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The new port of the original 2010 Black Ops to PlayStation ought to be a celebration of one of the most iconic Call of Duty titles - but instead, the lasting impression after playing it is of just how little time, resources and expertise that Activision chose to invest in this project.

The resolution numbers don't tell the whole story, but are indicative: the PS5 is a powerful piece of kit by the standards of a game that came out 16 years ago for PS3 and Xbox 360, so most contemporary games ported to the system run at the full 4K output by default. Not so here, which comes out (in the year of our lord 2026!) with a native 1080p presentation - and no anti-aliasing to speak of.

That low resolution isn't in service of a smooth 120fps output either, with the game limited to 60Hz. A 1080p60 presentation would be potentially acceptable for the PS4 version - and there is one! - but for a brand new PS5 conversion, it's disappointingly poor and well below what the hardware is capable of.

Amazingly, the game is still better than the Xbox version running under back-compat, which is limited to a 360-era 608p resolution, with lower-res shadow maps and a darker presentation - so no Xbox enhancements to speak of. But for a native PS5 title and a somewhat high-profile port, this is a deeply odd state of affairs. Even the game's obvious visual blemishes are preserved: shadow quality was necessarily poor back in the day, but why preserve that problem in the present day when so much more graphics horsepower is available?

I could understand Activision owners Microsoft not wanting the game to look better on the PS5 than their own Series X console, giving a false impression of the relative power of the two systems, but the game still ships with a resolution advantage on PlayStation. And if that was the case, surely the answer here would be to get back-compat working better on Xbox, or bring out Blops 1 as a paid "remaster" for both PS5 and Xbox Series consoles with minimal tweaks at a full 4K?

Another theory is that, somewhere, someone committed to bringing Black Ops to the PS5, yet for whatever reason they had absolutely minimal resources to do so - so updating the resolution to modern standards fell out of the remit. Given the fact that there is some amount of marketing for the PS5 releases, this again seems unlikely, but I just can't think of too many good explanations for why a port would be released at such a low resolution for the PS5. And if you think the sequel fixes the issue, nope - it's 1080p too.

Beyond that, questions must be raised about the price point. For such a low effort port, a $40/£35 cost is frankly astonishing - though a 50 percent discount is available if you're a PlayStation Plus subscriber. On top of that, Activision is asking for another $30/£26 for the season pack when surely all available content should have been bundled into a single release. There's a 67 percent discount for the DLC if you have a PlayStation Plus subscription, but it's still a very poor state of affairs - and the exact same pricing is in place for Black Ops 2 and its DLC.

This really isn't good enough. The original Black Ops and its sequel are celebrated entries in the Call of Duty series. Reasonable upgrades at a decent price point with all available content - and ports to Xbox consoles too - isn't too much to ask for.