Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Beta | Review

Last week Activsion released its beta for the highly anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and our gaming division took the time to test it. At first our team found it very difficult just to download the beta,but after a few calls to Xbox customer service number we found a way to download it. (as seen on our Instagram) We immediately noticed that unlike the previous versions of the Black Ops franchise, this time around they have a class system. This class system allows the player to choose between group of seven specialists based on their unique abilities.

• Reaper (Real name: Experimental War Robot)
  • Bio: Started as an expensive
    military R&D project to supplement Special Operations soldiers in
    the field, the EWR was a cutting-edge prototype combat robot, the most
    advanced in the world at the time. Budget overruns and embarrassing
    political incidents left the project all but a resource for scrap metal,
    except for the one prototype that remained.
  • Power Weapon: Scythe – transforms Reaper’s robotic arm into a powerful mini-gun
  • Ability: Psychosis–Infiltrate enemy DNI systems to simulate three instanced decoy Reapers.
• Outrider (Real name: Alessandra Castillo)
  • Bio: Developed keen observations
    kills growing up in the streets of the Favela, traversing the rooftops
    to watch the action of the city below, and this earned her a place in
    the ranks of the Brazilian Special Forces. She outsmarts enemies by
    finding them before they have a chance to know what hit them.
  • Power Weapon: Sparrow – compound bow featuring explosive bolts that stick in enemies.
  • Ability: Vision Pulse – senses where nearby enemies are and highlights them for a short period of time.
• Seraph (Real name: Zhen Zhen)
  • Bio: Militant enforcer of the 54I
    crime syndicate’s rule of law. She is known for her focused and
    unflinching combat discipline, striking fear within the ranks of the
    cartel.
  • Power Weapon: Annihilator – high-caliber revolver that instantly kills any enemies in the bullet’s path.
  • Ability: Combat Focus – temporarily adds a multiplier to score in order to help players rack up scorestreaks.
• Ruin (Real name: Donnie Walsh)
  • Bio: Raised in a military family
    in a tough neighborhood, he is fearless and headstrong, an infantry
    soldier through and through. He uses his unique abilities to rush into
    battle and surprise the enemy with sheer force.
  • Power Weapon: Gravity Spikes – creates a devastating area of effect shock wave in the surrounding area.
  • Ability: Overdrive – gives players a burst of speed for a short period of time
• Prophet (Real name: David Wilkes)
  • Bio: Wilkes got his first set of
    cybernetic augmentations while serving in the British Engineering Corps.
    Five years and many upgrades later, he is the embodiment of cutting
    edge of human weaponry on the battlefield, using his superior technology
    to disrupt opponents’ tactics before moving in for the kill.
  • Power Weapon: Tempest – the
    tempest is a lighting gun. Once it’s charged, it will shock and kill
    enemies within a wide range of area. This weapon is one of the most
    powerful ones we’ve seen yet.
  • Ability: Glitch – Hack the battlefield – When
    having this ability equipped, Prophet can relocate himself back to the
    previous location. This is especially helpful if he’s entered a
    dangerous situation.
• Nomad (Real name: Tavo Rojas)
  • Bio: Last surviving member of an
    elite Rapid Deployment Force unit specialized in Jungle Warfare, Rojas
    has gone off-grid using his survivalist training to stay alive. At home
    in the wild, he uses his skills to turn the environment against his
    foes.
  • Power Weapon: Hive – with the Hive, you deploy pod traps. Once an enemy comes near the traps, they’re dead. It’s basically a more deadly C4.
  • Ability: Rejack – now, we’re gonna go ahead and say
    this: it’s basically a nerfed down version of Final Stand. When
    equipped with this, if your character enters a ‘near death’ experience,
    you inject yourself with some nano particles into your blood stream, you
    character pauses, and then your health comes back.
• Battery (Real name: Erin Baker)
  • Bio: The only daughter and youngest child of five siblings, Erin
    Baker always had to fight to get her way. Following in a family
    tradition of over 100 years of military service, and watching her
    brothers enter the US Army one-by-one, she finally graduated high school
    and enrolled herself. Driven to excel by her ongoing rivalry with her
    brothers, she volunteered for Airborne School, before crushing the
    Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. Heavily armored, she fearlessly
    operates ahead of the front lines, nimbly traversing urban
    environments, as she destroys HVTs with salvoes of advanced
    high-explosive munitions.
  • Weapon: War Machine – Grenade launcher that fires bouncing grenades
    which detonate after a short time or by hitting an enemy directly.
  • Ability:  Kinetic Armor – Reactive armor that deflects enemy bullets
    away from the body. Still vulnerable to headshots and non-bullet damage
    while active.
• Spectre (Real name: Classified)
  • Bio: Next to nothing is known about the presumed wet-works
    Specialist, Spectre. The designation itself is a codename agreed upon by
    the various agencies that have pooled their intelligence on unsolved
    assassinations, inferring his or her existence based on either evidence
    found at the scene or from fragmentary reports given by shaken
    bystanders.  Despite heavy redaction, all accounts suggest an individual
    capable of extraordinary stealth, able to evade or neutralize the most
    sophisticated of manned or automated security set-ups.  In every case,
    Spectre’s victims have been ‘handled’ with surgically precise mid-line
    wounds with rarely any signs of struggle.
  • Weapon: Ripper – Spectre deploys mono-edged twin blades before gracefully dissecting victims with lethal, surgical precision.
  • Ability: Active Camo: Advanced meta-materials rapidly change their
    properties, guiding photons over their surfaces instead of reflecting
    them, rendering Spectre temporarily invisible.

Each specialists abilities allows the player a different experience when with each round. The gameplay and load times are both fast and smooth. Though this was not without its faults, there where a few times the game stopped working and caused errors with both our streaming account, as well as on our Xbox console. If would crash as we loaded the game/make our console crash.

Pros: A faster pace game than both its predecessor and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare while giving more features than both as well. Offering a class system giving you the ability to get a wide verity of weapons based on this system.

Cons: The beta constantly crashed one out of the four times we started the beta,and there were several times it crashed during full gameplay. Issues we hope will be fixed before the full version is available in November.

Final Verdict: By far the best of the Call of Duty console games in recent years,and if this beta is in anyway what the full version of the game will be like….it is worth buying.