disgusting. Avoid, and tell your friends to do likewise.

Black Ops Declassified isn't a Call of Duty game. It's like one of those grey-market cameras that has an almost-recognizable brand name on the front. And Activision, in all of their laziness, may have inadvertently kicked off the Vita's funeral procession.

Bad multiplayer, awful story, generic level design and a host of other issues turn what could have been Vita's biggest blockbuster into one of its biggest duds.

The multiplayer experience, though it's probably the best part of the game, is extremely poor when compared to the other chapters of the Call of Duty brand. The maps are too small and badly designed, the net code is terrible and, among many other problems, the game tends to crash randomly while joining a session or during the match itself.

But Declassified also exposes failings of Call of Duty's form and fashion. The game is a cliché, its thrills limited, its time-stretching ploys clear. It's infused with the character of Call of Duty, but stripped of the spectacle it reveals the underlying game to be wholly plain and an uninteresting use of your time.

A cynical grab for gullible gamer Christmas cash made to coincide with Vita's first festive period, this COD shouldn't just be declassified; it should be erased from existence.

A passionless take on a great license. Only but the most battle hardened Call of Duty fans should even consider taking this one down to the range.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified was supposed to be THE Vita game. This was a system seller, and one that would forever showcase just how hardcore the PS Vita was in the handheld scene. Unfortunately, what we ended up with is a watered-down, uninteresting version of CoD that feels almost like a cheap knock-off of the series. I cannot recommend this game for Vita owners with so much other quality software dropping in the last month. Shooter fans continue to hold out, Declassified is not the shooter that will define the PS Vita… at least not in the way Sony hopes.

Declassified completely fails to deliver what gamers expect from the Call of Duty name.

It feels like Activision rubber-stamped this empty shell of a game to make a quick buck. The Vita deserves better. You deserve better.

This game should have stayed classified or, at the very least, been redacted.

It's a muted, ungainly piece of work, the bare minimum for a ridiculously inflated price tag.

Vita users deserve more than the half-baked conversions they get lately. This is a disgrace to the Call of Duty franchise. Both story and multiplayer feel unfinished.

The final word on Black Ops: Declassified is somewhat paradoxical. It's not quite the trainwreck that many have made it out to be. In fact, if this were an iOS game available for $1.99, there's every chance that it would garner much more praise. But the Vita isn't an iPhone, or a tablet. It's capable of so much more, and for that reason, Declassifed is incapable of defending itself as anything other than execrable. It's a black mark on the franchise and yet another massive missed-opportunity for the Vita.