Activision's 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 2' will hit global store shelves on Nov 13 and this early the highly-anticipated game title is projected to quickly breach the $1 billion mark, easily breaking the record sales set in 2011 by its immediate CoD predecessor.

UK-based The Sun reported on Tuesday that thousands held vigil on gaming retail stores where the latest instalment of the hugely popular shooting game series is expected to be sold.

Hard-core gamers want to draw the first blood on the Black Ops 2, which according to PC World is set on a backdrop of a cold war that "has been brewing between the United States and China over rare earth elements."

But beyond that storyline, gamers will be treated to numerous set ups that "span almost 40 years and four continents ... missions range from a civil war in Angola in 1986 to the futuristic setting of LA in 2025," according to The Sun.

Vast improvements deployed by Activision with Black Ops 2 spurred frenzied excitement within the gaming community that reports of advanced copies obtained by some in UK have already emerged, BBC said.

Gaming experts, however, were far from surprised, saying that copies could be easily accessed though BitTorrent sites and black markets but as stressed by those who talked with BBC, what they have are genuine and physical copies.

These sort of news, observers said, are testament to the immense interest and following generated by the CoD game series, the last title of which had attracted close to seven million buys last year in the UK and U.S. alone.

And early reviewers concluded that millions more will be glued to the game, most likely to be entranced by the layers of challenges designed for Black Ops 2.

The single-player campaign itself is an allure but for the great many CoD fans, the 14-map online multiplayer mode serves as the biggest crowd-drawer, wooing for the CoD network as much as 40 million players every month from around the world, The Sun said.

Also set to hook hordes of gamers to the new CoD title is the Zombie Mode, which according to PC World comes with a game segment called Tranzit, wherein "players try to fend off the undead in an open-world, taking shelter in a bus that they can outfit with barricades and weapons."

And speaking of new weapons offering in Black Ops 2, gamers should be delighted to dislodge some bullets using the new "heat-mapping sniper rifle," The Sun reviewer Lee Zaleski said.

This killing machine, Mr Zaleski said, allows for enemy annihilation beyond walls or any form of shields.

Black Ops 2 is playable on PC, Sony's PS3, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Wii U though U.S. owners of the new Nintendo game console will have to wait until Nov 18 to have a taste of the virtual carnage in the new CoD offering.