It's November, and that means three things. The days are getting shorter, holiday advertising is ramping up, and there's a new Call of Duty game.

Last year's entry, Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 3, shattered all kinds of sales records in its first day and first weeks on store shelves, launching into the stratospheric billion-dollar sales sphere usually reserved for the biggest of Hollywood's big blockbusters.

This year is Treyarch's Black Ops II, successor to 2010's Black Ops. Two years ago, reviewers were blown away by Black Ops and felt it was the pinnacle of the series to date. Do they feel as warmly about its successor in a jaded, cynical 2012?

Well, yes, in fact, they do. Critical consensus is tight, with every scored interview falling into a narrow, unanimous, positive range. Read on to see the good, the bad, and the ugly—but really, mostly just the good—of reviews of Black Ops II.

Polygon

These excellent new additions are layered atop an already-refined multiplayer blueprint, which is as good as it's ever been. Black Ops 2 multiplayer feels like a Swiss watch I could never afford.

Treyarch took a big risk with the Pick 10 create-a-class system, and it paid off, reimagining how players customize their experience. They could have stopped there, but the developer's drive to go deeper, changing certain core elements of Call of Duty multiplayer to encourage more teamwork, makes Black Ops 2 online play even more remarkable. No other online shooter is offering a better experience right now.

Giant Bomb

All of this story is set against a new Cold War with China, but the world's problems take a backseat to the more personal story of Menendez, his sister, and his over-the-top quest for revenge against the guys that wronged him. By the end, he's controlling huge drone fleets and bringing the world to the brink of war. It's outlandish and ridiculous to think that one determined man could bring all this about. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a proper action movie, which, with all the jumping back and forth between quiet nights deep inside Noriega's Panama and the deck of an aircraft carrier as it comes under attack, sums up the pacing and feel of Black Ops II's campaign. Compared to the past games in the series, the story feels far more personal. It still jumps between characters in traditional Call of Duty fashion, but each character is meaningful and each conflict is more directly tied to the overall plot. It unfolds in a fascinating way, and you'll actually have some very real agency in how that plot unfolds.

Game Informer

For shooter fans that don't require as deep of a dive, Black Ops II's multiplayer may feel like more of the same. No significant new match types are present, and the Pick 10 system doesn't drastically change the gameplay experience. Most of the changes to the Call of Duty formula come in campaign mode, and they are executed with mixed results. Despite some frustrations, Black Ops II is yet another massive, polished, finely tuned entry in a series that shows no signs of slowing down. Even if Treyarch misses the mark on occasion, I respect the developer for taking chances with a series that would sell just fine if it stuck with the status quo.

GamesBeat

The story makes you think about how far you would go to stop a man like Menendez. Like any good cinematic video game, it makes you think.

It has a couple of disturbing parts in which you play the enemy, and those are sure to raise alarms among concerned parents (and media and politicians looking to score some cheap points). You have no choice but to go on a murderous rampage, shooting the good guys or even civilians. As the player pursuing the villain, you make some critical ethical decisions about whether to shoot a captive or show him mercy. Often you don't have a "right" decision. The story has multiple endings, adding some variety and replayability to the campaign.

EGM

Whether it's assassinating targets or protecting computer terminals holding valuable information, the Strike Force objectives are supposed to help determine how you play. Unfortunately, once you dig into these side missions, you'll realize how incompetent the ally AI is; it often ignores your commands, and soon the RTS view becomes null and void. In the end, it's better to try to supersoldier it and control one character at a time in order to win the day. Strike Force is a great idea that finally brings some new gameplay elements into the mix, but it's poorly executed, making some of the missions a bit of a chore depending on the parameters.

Aside from this one glaring flaw, however, the campaign is the best since the first Modern Warfare. The story enthralls from the start, and the gameplay is still definitively Call of Duty-especially with some sweet future tech like the Millimeter Scanner that allows you to see foes through walls.

GameTrailers

The sound design is tight and punchy, with special commendation for the near-future weapons, and the voice actors deliver strong performances all around.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the most evolved sequel we've played in recent memory as it challenges the status quo at almost every turn. The elastic story provides plenty of incentive to replay the campaign, the strikeforce levels aren't executed perfectly, but they're a glimpse at the future, and the multiplayer features are tweaked to make every play style relevant and to level the playing field. It does so many new things so very well, making it the most groundbreaking Call of Duty since the first Modern Warfare. Shooters simply don't get much more deep, varied, surprising, or rewarding than this.

Kotaku

Black Ops II is a great shooter, but that alone doesn't make it worth playing to me. Black Ops II's triumph is found in how it assembles modern-day issues, ultimately making it impossible not to feel like I was staring into the mirror of my society. If the the constant question with games of Call of Duty's ilk is whether or not they hold some responsibility in what they depict, then Black Ops II feels like an answer. An answer that shows that the things that make us reconsider things, as "responsible" media does, do not always have that intention-and they don't have to. I think that lacking that explicit purpose actually accentuated the crisis I felt as I realized that as much as I enjoyed what I was playing, I didn't like what the game revealed.

Well then. There are a crapload of people playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II online right now. On Xbox Live alone, between Zombies mode and regular multiplayer, there are more then 800,000 playing:

And bear in mind, that's just Xbox Live. Factor in PlayStation Network and PC players, and you've got even more. That's a looooot of shootin'.

Never ones to let a chance pass them by to rain on an Activision parade, EA is giving away some free games to those affected by a Black Ops II disc printing error.

The publisher is offering 50 copies of the Mass Effect Trilogy on PC for those who send in pictures of their dodgy Black Ops II discs, an issue we reported on earlier today.

A smug move, but is Mass Effect 1 really a game you want Black Ops fans who have never experienced the sci-fi series to be sampling first? It's a little... slow.

WE'RE ANSWERING THE CALL…[BioWare]

Boy, those young men sure do love video games, don't they? And wouldn't you know it, two of the biggest games of the year, Halo 4 and Black Ops II, just came out! Surely there is some pithy joke to be made here, some quick gibe about how men will be playing those games and therefore neglecting their girlfriends?

Turns out there is indeed a joke to be made. Not a very good one, but a joke. It combines Halo, Black Ops II and the "Movember" cancer-awareness movement into a comedy hat-trick:

With no shave November, Halo 4 and Black Ops 2 this month, I'm predicting teen pregnancy will be at an all time low.

Okay, kinda low-hanging fruit, but it gets the job done. But here's the thing: It's not just one person making this joke. It's practically everybody. They all use the exact same language, referring to Movember as "No Shave November," and they all refer to Black Ops II as Black Ops 2. Check it out:

There are hundreds, probably thousands more—a Twitter search of "Halo Teen Pregnancy" reveals new people stealing the joke every minute. Who made the joke first? It's difficult to tell, but it seems possible that it was a fresh-faced young fellow named Joseph Anderson way back on November 5:

Of course, this sort of thing is rampant on Twitter—plenty of people make timely, RT-ready jokes and see them almost instantly co-opted by a gaggle of me-too tweeters, parody accounts, and faceless phonies.

What does this tell us about the state of Twitter? That it's a hive of scum and villainy, where a guy can't make an honest joke without having it ripped off by a bunch of strangers? Yeah, probably. More importantly, what does it tell us about the state of video games and teen pregnancy? Only time will tell.

Many Mass Effect fans lamented the recent metamorphosis of BioWare's signature sci-fi series from a role-playing game with shooter elements to a shooter with role-playing game elements. So what are we to make of the new Call of Duty playing a bit more like a Mass Effect?

This new Call of Duty: Black Ops II has Mass Effect in its bones.

Let's celebrate.

And let's get some of the obvious distinctions out of the way. Competitive multiplayer? Black Ops II has that; Mass Effects don't. Krogans? Only in Mass Effect. Dialogue choices? All over Mass Effect; absent from Black Ops II. Thor's hammer? I don't think that's in Mass Effect.

What Black Ops II has in abundance are choices. It doesn't just have the kind of choices you'd normally find in a shooter—the interesting moment-to-moment choices of whether to shoot or run, whether to throw a grenade and then step to the side or step to the side and then throw a grenade. It has the kind of choices that tweak the plot of a game. It has the kinds of choices that enable Mass Effect fans and fans of other flexible role-playing games to discover that their games unfolded in very different ways. Did you let Wrex die? Did you save the Council? What final choice did you make for Commander Shepard? We can now have the same kinds of conversations about Black Ops II because, for once, a new Call of Duty is not a flume ride. It's a broadly-branching tree of decisions.

The campaign of Black Ops II is full of missions set around the world, most of them involving lots of over-the-top triumphant military actions. From 80s Afghanistan to the 21st century Cayman Islands, there will be bad guys to shoot and helicopters in need of exploding. Sometimes, these missions will pause and give you a choice: Let this key character live or die? See that guy, the [redacted]? I killed him. Patricia Hernandez, who reviewed Black Ops II for us, did not. Out yourself as a spy and risk the consequences? Depending on the choice you make, a major supporting character might be absent for the remaining handful of levels left in the campaign.

Some of the choices in Black Ops II could almost be described as subtle, except, well… one involves whether the supporting character Harper is burned in a fire and has half his face scarred for the rest of the game. This choice is decided on the fly and simply depends on whether you drive a vehicle he's on top of too close to an inferno. Yes, this decision is made in the heat of the moment. But what's more remarkable than the pun I just made is that kind of choice in any game. It's highly unusual to see that kind of on-the-fly decision, if we can even call it that, have lasting consequences—even if cosmetic ones—for the duration of game. A matter of steering a truck in one mission determines how a major character will look for the rest of the game? That's fantastic.

As you play through Black Ops II's campaign a small alert occasionally appears in the upper left corner of the screen. It indicates that your career has been updated. This is usually a signal that you've just done something that has bent the story or expanded it. Of all the prompts games have given me this year, of all the alerts I've seen pop on the screen, this is one of my favorites. It signals to me that I may have stepped off the expected path, that I have in some way deviated. In a Call of Duty this at least simulates some overdue rebellion. At the end of each level, the game's main campaign menu displays a list of the levels the player has completed along with text descriptions of what consequential things have happened. These are signals, too. Their message: you could have had a different outcome; your friends probably did.

When I compared notes with Patricia, I discovered that there was an enormous difference in the ending scenes we both saw. It wasn't the difference I had expected us to have. It wasn't the one I figured we'd be able to trace back to an obvious, pivotal press-this-button-or-that-button choice in the game's final level. The difference we discovered (don't worry, I won't spoil it) came down to which part of a certain character's body we shot halfway into the game. That's some Mass Effect-style long-term consequence for you. (No wonder someone mixed up the games' discs. Totally understandable, given all of these similarities.)

There are even more branches in the new Call of Duty. Every Black Ops II mission is filled with small side-missions. It would be a bit much to call them sidequests. There's no Majora's Mask wedding quest in here. But they are essentially the CoD equivalent of a sidequest. You'll see the words "ACCESS" floating over things that you don't really have to access. If you do, you get a little extra mini-adventure.

Here's an example that we captured from the game's second level. If you don't select ACCESS, you don't play that sequence.

In other levels, going down similar tributaries might gain you a helper drone or throw you into a short rescue mission. You might wind up with a new weapon or ability just for that mission. Many of these side missions are tied to the sets of 10 challenges that are scripted for each level. These challenges might require you to discover and use a certain weapon to kill 10 enemies or to find some important information that will expand the story. Completing a bunch of these challenges unlocks a perk, one per each level (shooter fans may notice that a lot of this resembles some of the great but long-since-neglected level design ideas in the Rare-made Nintendo 64 shooters GoldenEye and Perfect Dark). The challenge lists are essentially lists of clues that hint at side tasks still undiscovered in each mission.

After the campaign's first few missions pass, players can access Strike Force Missions. These are played in what resemble arena-shaped multiplayer maps. They run on a timer. You command several units at once: squads of soldiers, drones, turrets and even a little walking tank. You can control any of them, hopping from unit to unit a la Battlefield 2: Modern Combat or Battalion Wars or just direct them all from overhead. Either way, you can dole out orders for units to attack, defend, hack enemy installations and so on. The missions tie into the campaign's story and essentially dictate the attitude of the rest of the world toward the United States. Countries will ally with you if you succeed (X-Com!). If you fail, you lose a Strike Force squad. Lose enough and the mission is lost for good. Don't even try and certain things will happen in the campaign that wouldn't have if you played the missions and succeeded in them. Again: branches, choice, and my storyline differ from yours. Again: Mass Effect and its tribe.

The biggest games can afford to be the laziest. The Call of Duty series can rightly be accused of not having changed enough to merit a new installment each year. With Black Ops II's campaign, however, we have a wonderfully unexpected and welcome twist. The twist is that there are twists, not all played out to a passive audience but, with shocking frequency, instigated by the player.

Mass Effect became more like Call of Duty a couple of years ago.

Today, Call of Duty is more like Mass Effect.

Black Ops II is all about the consequences of unmanned war machines running amok under a hostile power. So the last thing you might be expecting to find is a certain Thunder God's magical weapon as an easter egg.

But Mjolnir—the war hammer wielded by Thor—is exactly what GameFront found in Black Ops II, tucked away in one of the game's early levels. The video above show you how to get to it. A little weird? Yeah, but cool as Asgard, too.

Where to Find Thor's Hammer Easter Egg

Let's be honest for a moment here: pretty much everyone around the world has at the very least thought about calling in "sick" to work or school while their health was perfectly fine, for one reason or another. For some folks, it's a beach day; for others, just a chance to sleep for an extra few hours. And then, of course, there are the gamers.

It's a classic running joke that a Call of Duty launch day means players will stay home "sick" to glue themselves to the TV and shoot virtual weapons all day. And it's a joke that seems well-grounded in truth.

USA Today has a report on the uptick in unscheduled absences and sudden illnesses that take place on a Call of Duty launch day. CNET also chimes in, pointing to poll data gathered by IGN, which found that one in four respondents planned to call in "sick" today to get more Black Ops II time in.

Of course, as much as many of us would like to take a day off just to play a new game, reality often intervenes and we can't always follow through. But plenty of folks, it seems, are. From the schoolkid cutting class to the savvy boss who knows exactly where his employees really are, Twitter is full of the stories of the Call of Duty twenty-four hour flu:

It's not uncommon for a game to have bugs and glitches, just ask Bethesda. But especially when multiplayer is involved, people will dig up or stumble on some hilarious (and sometimes useful) glitches.

Here are a few that people have already been uploading to YouTube, not even a full day after Black Ops II has been released.

The top video is during Black Ops II's Zombies mode, where a zombie's body stretches across a building, leaving but a tiny hand at the end of that awkward, skin-filled rainbow. I hope the imagery of that made your Tuesday better.

This one got coined the "Jesus glitch." For obvious, non-resurrection related reasons.

Here's another one from the Zombie mode. A sneaky little glitch that gives you invincibility. But where's the fun in that if you're not getting up and fighting? I don't know about you, but I like using my guns.

I like to think the care package in this video came down, saw all the enemies with guns and was like, "NOPE. BUHBYE."

Yet another Zombies glitch, I imagine the zombie here is thinking, "Maybe if I stand really, really still he won't see me." Either that or he's been practicing his ballet lunges so much he froze that way. That's how it works, right? Like making faces?

And then of course there's the Samuel L. Jackson glitch that Luke pointed out last night.

Find any others? Let us know. And make use of Theater!

Don't try to solo the extraordinary Zombies mode in the new Call of Duty. You won't last long.

The new zombies mode should probably be its own game and is definitely designed for co-op. I learned this after wrapping up the campaign and trying to play the new TranZit part of Zombies on my own. Possible, but also impossible!

Zombies in Black Ops II continues the story from the Rezurrection zombie-mode expansion to the first Black Ops. We begin in a wrecked small town in the middle of America. We're not soldiers, just survivors. The TranZit mode lets us take a tour through this town (and maybe beyond? I don't know). You start in a bus station and immediately have to shoot zombies. Every shot earns you points that you can spend, as before, on unlocking weapons and items that you'll be able to use during your run. You lose everything if you die.

You start TranZit with just a pistol and very little ammo. You're weak. The zombies are coming through the windows. Things are bad. You can board up the windows, earning some points in the process, but those boards won't hold.

From outside, you will hear the honk of a bus horn.

In the twisted world of Zombies, you had to pay in-game points to open doors, but in Tranzit you can also build stuff. One makeshift contraption will open doors for nothing. You should make it. You should grab a mannequin, a fan, and an item from a pay phone. They're all in the bus station. Craft them on the workbench and you get a device you can deploy near doors. It literally blows them open.

Smart survivors scramble to any idling nearby vehicles. That bus will do. It's driven by an automaton and seems, like the rest of Zombies mode, like something out of Fallout. Shut the bus doors and the driver will get a move on. Slowly, you'll drive to the next area. Zombies enjoy bus rides, too, so out the back window you'll see a few zombies that are on fire. They're running after the bus. Recommendation: shoot them. Others will climb on top of the bus or even jump inside.

The next stop was foggy. I'm not sure what was there. Eventually I reached a diner, maybe after another bus ride? My memory blurs.

I noticed that the bus is upgradeable. I added a ladder to it so I could ride on its roof. I'm hoping I can put some guns on this local.

The zombies come in waves. Each wave is tougher, which is why you really, really should be playing this with other people. The diner hid more items I could use for crafting, but I died before I could use them.

I'm very eager to play more of this.

TranZit is a quest, really. It has goals. The first is to turn on the power. I didn't manage to do that. The folks at Gamefront did, so please watch their video here for a tip about that.

And that's not all... TranZit is just one part of Zombies. There are many standalone maps that can be played as four gamers against zombie waves or as four gamers against four other gamers against zombie waves.

I did try to solo the small town map in Survival mode. I lasted six waves, hiding in the pool hall, shotgunning a bottlenecked bunch of zombies in the bank. I used some revive power-ups to keep death from being a Game Over. I didn't have enough.

It was tough.

It is remarkable that this whole Zombies thing is tucked into a Black Ops II disc that is already stuffed with an ambitious, albeit short, campaign and a whole heap of competitive multiplayer content. Lots of bang for your buck.

Just don't play it alone.

Call of Duty isn't exactly Skyrim, but it does include a sword. You can get it in a campaign mission (maybe more than one) to slice bad guys up.

The video above shows where we first found it. We captured this footage from "Old Wounds", the third level of the campaign. The sword is really easy to find but isn't a mandatory item. Grabbing it is one of a stunning amount of optional, tiny side quests that break off from the game's main campaign and encourage—get this—exploration. No, Black Ops II is not a normal Call of Duty!