Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 has picked up a reveal trailer this afternoon, showing off Treyarch's latest efforts to mix up the CoD formula.
The trailer offers glimpses of gameplay aspects new to the franchise, as well as a refreshing shift towards a darker tone.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is set in a 'dark and twisted' future where robotics have changed the military landscape. Eidos have already poked fun at Treyarch for borrowing from Deus Ex's gritty futurism, and this new trailer adds further cause for comparison. Adam Jensen fans will recognize prosthesis wielding soldier transform their hands into a weapons on the fly; Titanfall fans may recognize wall running and Spectre-like hack-able robots; and Bioshock fans may recognize wrist-deployable bee swarms (robot bees albeit, presumably).
Also making the cut is gore and dismemberment, which hasn't been seen in Call of Duty since World at War. The trailer plainly shows soldiers limbs being mauled by explosives and large futuristic guns, as well as a crazy bladed rolling drones which look like BB-8's evil cousins. One instance shows a soldier being blown into bloody chunks by an explosive arrow fired from a tech-bow; another shows soldiers being splattered by a large explosive cannon, and so on.
One of my pet Call of Duty peeves is how you can hit someone in the face with a grenade launcher and they fall to their knees rather than get blown across the map as would be the case in Halo or Battlefield, so, kudos Treyarch.
The trailer corroborates some of the leaks we saw from posters and pre-release magazines, such as pre-order beta access and the November 6th release date, but it still remains to be seen whether Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 becomes just another high priced map pack in a series that (in my opinion) no longer innovates.
Here's hoping Treyarch can prove us naysayers wrong. Stay tuned to Windows Central for all the latest on Black Ops 3.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will release on (at least) Xbox One, PS4 and PC on November 6th, 2015
