The “Call of Duty” franchise has quickly become a gaming world juggernaut. With the immense success of its previous releases “Call of Duty: World at War” and “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” it is no surprise that Treyarch’s latest addition is flying off the shelves. “Call of Duty: Black Ops” takes the best aspects of its predecessors and combines them to create a fun, tactical and fast-paced, first-person shooter that can be played for hours on end in multiplayer mode alone.

The game’s developers did well to fix some of the kinks and exploits in the online multiplayer mode, and the storyline in the “Black Ops” campaign may possibly be the best of the series.

The game begins with Alex Mason, a soldier captured after attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro, and are now being interrogated and tortured during the Cold War. You must play through Mason’s memories to gather information vital to your captors while simultaneously learning the story’s plot. While there are some bugs and annoyances, namely with the artificial intelligence of both enemies and allies, the characters are well-crafted, the plot is captivating, and the finale far surpasses that of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” or any of the previous games.

Although the campaign is more exciting and enthralling than its predecessor, most people buy the games for their massive online multiplayer modes. “Call of Duty: Black Ops” did well to live up to expectations, making a major change by adding CoD points, a new banking system in which you earn points to buy weapons, modifications and various other rewards. This allows players to sculpt a character to their liking as opposed to every rank being the same, which was the case in “Modern Warfare 2.” The developers omitted the game-ending “tactical nuke” option, and brought back one of the favorite killstreak rewards from “Call of Duty: World at War;” a vicious team of attack dogs.

With the addition of self-mounted security cameras, remote-controlled cars strapped with explosives, manually-guided Valkyrie rockets and devastating napalm strikes, the ways to dismantle and defeat your enemies are virtually unlimited. All of these promising new features coupled with a variety of unique maps from urban to jungle settings make it very difficult to put down the controller. Overall, aside from a few small bugs, the game hits its mark and is quickly becoming one more major success story for the “Call of Duty” series.