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It's sure to be the biggest game of the year, but is Black Ops II worth your time and money? According to the critics, the answer is a big sweaty "yes", with praise for Treyarch's shooter raining down from all sides.

"Not just a fantastic Call of Duty game, but one of the best shooters of the last decade," says IGN in a 9.3/10 review that points to the numerous tweaks and changes to the COD formula as highlights. "The most ambitious and exciting Call of Duty ever made" is their conclusion.

"Zombies drops you into an intense, expansive world with untold secrets to discover, multiplayer's Pick 10 system and Scorestreaks open up new strategies to exploit, and the single-player campaign warrants repeat visits from its captivating, branching storyline" says GamesRadar's glowing four and a half star review.

Across all of the reviews, much of the praise centres around the decision to lavish attention on the single player campaign, an element that some had felt was becoming irrelevant as Activision capitalised on COD's multiplayer modes. "The elastic story provides plenty of incentive to replay the campaign" reads the 94% review from GameTrailers, concluding that "shooters simply don't get much more deep, varied, surprising, or rewarding than this."

Even if everyone was going to buy Black Ops II anyway, it's great to see that the game itself goes out of its way to deliver value for money.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is out now for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. A Wii U version will launch on November 30th, alongside Nintendo's new console.