Although the “Call of Duty” franchise is just another commercialized gaming community that has earned countless profits throughout their renditions of the same game over and over for the past decade, this year’s release has significantly changed the series. The game developers have refined many of the newer mechanics attempted to be introduced from last year’s title, “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare,” and brings its own flavor that makes this game shine in the face of recent competition; like “Battlefield”, “Destiny” and “Star Wars Battlefront.”

With the release of “Call of Duty: Black Ops 3,” the third and possibly final Black Ops game developed by Treyarch, they refined many of the characteristics from their last game and revolutionized ideas from Advanced Warfare to create a different style of gameplay. Although wall running was introduced in the previous title, this developer refined it so that the gameplay would be a lot more fluid, and allowed a smoother game that makes playing it more enjoyable and ultimately allowed more replayability.

Instead of going with the idea of Exo-Suits however, they went with the Destiny-style specialty classes that granted special power-ups or weapons that gave some players more of an advantage over others, based on how well you play. From my experience in Destiny, the specialist power-ups are too overpowered and give players a deeper advantage over others, making the game very one sided when facing stronger opponents very quickly.

With Black Ops 3 conversely, the developers were able to introduce this new idea without sacrificing the idea that these players can be killed the same way others could without the power-ups. At first this may make the specialties seem not worth the effort, because these power-ups are supposed to grant those who earn them an advantage. Although that line of thought makes a lot of sense, it is pivotal that these players are only at a slight advantage over others to make the game enjoyable for everyone.

The developer Treyarch is also the creator of one of the most popular game modes in Call of Duty’s history, zombie survival mode. In their last rendition of zombies, they attempted to improve on their multiplayer by switching from the outdated zombies servers to the multiplayer game mode’s servers. Although a vast improvement over their last version of Black Ops, the gameplay was far from smooth and led to constant lag. Especially paired with their ridiculously tedious first map that came out with the game’s release, Tranzit, this rendition of the popular mode didn’t gain much traction and lost many people, including myself, from playing it too often.

With Black Ops 3, the developers were able to create a more refined version of the game, just like in multiplayer, and were able to create puzzles that created an interesting story for this game while making just survival even more fun. Although I do not appreciate that you have to do the very tedious puzzle, that can be only done with at least three people, to have access to the pivotal Pack-A-Punch machine that upgrades guns so that you can survive longer, the game is still miles more advanced than its predecessor.

The gameplay is good, the story is great and the new features make the game become a more even landscape for new and casual players to have fun, whether they are dominating or being crushed by the enemy. Although there are tons of first-person shooters saturating the market now, Call of Duty finds a new way to stay relevant and keep replayability higher than ever before.