Call Of Duty Black Ops 2

Black Ops 2 is three games sharing a disc, and each one asks something different of you. The campaign wants decisions and remembers them. Multiplayer wants you to spend a fixed budget well. Zombies wants patience, a workbench and usually three other people. This hub is the way into all of our coverage, arranged by which of the three you are actually sitting down to play.

The campaign remembers what you did

The series had never done this before. The game quietly logs eleven separate moments as you play, and your ending is assembled out of them rather than picked at the finish. Woods can come home from Pyrrhic Victory or not. The file in the cocaine lab in Time and Fate can be found or missed. Menendez can be captured or shot. Three of those choices do the sorting; the other eight are the same whichever way your run goes.

If you want the outcomes laid out first, our mechanics guide puts the eleven decisions in mission order against the endings they feed, and our endings guide carries the full checklists for endings two, three and four. If you are only going to play the campaign once, follow our best ending guide instead, which is the run where Kravchenko is interrogated rather than killed, Defalco never gets away with Karma, and the Strike Missions all get finished.

Multiplayer is a budget, not a shop

Create a Class hands you ten points and charges one for every single thing you take, which is why the good classes in this game are the ones that leave something out. Wildcards look like the way around that, but each one is really two points, since the card costs a slot and so does the extra item it unlocks. Three cards is the maximum, and three cards is already six of your ten.

The mechanics guide merges the seven perks and eight Wildcards into a single cost table, our perks guide ranks the seven and does the Hardline arithmetic properly, and our Wildcards guide lists what every card buys and the level it arrives at. When you want the theory turned into something you can equip, our class loadouts guide spends the budget ten different ways, from an AN-94 defensive setup to a knifing class with no primary weapon at all. There is one map strategy page too, for Turbine, the Yemen wind farm built around a fallen turbine you can climb if you do not mind being seen from everywhere.

Zombies is six maps and the same five jobs

TranZit, Die Rise, Mob of the Dead, Buried, Origins and Nuketown Zombies look nothing alike, but the work is the same shape every time: get the power on, gather parts at a workbench, open Pack-a-Punch, get hold of the weapon the map revolves around, then run the quest. The difference is the price. Buried gives you power after a short drop and two turns; TranZit spreads it across a bus route, a 750 point door and three components that move between games; Origins replaces the switch entirely with six generators you have to defend while they charge.

Our Zombies maps guide compares all six inside each of those jobs and indexes the 25 per map guides underneath, including the Tower of Babble, the Die Rise mahjong tiles, the Mined Games split between Maxis and Richtofen, and the seven step Little Lost Girl. If you want the shortest possible route to something fun, the three secret songs are it: teddy bears on Buried and Nuketown, whisky bottles on Mob of the Dead, and no build required for any of them.

Everything the game hides

Treyarch buried jokes across all three modes, and they are collected in our Easter eggs guide. There is a hammer in a cave in the Celerium mission that you cannot pick up because you are not Thor. There are four playable Activision games on Nuketown 2025 if you can decapitate every mannequin inside ninety seconds. There is a whiteboard on Standoff warning that zombies are coming, a basketball court on Raid, a note on the Nuketown mailboxes naming Woods and Mason, and Nacht der Untoten sitting out in the cornfields for anyone who walks far enough. Stay through the credits and Menendez turns up playing guitar.

Where to start

New to the campaign, take the best ending guide with you from mission two, because the decisions that matter most come early and cannot be revisited. New to multiplayer, read the cost table before you read a perk list. New to Zombies, start on Buried, which asks less of you than any of the other five and still has a full quest at the end of it.