This is partly because Bell’s characteristics are arbitrary and variable. Meanwhile, the player’s character, “Bell,” or, according to my own playthrough: “Yussef ‘Bell’ Cole,” participates mostly as an outside observer, detached, in myriad ways, from the plot’s core exigencies. ![]() They sit uneasily next to the darkrooms and briefcases, the leather jackets and listening devices snatched from recent dramas like The Americans and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Consummate and irredeemable bros, fist-bumping, one-lining and smirking their way through the game’s missions their aggrieved bloodlust feels out of place next to the more delicate and buttoned-up aesthetic of spywork the series’ fifth installment seems newly interested in foregrounding. Though Russel Adler, the team’s leader, evokes the cool-headed stoicism of a Robert Redford-type, and most of the other new additions to the team have a reasonable amount of dimensionality, the series’ staples Frank Woods and Alex Mason reflect Reagan’s cartoonish extremes and remain just as faux-edgy and ratcheted up as they were in the previous Black Ops titles they starred in. Effortlessly masculine, idealized and paternal, he sweeps aside the peevish concerns of his worrying generals and gives your team carte blanche to hunt down the secret Russian operative “Perseus” by whatever means necessary, legality and plausible deniability be damned. The soundtrack swells patriotically as the camera gets in close on his exhaustively detailed face, the room’s light picking up his sun-baked wrinkles and glancing off his piercing baby blue eyes. Early on, our heroes, waiting in a government boardroom, are interrupted by double doors swinging violently open as the newly inaugurated President, Ronald Reagan, strides confidently into the room. Image: Treyarch, Raven Software / Activisionįew parts of the plot are delivered with subtlety or in half-steps. The main task of the game, after all, involves using action spy-movie dramatics flying around the world, connecting threads on a corkboard, infiltrating behind enemy lines, torturing and maiming suspects, all to prevent nukes from falling into the dreaded enemy’s hands-a threadbare premise the Call of Duty games have relied on countless times before. On the other, it heaps upon the player an endless stream of heavy-handed jingoism, of defending the “Free World” from the evil, Communistic threat. On the one hand, the game seems to recognize the arbitrary divisions of the conflict, its false messaging and self-fulfilling propaganda. It’s a running theme throughout Cold War–a confusing split laid right down the middle. The same halls that were once full of the peaceful busywork of war now transform into the stage for the bullet-scarred and bloody job the series has always been more comfortable taking part in. Knowing this, this moment in the game offers the player a kind of mirror, a visual recognition that the people who are your ostensible mortal enemies are really just another version of you.Īnd then you switch back to your operatives, strap on some flak armor, pick up your machine guns and light the whole place up. On the other side of the world, in Langley, the same sorts of people are doing the exact same sort of thing. In spite of the building’s grandiose architecture, with its soaring central atrium draped with red flags and tall portraits of stoic party leadership, the space still feels largely pedestrian, like any office building full of people working on their tiny little piece of a massive and self-propelling bureaucracy. news broadcasts, or strategizing with one another about intel. As Belikov, you can pop into offices and eavesdrop on chain-smoking analysts variously digging through newspaper clippings, listening to U.S. About two-thirds of the way into Call of Duty : Black Ops Cold War’s campaign, in classic Call of Duty fashion, the game shifts in perspective away from its main protagonist, a CIA operative called “Bell,” to a man named Dimitri Belikov, an American mole embedded within the KGB’s headquarters in Moscow.
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