Black Ops 7 is the fourth CoD game to hit the most negative Steam reviews

Black Ops 7 is off to a terrible start; Physical sales are down 61 percent, Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders have overshadowed their launch on Steam, and it has the lowest user review rating in the series' history, falling even further than Modern Warfare 3 (2023).

Given all this – and a campaign so bad that Treyarch is removing the Endgame mode and asking Zombies players to try it with the incentive of Perkaholic GobbleGums – a Mixed score on Steam looks positively glowing. Unfortunately, it has lost that too.

With over 1,600 reviews at the time of writing, Black Ops 7 now has a Mostly Negative score, meaning there are now four Call of Duty games on Steam with that mark. According to SteamDB, this is how they rank when looking at what percentage of their reviews are positive:

Black Ops 7 – 42.18 percent.
Modern Warfare 3 (2023) – 38.71 percent.
Modern Warfare 2 (2022) – 34.62 percent.
Warzone – 31.95 percent.

So, Black Ops 7 isn't the worst-reviewed game in the series yet, at least on Steam — it still holds that record on Metacritic — but considering it only had a Mixed score earlier this week, that's hardly promising.

What the reviews say

Black Ops 7 campaign giant man boss in a red sky.

Reviews single out the “terrible” campaign and condemn Black Ops 7 as the “most disappointing CoD” yet. Others complain that “the multiplayer is full of hackers” and that the only thing that saves the game “from being a scam” is the Zombies mode, where Ashes of the Damned is widely considered to be one of the best maps in recent years.

I'd rather play Battlefield 2042 at launch – snuffhound.

Others note the sheer amount of bugs and crashes, and how they've lost hours upon hours of progress, writing angrily that they want their “damn money” back. I can attest to these questions; when playing with friends on PC, Xbox and PlayStation we encountered CTDs, black screen after skipping a cutscene, major game breaking bugs like Zombies no longer spawning, blue screens, the PS5 itself freezing, DirectX errors, packet bursts and more.

Black Ops 7 list of Zombies calling cards displayed on a grid.

Then there's the “AI lag”, a problem that crept into Black Ops 6 post-launch with the infamous Christmas promo material. It's plastered all over Black Ops 7, with Studio Ghibli-esque business cards thrown up the career ladder and rewarding you for completing grueling challenges with misaligned fingers and dead-eyed cartoons.

It's no wonder Black Ops 7 lags behind the competition; after the disastrous launch of Modern Warfare 3 and the fervent backlash to Black Ops 6's post-launch, this was Activision's moment to win the community back, but after being met with horrible AI, a plethora of bugs and poor optimization, and a joined-up campaign that almost feels like a cry for help from developers who have been trapped in the 20-year-old machine's campaign. dug that hole even deeper.

At least zombies are good, huh?