Here's part of a review I wrote on Call of Duty MW2 and I think this section applies to Black Ops.
Quote from ME! : However, not all is perfect.
After completing the game at a relaxed pace, I decided to play through again on Veteran. I wanted the Gamerscore. After choosing ‘Veteran’ from the difficulty list, I was warned not once, not twice, but three times, that it was, and I’m quoting ‘extremely difficult’. They weren’t wrong.
As a rule of thumb, it’s 3 shots and you are dead. Keep your head down or get it blown off. And while it’s good for the challenge, and sense of achievement it brings up the game’s biggest flaw.
The computer controlled players. Which even on the easier difficulty levels are, frankly, rather poor.
Now hear me out, before everyone yells ‘But wait! It’s a multiplayer oriented game!’ There are plenty of people, myself included, who buy for the offline experience. And anyway, they bothered to make a half decent storyline to play through so it would be rude not to. But if only they’d spent another 50p...or about 25 cents to you Yanks, on developing the AI.
After much testing, and clever deduction, I concluded they were basically the same as the AI from Modern Warfare 1. Slow. Idiotic. Dumb. Not so much intelligence, as Artificial Ignorance. On Veteran difficulty, the enemies will shoot you before they even see you. They always know exactly where you are, no matter how sneaky you are or how much of a good hiding spot you find. I yelled hacks.
Considering I’m a fan of stealthy games, such as the Metal Gear Solid series, not to mention the stealth parts on Farcry, Crysis, etcetc, you can perhaps understand my anger. When you shoot enemies with a grenade launcher, or even throw a normal one at them, unless it basically hits them, they will somehow survive. 6 foot kill radius my arse. It’s quite infuriating.
When they kill you, they keep shooting you, almost like they have some sort of sadistic tendency to shoot up a corpse. As if they’re saying ‘Ha ha! I killed you! They seem to have no recoil, they seem to aim at your head instantaneously and track it wherever you go.
What’s more annoying is that they seem to only ever shoot you, and only you. Regardless of difficulty level. Stand in a group with your computer controlled buddies and the enemy only ever seems to target you. Perhaps your Leotard has lumps and bumps in all the right places. Don’t ask, don’t tell, right? You can never know.
To add insult to injury, in the little dying sequence, you often see the guy who shot you, being killed. If only it was a few seconds earlier, you think. And what’s even more annoying than that is that your buddies don’t even shoot them in return. Ever.
Your teammates do not seem to have any brain. Terrorists will appear in the middle of your group and your team won’t even notice them. It’s almost like you’re expected to kill everyone and they’re just along for the ride to look good with their silly skin tight outfits and face paint that would be more at home on an 8 year old child’s face.
They’ll just keep their obviously thick heads down and leave you to kill 30 plus enemies. Not easy when you have about 2 seconds to come out of cover, take aim with the handicapped controls, kill the terrorist...to death, and then go prone again before one of the other 29 shoot you in the face.
As you can tell, probably not impressed. The exact same applies in Black Ops.