‘Black Ops – Cold War’ Has a Great “Bad” Ending
The following article contains spoilers for the Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War “Bad” Ending
The Black Ops series has never shied away from being experimental, often toying with unreliable narrators and alternate-histories. When the first iteration of the series came out in 2010, we played as Alex Mason, a former Force Recon agent and American operative. Given the timeline of the series (which weaves between the Vietnam War and Cold War), the emphasis on interrogation and manipulation makes an awful lot of sense. Still, Black Ops has a tendency to get really bizarre – for instance, it’s hinted that Mason was brainwashed by Russians to commit the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Black Ops – Cold War is no different, and uses player choice to navigate its way through one of the weirdest and best “bad” endings I’ve ever played.
To help set the stage, Cold War does something a little new with its protagonist: even though you’re stuck with the nickname “Bell,” just about everything else about your profile is customizable. Psychological tendencies like “Lone Wolf” allow you to sprint longer than normal, and you can determine your professional background (I chose CIA) to affect some dialogue. Given how on-rails everything related to Call of Duty has ever been, I presumed that whatever decisions I made here were mostly surface-level. And I was right, but with a little bit of a catch. The fill-in-the-gaps nature of the profile generator serves more of a function as a narrative device – it turns out Bell isn’t an American operative at all. Instead, as it’s later revealed, they’re a “rescued” Russian operative who has been successfully brainwashed to collaborate with the CIA.
This is all just as campy as it sounds, but it’s a five-hour roller coaster well worth navigating (if you can deal with the insane Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 crashing it comes along with). The plot is based on a pretty simple concept: a Soviet agent by the name of Perseus threatens the safety of the free world, as they are in relentless pursuit of the ability to set off an abundance of nuclear weapons in the West. For reasons still unknown to the player, Bell is vital to tracking down Perseus and saving the world from nuclear disaster.
As the story moves along at a rampant pace, it becomes clear that the CIA isn’t willing to play by the rules to get intel they want. This includes chucking enemy agents off of the roof and killing or immobilizing family members of high-up Soviets. Sadly, the brute force nature in which the CIA gets its intel is largely emblematic of how Black Ops – Cold War deals with the Cold War in general. Instead of being filled with espionage and manipulation, the gameplay is largely “kill at all costs.” Aside from the best mission in the game (“Desperate Measures”), which involves a series of choices you can make in order to gain access to a bunker with classified info, there’s largely no espionage gameplay at all. And what’s there is often in the form of espionage-gone-wrong and eventually leads to killing anyway. Still, this brute force style allows for a gratifying sense of efficacy just a little later.
By the time Bell figures out that they’ve been manipulated and lied to – including that their entire sense of memory has been falsified by the CIA (which includes many of Black Ops cast of characters, such as Alex Mason and Frank Woods) – it’s become clear that you have to make a choice. One option, which I presume is canonical, involves ratting out Perseus’ location and stopping the Soviets from setting off nuclear bombs in the West. The other option, which I decided to take, involves misinforming the CIA and setting them up for an ambush.
The nice thing about Black Ops is that the writing is so in-your-face and exaggerated that I didn’t feel entirely bad about making the “wrong decision.” In fact, the series plays its way into a corner of curiosity: I just wanted to see how crazy things could possibly get. So after I set the CIA up for an ambush, an abbreviated ending begins to take place. I’m charged with eliminating every remaining member of my former CIA team, and the fallout is simultaneously ridiculous and fun. Every shot I landed on the CIA members in the final mission (appropriately titled “Ashes to Ashes) came in the form of a slow motion bullet that sent them flying backward with blood spurting everywhere. I imagine this task may have been more difficult for anyone who felt allegiance to the CIA squad that we’ve gotten to know over the course of several games, but I found myself put off by the war crimes and manipulation. There really didn’t feel like a good choice to make, so I made the choice that put the control back in Bell’s hands.
In the final moments of the game, I was left with a dialogue option on how I wanted to deliver the command to release the nuclear bombs on the West. The choice in dialogue doesn’t mean much (I tried both), but there’s a certain level of pettiness in being able to deliver the final swing of revenge from Bell’s perspective. It’s a choice I got to make on my own terms, and it fully lives up to the crazy and exaggerated plot that the Black Ops series has twisted itself into. For me, the Cold War “bad” ending is really a good one: it allows the series to reach its potential as something fully based in lunacy all while ignoring the core of what made the Cold War so tense.
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