For a long time, developer Treyarch has been known as Call of Duty’s “B-Team.” To be fair, that isn’t such a bad thing when you’re being compared to Infinity Ward, the developers behind COD 1, 2, Modern Warfare, and Modern Warefare 2, but Treyarch did manage to make a really solid shooter in Call of Duty: World at War. The developer hopes to continue that trend with Call of Duty: Black Ops, and from what I’ve seen of it from E3: this is indeed the same Call of Duty you know and love.

Taking place during the Cold War, Black Ops aims to tell the “untold” stories of some US soldiers going behind enemy lines. The game starts off with you manning an aircraft that flies into space. As your character looks into the screen in front of him, you take control and are able to issue orders to your squadmates down below on earth in sort of an x-ray vision cam (think the bombing sequence in Modern Warfare). After you’re done ordering issues from space, the game switches over to a snowy level. Here, you take control of a soldier who is working with his superior as they make their way down a mountain to break into a soviet facility to accomplish a cover mission.

One new weapon that I saw here was a crossbow. But this was no ordinary crossbow, it was a crossbow with exploding arrows. Another new addition that I saw was the ability to fly a helicopter. This part took place in Laos and reminded me a lot like the flight sequence towards the end of the original Crysis on PC. While these section looks like it’s on rails, an Activision rep tells us that the helicopter is completely controllable. In this chopper, players can spray enemies with machine gun bullets and shoot missiles at foes. One mission objective had us blowing up a bridge to disrupt enemy mobility.

Aside from those new additions, in terms of gameplay mechanics: this is Call of Duty. Even though it’s made by Treyarch instead of Infinity Ward, casual Call of Duty fans will probably not even notice as the presentation aspects from what I saw look nearly identical to Infinity Ward’s previous efforts.