

One mission you’re rushing through to rescue some hostages, the next you’re sniping to cover an ally. Each stage is a two to five minute distillation of something we’ve all done in every other Call of Duty game, with no pacing changes or moments of spectacle to provide a hook. The campaign levels themselves don’t do anything interesting with either the Vita or with their design, either. It’s simply a device put in there as an excuse to connect it to the Black Ops games. The story never builds up to anything, and there’s no progression or development of the characters.

Instead of a coherent plot the “story” is a series of random events that happened to characters from the Black Ops series, with some shoehorned tie-ins to plot points from the first and second games. Play Black Ops 2 shows that Call of Duty games can have great narratives, but Declassified’s is a mess.
