A competent but overly streamlined CoD experience that, despite having all the ingredients, fails to provide enough of anything to be an essential buy. [Jan 2013, p.102]
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]
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.
The very worst thing about Declassified is that in reporting its failure we feel like we're writing an obituary for the PS Vita itself...This was make or break for Sony's portable, but such a shamefully underdeveloped shooter disgraces both the PS Vita and the Call Of Duty franchise.
Declassified drags the PlayStation Vita down to new-found depths. Absolutely nothing about this game is fun. The multiplayer is awful, the artificial intelligence is moronic and things that you'd expect to be there are blatantly missing. Fortunately the single player campaign takes less than an hour to finish, so you'll get through it really quickly.
Rather than add a few more multiplayer stages, fix the glitches, fix the connection problems, write a story that might matter to Black Ops fans, add at least a few more campaign missions, and tweak the AI a bit, they released the game in this undercooked state. There's no excuse for that.
SummaryCall of Duty: Black Ops Declassified explores original fiction in the Call of Duty Black Ops universe with an all-new campaign of Special Ops missions.