To cut a long story short: In the end, we chose the beginning of the third chapter, "In Darkness". To guarantee a high degree of comparability, we also had to eliminate missions whose course is hard to reproduce. The user is permitted to unlock all of the missions at the first startup (we wish the competition would copy the developer here), but because of the massive performance drops many levels are out of the question. Finding a fitting sequence was a more difficult task. Nor does the game require much in the way of strategy in single-player mode, and the difficulty level is disappointing.ÄȘlthough Black Ops 3 needs quite some time to load a level (the videos don't stutter on weaker devices as badly as they did previously), measuring frame rates was fairly easy. But under the hood, we discover that it's more about appearances than substance: The game is plagued with poorly executed AI, excessively large enemy waves and a chaotically-presented story. In terms of gameplay, buyers will get that familiar Call of Duty feeling: Diverse kinds of action in perfectly-tailored scenes. This makes the performance problems and bulky game size (almost 50 GB download) all the more irritating. True, Black Ops 3 has considerably more game physics elements than its predecessor, but overall the graphics seem somewhat antiquated. During the campaign, the player often encounters muddy textures and second-rate effects (fire looks somewhat pathetic). With the exception of the detailed and well-animated characters, the game's visuals aren't especially impressive. But in our experience, the hardware demands and graphics quality aren't strictly related. Now, one could argue that a visually stunning first-person shooter is simply bound to eat up resources. HDD), Black Ops 3 seems to be influenced by the potency of the other hardware as well. While most games' load times are dependent on the system's mass storage device (SSD vs. Yet that's not all: Over the course of our tests, we also dealt with mouse bugs (after changing the resolution on our 4K monitor), graphics errors (mostly at low and medium detail settings), and strange fluctuations in load time. The game occasionally froze completely, however, forcing us to kill the EXE through the Task Manager. In such cases, briefly exiting Full-screen Mode via Alt + Enter often resolved the problem. Speaking of switching windows: On some systems the screen went completely black after settings changes or immediately after the game startup, though we could still hear the sound in the background. When we opened the Task Manager for testing purposes, we were astonished to see that the first-person shooter was gobbling all 8 GB of our desktop PC's memory. Black Ops 3 seems very poorly optimized for working memory as well.