Yeah, I think Call Of Duty might be done now.

It’s disheartening to play Infinite Warfare after watching the CoD series’ painstaking attempts to claw its way back from the brink of irrelevancy over the last three iterations. Ghosts was mostly a failure, but Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3 were both encouraging in intent if not in execution, as they started to explore what would be possible in a near-future setting and showed that CoD was at least trying to give the player more interesting things to do than sit behind cover looking out for grenade indicators. Black Ops 3 even had some half decent story ideas and visual design to offset its quite considerable flaws. It was a moderately promising path for the series to be headed down; I don’t think it would have saved it as those yearly releases carry far too much inertia for CoD to be able to reinvent itself in the comprehensive manner that its modern competitors have, but it at least would have been a managed decline and the best that CoD could have realistically asked for without Activision drastically rethinking how they manage their biggest property.

Infinite Warfare is not a managed decline. Infinite Warfare is an almost conscious rejection of all the progress that CoD has made over the past three or four years, no matter how slight it might be, in exchange for ramming itself face-first into the nearest wall. (Not coincidentally, this is what the act of actually playing Infinite Warfare feels like.) On the surface there’s a lot of potential to be found here, as Infinite Warfare finally sheds the last vestiges of plausibility by setting itself in a far future where mankind has colonised a solar system that’s now replete with space stations, space destroyers and space fighters. You could do a lot with this setting in terms of gameplay gimmicks – as an example I’d point you towards what Titanfall 2 managed to do just last week if it wasn’t still a massive spoiler — and CoD is a series that is extremely heavily reliant on its gimmicks to spice up the basic shooter action so rote and uninspired that I could do it in my sleep by now. Example gimmicks from the series’ past include but are by no means limited to: the AC-130 gunship level from Modern Warfare; the ice climbing level from Modern Warfare 2; the five trillion minigames from Ghosts; and the jetpacks and grappling hooks from Advanced Warfare. Opening up vast new gimmick horizons for CoD to exploit by making that giant leap into space probably could have staved off the death of the series for a few years, if the developers had just had the wit and/or creative freedom to properly take advantage of them.

Instead we get probably the most regressive shooter I’ve played in the last half-decade. Think of everything you do in a standard Call Of Duty game, add the rider “But in space!” to the end of every sentence, and you will be able to successfully visualise the entirety of Infinite Warfare in your mind. I will give it grudging points for the tutorial mission, which is a jetpack drop onto the surface of Europa followed by a stealthy infiltration of an enemy facility that shows off the main innovation of the FPS segment of the game: anti-gravity grenades. (Yes, the best they could come up with is a grenade that replicates the Lift biotic power seen in the original Mass Effect nearly a decade ago.) It’s not a stellar experience by any measure, but it did briefly trick me into thinking I might at least get some interesting environments to explore during the campaign. Unfortunately since this is Call Of Duty the special ops team you’re leading gets executed by Infinite Warfare’s villain Salen Kotch — a laughably miscast Kit Harrington who you absolutely will not be able to take seriously, and doubly so if you actually do watch Game Of Thrones since there’s zero effort made to ensure that he doesn’t look and sound like Space Jon Snow — and the action then cuts to Earth, which has unified into Space America, and the main character you’ll be playing for the rest of the game: Lieutenant Reyes, a square-jawed space fighter pilot/space special forces soldier (the writers for this game have clearly been watching a lot of Space: Above And Beyond) who might as well be marketed as a brand of carpet cleaner since he is odourless, colourless and guaranteed to leave absolutely no lasting impression on you whatsoever.

Joining Reyes are Salter, the female wish fulfilment character for this iteration of the franchise — steely-eyed, competent, one of the lads, yet secretly into your character — Ethan, a robo-bro who paradoxically displays the most humanity out of anyone in the campaign, and Omar, a sort of knockoff Idris Elba¹. All of these characters communicate with one another solely in the form of tired military cliches, to the point where I’d almost suspect Infinite Warfare of being an exquisite parody at times since the refusal of its cast to talk to one another like normal human beings is taken to such extremes that every single one of them comes across like they’re a jabbering lunatic. They’re also all from English-speaking Western nations (mostly America with two Brits and an Australian sprinkled in) which I thought was a bit much for what is supposed to be a united Earth military, especially since Kit Harrington’s faction in this game — the Martian SDF — are pretty clearly Space Russians complete with Space Russian accents and Space Russian names, and they even carry Space AK-47s with a space wood finish as their standard weapon.

The Space Russians are very bad people indeed – they’re so bad, in fact, that every time you die in Infinite Warfare you get spammed with a quote about how evil the Space Russians are (the anti-war literature is a thing of the distant past). They open the game by doing a Space Pearl Harbour on Space America, evilly surprise-attacking their space fleet while it’s having a space parade in Geneva and dropping off space marines to shoot civilians in the streets, because they’re so evil² You spend this mission fighting your way through Geneva on foot to reach HQ, and it’s here that the true nature of Infinite Warfare first rears its ugly head since the gameplay experience of slogging through a wrecked European city with a few AI buddies while stopping to trade shots with occasional groups of bad guys who are crouched behind waist-high cover could literally have been spliced in from the very first Call Of Duty back in 2003. The enemy behaviour is about the same grade as 2003-era CoD too; they show massive preference for targeting you over your friends and they’ll shoot at you no matter where you are in the level — since Infinite Warfare’s cover has a lot of tiny holes in it that they can get you through this leads to a lot of frustrating deaths because you’re not crouching in exactly the right spot. To avoid death you spend a lot of time lying prone behind cover waiting for the flashing red screen borders to go away. Then you quickly poke your head out, snipe one bad guy if you’re lucky, and then immediately retreat back behind cover to recover from the sheer weight of incoming gunfire.

This static gameplay of remaining huddled behind cover while the bullet storm rages around you couldn’t be more at odds with the two outstanding FPS heavyweights released this year, Doom and Titanfall 2. In those games your mobility is not only a thing to revel in and enjoy, it’s absolutely essential to keep moving in order to survive. The reverse is true of Infinite Warfare; here, moving out of cover will result in you looking at one of those quotes about how evil the Space Russians are after approximately one and a half seconds. It wants you to remain nailed squarely in place behind whatever piece of concrete and/or metal you’ve selected headshotting goon after goon until you finish the encounter and move on to the next shooting gallery. There’s fuck all enemy variety to spice things up; there’s human enemies that you use bullets against, and robot enemies that you use lasers against (and can hack if you want to briefly relieve the tedium), and this is the sum total of Infinite Warfare’s imagination when it comes to the baddies since otherwise they behave in precisely the same way. There’s very little that you can do outside of shooting them, either; you have two slots for activated abilities but the most interesting of these is the one that lets you take over a robot and blow it up in a particularly large cluster of enemies. The others are a shield, which I suppose lets you move with the cover, and a little deployable drone that’ll shoot whatever you’re shooting at and basically functions as an additional useless AI sidekick. It’s so damn sickly that I found myself actively pining for Black Ops 3’s nano-abilities, or even something like Advanced Warfare’s grapple: literally any additional option for doing things in a mission that wasn’t shooting somebody in the head.

Anyway, after you’re done with the Geneva slogfest you hop into your space fighter and blast off into space to shoot it out with the enemy fleet. These Jackal segments are supposed to be Infinite Warfare’s big step forward, since in most of them you’re in the fighter the entire time and there’s no classic FPS gameplay at all, and they’re certainly quite impressive visually with lots of flak and explosions and tracers flying around. Unfortunately in terms of what you actually do they are, if anything, even shallower than the FPS segments since there is exactly one type of enemy fighter and two types of capital ships, and the capital ships don’t pose any threat to you just so long as you press Q to launch flares whenever they launch missiles. It’s pretty much just the Apache level from Ghosts — but in space — except where Ghosts at least recognised it was a gimmick with a short shelf life and didn’t allow it to outstay its welcome Infinite Warfare has decided to unroll it into half of a game. Every Jackal mission plays out the same way: shoot the fighters, then when they’re all dead shoot the capital ships, and then land on your space carrier. Which, by the way, is a literal space carrier complete with a space landing strip. In fucking space, that famously air- and gravity-filled³ environment where fighters must approach a carrier at speed in order to remain airborne before touching down and braking hard. I wouldn’t bitch about it so much except they actually do make you land on the carrier at the end of every mission, and if you’re even slightly misaligned with the blue target circle you have to turn around and do it again⁴.

Infinite Warfare’s other big innovation outside of the FPS segments (god knows it fails to innovate enough inside of them) is that once you get the initial three missions on Europa, Earth and the Moon out of the way you get command of the big space carrier you spend so much of your time trying to land on and can choose which missions to do via a big tactical display in the middle of the bridge. About half of these are Jackal missions, which means they’re functionally identical and absolutely disposable. The other half are ship boarding missions, where you fly to and board a Space Russian capital ship on foot in order to do a thing, and while these are kind of mixed they do have their good points. The approach to the ship is usually great fun as Infinite Warfare does a pretty good job of the zero-G sections that Ghosts got so horribly wrong — the enemy AI still blows and you still have to hope there’s a good piece of cover between you and them, but if there’s no enemies around the game can focus on spectacle and there’s some great bits where you’re scrambling through asteroid belts to plant bombs inside the engines or boarding the target ship while it’s shooting it out with a friendly capital ship. Unfortunately once you do finally get on board the tables turn: some clever soul at Infinity Ward has gone “Well, since the ships you board are all the same class of ship that means we can use the same level for each one!”, and while you’d struggle to notice the difference between each ship’s drab metal interior at the best of times it’s striking how many times they re-use the armory room, for example.

This ensures that the latter half of each boarding mission feels exactly the same, and this is kind of a problem for Infinite Warfare since the number of missions where you don’t board an enemy capital ship is somewhere around six. Three of those form Infinite Warfare’s opening as described above. There’s another two set in a fuel refinery on Titan and an asteroid mining base, for which you can read “prefab metal structures on a rock”. Infinite Warfare now wants me to go back to Earth, which is the point where I punch out of the game because I’m absolutely unwilling to go through that bullshit again without a moderately pretty environment to back it up; I imagine that after this there’s one final mission to attack Kit Harrington’s super star destroyer but quite frankly I’m perfectly happy not sitting through that either. It’s rare for me to give up on a game so close to the end but given the mostly monotonous and repetitive missions that Infinite Warfare has thrown at me up until this point I’m as sure as I can be that I’m really not missing anything by yanking on that EJECT handle a little early. Call Of Duty is a series that’s built almost 100% around scripting and spectacle, but despite the exotic new theme Infinite Warfare contains precious little of either; this was supposed to be a game that took me on a tour of the solar system to visit whole new planets, but instead it seems far more interested in showing me the interior of a fucking filing cabinet that’s filled to the brim with aimbots, over and over again.

This is why I say Call Of Duty is done. These days development duties for the series revolve between Infinity Ward (last responsible for Ghosts), Sledgehammer (Advanced Warfare) and Treyarch (Black Ops), so Infinite Warfare sucking so hard is by no means an indicator that the genuine progress made by Treyarch and Sledgehammer is going to disappear. However, this was the series’ big opportunity to really reinvent itself and it’s just been screwed up so badly that Activision won’t ever allow the series to go back into space again; at best it’s going to be all Advanced Warfares and Black Ops titles from here on out and, as I stated in the opening paragraph, that’s not enough to keep the CoD series going on anything more than basic life support while it gets eaten alive by its more agile competitors. I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the franchise (my interest in it is academic more than anything else), but I do think the failure of Infinite Warfare is sad in at least one respect: it is so weak that EA really didn’t need to aggressively market its two best shooter franchises against it, and so all they’ve managed to do there is crush Titanfall 2 — arguably the actual best all-round FPS of 2016 — beneath the unstoppable bulk of Battlefield 1. That’s the real tragedy of Infinite Warfare.

The post Thoughts: Call Of Duty – Infinite Warfare appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After the last three iterations progressively shed their now-tedious modern trappings I think we can say that, even without the recent announcement of the frankly ridiculously-titled Infinite Warfare¹, the Call of Duty franchise has now fully committed itself to being a proper near-future sci-fi shooter. If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from Ghosts and Advanced Warfare it is that the supposed genre trend-setter is evolving in response to its competition – slowly and at times painfully, but the move to that sci-fi setting opens up a more interesting design space to the various developers involved, allowing them to introduce mechanics that should fundamentally change the way the game plays – at least in theory. I bought CODBLOPS 3 (I love that acronym) because I’d heard it had improved movement mechanics including wallrunning and double-jumping, which intrigued me since it appeared that this would be the franchise’s first real response to the unfortunately short-lived Titanfall. Having finished the single-player now I feel that it’s also the first CoD game I’ve played that’s really started to explore the possibilities of the sci-fi setting. But the catch here is that exploration always carries with it an element of risk, and Black Ops 3 is a long, long, way from being an unqualified improvement on what came before.

Black Ops 3 is set in the 2070s, and just like Ghosts it has two fake coalitions battling it out in a cold war; the Winslow Accord (American good guys) versus the NRC (seems to be mostly Africa and the Middle East). Just like Ghosts the side that isn’t you is almost comically evil, with the extended intro level showing you plenty of scenes of evil African soldiers torturing POWs², and their evil-ness appears to extend to their battlebot programming as you get your arms and legs needlessly ripped off by one in a ridiculously graphic sequence at the end of the level. I understand that the game needed an excuse for you to get cybernetic replacements that would let you do all of the additional cool shit allowed by the sci-fi setting, but it didn’t even shock me, it just had me rolling my eyes at yet another attempt by the series to be all edgy and mature, much like the No Russian sequence in Modern Warfare 2³. The intro level isn’t all bad, though; it’s the one part of the game where you play as a bog-standard unaugmented human being, and Black Ops 3 both previews the stuff you’re going to be doing later and brings your limitations into relief by pairing you up with a squad of bionic men (and one token woman) led by one Samuel Taylor, who proceed to cut the NRC to pieces using a variety of technological gimmicks.

While you’re in surgery getting your metal arms and legs stuck on you then get to go through a very cool VR training environment with Taylor and his team that teaches you how to use your new abilities – mostly this involves turning on your see-through-walls vision that helpfully tags all the enemies with little symbols over their heads (which are never explained) and pressing Q to fire off a cybernetic power (read: magic spell) whenever it’s off cooldown.  These are actually pretty great! There’s a skill tree into which you can invest skill points (sorry, Fabrication Kits) to acquire new abilities and upgrade them in between missions; I went for the Control tree which let me hack robots, tear out their power cores and use them as EMP grenades, and hijack enemy cyber-soldiers’ augmentations to break all their limbs. There’s also a Chaos tree that focuses on less specific forms of sabotage, such as firing a cloud of nanobots at people to distract them and also set them on fire, as well as a more physical tree that I forgot the name of that basically involves punching people really, really hard; however my selection of what is basically the anti-robot tree paid off because there are a lot of robot enemies in this game, and being able to turn two of them to my side every twenty seconds was a great help in combat. You can also take direct control of the big robots if you can keep the crosshairs over them for a period of time, which struck me as a more natural way of doing the turret/vehicle sections that every CoD game flirts with without properly executing on. The abilities weren’t quite an unmitigated success – the ripping out power cores ability is activated using the grenade button when a robot is close enough, however since you’re usually backpedalling away from them what usually happens is that you end up dropping a grenade at your feet — but I thought that while they weren’t exactly game-changing, they did add a lot to it and made it feel suitably futuristic.

Of course since Taylor’s character model is a meticulously-rendered reproduction of the actor playing him that means he’s going to be the bad guy, and sure enough he goes rogue two missions into the game, breaking into a CIA safehouse in Singapore and stealing all of their precious data. Your “team” (consisting of you plus a very angry man with fantastic hair who is basically there to open any doors that might be concealing the loading of the next part of the level) is dispatched to Singapore to hunt him down and find out what happened — and it’s here that the dichotomy powering Black Ops 3 becomes painfully apparent, since the Singapore experience is flatly split into two sets of levels. One set is precisely the sort of fantastic near-future facilities I’d expect a game set in 2070 to have – the Solar Trees powering an enclave at the heart of the Singapore ruins and a wrecked corporate research facility that extended hundreds of metres underground (and under the ocean) were particular standouts. The other set was the same series of concrete boxes filled with waist-high cover that you can find in literally every other shooter in existence. The game continues in this vein throughout, constantly teasing you with the promise of exploring a glittering technological construct which upon further investigation turns out to just be a bunch of concrete and metal inside. Which is kind of a problem, because despite the added spice of the Q abilities the experience of shooting a bunch of guys who are poking their heads out from behind a concrete barricade is exactly the same one that I’ve had in every CoD game since at least Modern Warfare 1, and possibly since long before that.

That thematic incoherence carries through into the plot, which at first looks promisingly like it’s skirting the edge of being a decent-albeit-gritty cyberpunk thriller a la Richard Morgan, but which collapses into nonsense about halfway through the game. There are some great set pieces that really feel like they’re making full use of the setting, like the first bossfight with Diaz. On the other hand there are entire levels that baffled me as to why they were in the game, such as the awful Bastogne WW2 interlude that carries a definite whiff of “Well, we have these assets lying around and it’d be a shame to let them go to waste, so…” Black Ops 3 feels like it’s been stitched together from a variety of different sources that don’t match in the slightest – there’s definitely a fair whack of talent and imagination that’s gone into it, but using your imagination isn’t the same thing as having a good idea, and despite all the technological gewgaws surrounding you the whole premise is still firmly rooted in the idea that the player will want to iron-sights up and clear rooms by slicing the pie over and over and over again. The opportunities that the cybernetic enhancements provide are either treated as an optional bonus that makes your life easier but which are by no means an integral part of the game, or else as an afterthought; as I said I bought Black Ops 3 because I wanted to see what it did with the improved movement mechanics, and the answer is “Absolutely sod all”. I understand it’s better employed in multiplayer, but the single player levels are as conventional as they come and afford little opportunity to use that enhanced movement.

Honestly, it’s a little depressing that for a game where you’re supposed to be a cyborg super-soldier the new mechanics with the most impact on how the game actually plays are the ones that have been added outside of the missions themselves. After every mission you go back to a CIA safehouse that functions as a mission hub/lobby for co-op play and where you can upgrade your abilities and weapons; in 2070 all weapons are DNA-locked to the user (or something) and so you can only use the guns you physically cart into the mission with you. This is basically an excuse to port CoD’s multiplayer progression system into the single player campaign, where killing baddies gives you XP that is used to get fake ranks that grant access to new, shinier weapons. Said weapons can be customised with 10-12 different add-ons like scopes, suppressors etc., except you also have to level the guns up after unlocking them to be able to use the more interesting bolt-ons. Often this only takes one mission because of the absurd number of enemies the game throws at you (a typical misson’s kill count will be somewhere around the 250 mark), but it’s still a little disappointing to be forced to take what is essentially a crap version of the gun first if you want to eventually use the good one – the semi-auto marksman rifle is a great example of this, where it’s an absolutely godlike stealth weapon when you add a scope, a suppressor and a couple of other things, but a) you don’t unlock it until player level 15, which won’t happen until the last quarter of the campaign, and b) you have to use it in its bog-standard iron sights version first. The annoying thing is they actively trail how good this gun is by handing it to you during a stealth segment and get you all excited about using it – and then you realise that you’ll have to wait another 3 hours before you have enough experience points to even unlock it.

When put together all of these loadouts and unlocking mechanics have a single rather unfortunate downside: you only ever use one gun. You can’t pick up more guns from dead baddies, and you’re dissuaded from switching out loadouts by the fact that you’ll have to level the new gun up first. What this meant for me was that I found the gun that provided the best all-around performance — the Dingo LMG — and used that for about half the campaign. As the campaign clocks in at around 8 hours on Veteran, that is a long time to be using a single gun. I did occasionally experiment with other weapons, but as Veteran is a pretty demanding difficulty to play on (this is the installment where CoD has finally realised that simply multiplying enemy HP by a factor of two or three isn’t a great substitute for difficulty, so they’ve instead made the player much more fragile) this was actively handicapping myself and I always went back to the Dingo the next time I saw a magic loadout-changing box.  I really did appreciate the options the weapons customisation gave me, but it’s implemented in such a cack-handed way that it’s only working at a fraction of its true potential.

Other additional points that don’t really fit elsewhere in the review: you can play as a female character for the first time in a CoD game (to my knowledge, anyway) and she’s even fully voiced! So that’s two steps forward for the franchise, but unfortunately it immediately then took one step back when it became apparent that they’d only recorded one set of dialogue for everyone else, and while they’ve clearly tried to avoid using gendered pronouns in the dialogue my protagonist was still referred to as “him” on several occasions. Also, there is a bit where an NPC character goes behind an unbreakable glass wall and immediately dies, which is cutscene design that I thought we’d left behind back in 2009. I guess if I had to sum up Black Ops 3 as compared to the other recent iterations of CoD I’ve played, it hits higher highs than something like Advanced Warfare — when it is firing on all cylinders it does manage to capture the creepy potential inherent in these near-future dystopias like nothing else I’ve played — but it has fewer of them, and thanks to its generally confused nature the lows are commensurately lower. Taken all together it works out to about the same: a very average FPS with some glimmers of promise, but nothing that’s going to halt the series’ slow fall from grace any time soon.

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The post Thoughts: Call of Duty – Black Ops 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Reviewing two Call of Duty games in one year? What is the world coming to?

I see Advanced Warfare as CoD’s sluggish response to a gaming world that’s starting to leave it behind. CoD 4 was an incredible success that moved the series out of its increasingly-tired WW2 setting and set the FPS trend for the next half-decade, and five years ago you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Modern Warfare imitator. Today, though, things look very different. Even this second incarnation of CoD is getting long in the tooth; Modern Warfare-era shooters have become just as overexposed as WW2 was a decade ago, and CoD is facing challengers to its crown (Titanfall in particular) that are innovating in ways CoD simply cannot if it remains resolutely entrenched in the modern world. And these newer games are good enough — and successful enough — that for this shooter with a hundred ripoffs, this FPS that used to dictate the direction of the entire genre, the message is finally becoming clear: adapt or die.

Advanced Warfare is CoD’s first real attempt to adapt. It’s no longer set in the modern world, or even a weird parallel version of the modern world as the misfiring Ghosts was; instead, Advanced Warfare shifts the action half a century into the future, where drones are as common as bullets and every soldier is clad in a strength-enhancing exosuit¹ that gives them increased mobility and a variety special abilities. This in turn gives new series developers Sledgehammer an awful lot of latitude to tinker with the formula, and also to insert a digitised Kevin Spacey into the game as the not-at-all evil head of an international megacorporation with its own private army. Both of these measures provide Advanced Warfare with a much-needed shot in the arm; I dip out of the CoD series on and off, and Advanced Warfare is the best iteration I’ve played since Modern Warfare.

Unfortunately at the end of the day it is, however, still CoD. And in today’s gaming landscape, and with all prejudice put aside, I’m genuinely starting to believe this is something of a problem for the series — no matter how much stuff they bolt onto the top of it, it still feels like the same game they’ve been releasing for the last seven years. Maybe that was the idea; for some people I’m sure this is a distinct plus point, and trying to shift the inertia of a gargantuan franchise in the space of one installment was always going to be tricky in any case. As it stands, though, this attempt to reinvent itself doesn’t go anywhere near far enough.

Let’s get down to what’s actually changed. The single player campaign (because that’s all I buy these games for) sets you as some guy whose name I keep having to look up… Mitchell? That sounds about right. Mitchell kicks off the game by taking part in a Marine assault on North Korea, who have apparently been investing heavily in ziplines and drones in the forty-five years separating this game and the present day — at least judging from the number of drones and ziplining soldiers you blow out of the sky. This opening mission introduces you to some of the more basic changes to the game; you get a double jump from your exosuit, and grenades are now “smart” grenades, which hover for a moment after you throw them and then home in on a target underneath your crosshairs. Which was a nice idea, except this makes them worse than regular grenades because a) they’re no longer travelling on a parabolic arc and you can’t lob them behind cover and b) you have to keep your crosshairs trained on the target for a second in order to get it to go where you want it to, which means you might as well just shoot them instead.

Anyway, at the end of this first mission Mitchell gets crippled in combat, which leads to his being offered a job at the Atlas corporation by Kevin Spacey. Atlas appears to be Serco/G4S² if Serco/G4S were even larger than they currently are and also had a huge and technologically-advanced standing army, which is where Mitchell finds his employment combating an anti-technology terrorist cell called… god, I’m really terrible with names this week. That’s a pretty damning indictment of the plot of Advanced Warfare, really. It is entirely nonsensical and forgettable, and only the sterling efforts of Kevin Spacey and the guy playing Gideon prevent it from being what Ghosts’ plot was: a thinly-veiled excuse for the player character to flit around the world like it’s an over-large theme park visiting all of these heavily scripted experiences the designers have put together.

At least they are good scripted experiences. Possibly this shouldn’t be surprising given that CoD is the master of scripted gameplay, but Sledgehammer take the opportunity to put the player in some pretty interesting locations and situations. Advanced Warfare has you dashing through a Greek town evading fire from a sniper armed with a railgun, creeping through the undergrowth hidden by thermoptic camo, covering a special-ops team with fire from a stealthed-up drone — it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but I will say there is a definite perception difference between dodging regular bullets fired from a sniper rifle and dodging railgun blasts that are punching through solid cover next to you. Most of the exosuit abilities are either highly situational or else rationed so stingily that they have little impact, but occasionally you get thrown something like the grappling gun attachment that fundamentally changes the way you approach the game — the grapple is even used in a pretty respectable stealth level where you infiltrate a villa complex whilst doing your best Scorpion-from-Mortal-Kombat impression by grappling hapless guards into the undergrowth to be murdered. Some of the stealth levels reminded me of the SAS levels from Modern Warfare, which is just about the highest compliment I can pay a CoD title, while the open warfare you sometimes get dumped into is just as impressive; I particularly liked the shootout in Antarctica that turned into what was essentially the Battle of Hoth, complete with enemy walkers. It comes partly from the setting and partly from some well-tuned encounter design, but Advanced Warfare’s high points are pretty damn high – for CoD, anyway.

Even the regular shooting segments have enough quality about them that I didn’t resent them all that much. There’s a slight problem in that all of the guns are now future guns and so don’t have the instant recognisability of an AK-47 — not to mention there being very few guns that do cool future stuff, most of them fire bullets just like today’s guns which is decidedly dull — but the gunplay itself is well-judged and satisfying. There’s also the added pizzazz of a second variety of multifunctional utility grenade, which has different modes you can switch to depending on the situation – EMP for taking out drones, flashbang for flashing and banging, and a threat mode that paints any enemy in the blast radius in see-through-walls vision — and which I found myself using far more than the normal type of grenade. Otherwise it’s the usual business of shooting a bunch of guys with their heads poking out of cover. I have some big issues with the way CoD does this because the enemies are perfectly content to sit where they are taking potshots at you like something out of the Naked Gun, making no attempt to flank or anything, and it’s been like this ever since the series started. Halo nailed pseudo-intelligent baddies all the way back in 2001; hell, Half Life managed to convince the player they were through some simple voice cues in 1998. Sixteen years later I can only assume the passive enemy AI in CoD is a deliberate design choice and that the inescapable feeling that these things are just shooting galleries is intentional. It’s one of the reasons I say Advanced Warfare still feels like a CoD game underneath all the future gumpf, because ultimately you can point to a typical gunfight in Modern Warfare and compare it to a typical gunfight in this game, and threat grenades aside they’ll be like-for-like copies. That’s not a huge problem since Modern Warfare was a fine game, but with the change of setting I was hoping for something more.

As for Kevin Spacey, I’m sure his character also had a name but he’s pretty blatantly been hired for the purposes of hamming things up as villainous Kevin Spacey. I’m always surprised when stunt casting like this works, but he actually seems to be enjoying himself and doesn’t phone in his performance like certain other A-list actors moonlighting in videogames I could mention, while the high-quality CGI sequences bookending each mission allow him to deliver the trademark Spacey Smirk far more effectively than he could in-game. He genuinely adds quite a lot to Advanced Warfare. Unfortunately he lasts a disappointingly short time before lapsing from moral ambiguity into full-on mwa-ha-ha supervillainism, which I felt was something of a waste of his talents. It was also symptomatic of what I shall refer to as the Doctor Who problem, where it’s not possible to have measured, proportionate stakes in our fiction any more; instead we go straight to “Kevin Spacey is trying to conquer the world” and I laugh both him and Advanced Warfare out of the room³.

I can’t close out this review without mentioning Advanced Warfare’s performance issues. Simply put, it’s one of the worst PC ports I’ve played in recent years thank to the way it handles changing the video options. First, it defaults to video options so low that it looks like you’re playing something from the first generation Xbox. Attempt to change them to something more appropriate — I went for High, there’s no other game I’ve run into where I’ve had difficulties running stuff on High — and you’ll discover that no matter how minor the change Advanced Warfare will insist upon reloading the entire damn level. Inexplicably and unforgivably for a game made in 2014 and which is loading from an SSD, this takes three minutes. Three minutes. Three minutes of waiting every time you try to change the graphics options, which for me turned out to be very often since running it on anything higher than Medium turned out to produce framerate stutter that rendered the whole thing unplayable. The weird thing was that this wasn’t an immediate problem; it would only rear its head after 30-odd minutes of gameplay, which is the sort of thing that points to a memory leak somewhere. These are not the production values I expect out of what is still arguably the pre-eminent franchise in videogaming, and for which Activision are asking an eye-watering £40.

I wouldn’t call Advanced Warfare a great game. Thanks to the efforts of Sledgehammer I’d be fairly comfortable calling it a competent one; to their credit Advanced Warfare certainly feels like a fresher, more energetic game that has — for the most part — benefited from all of the future tech that’s been crowbarred into the game. The thing is, though, it’s also still very obviously a Call of Duty title. Despite the conscious attempt to disconnect itself from what had gone before, ultimately Advanced Warfare doesn’t even try to cut that umbilical cord and strike out in a new direction, perhaps out of fear of alienating what has turned out to be an absurdly rabid, if shrinking, fanbase. As a result Advanced Warfare doesn’t have anywhere near the same visceral impact of Modern Warfare or the original CoD; compared to these titles it doesn’t do anywhere near enough to break new ground. Since that was the point in this whole exercise I’d have to call it something of a failure — which is not necessarily a mark of shame for Sledgehammer as reversing CoD’s decline was always going to be a difficult job. Instead, Advanced Warfare acts more as a facelift for the series than it does a trip to the Fountain of Youth; it’s an entry that briefly manages to stave off the more obvious effects of aging, but underneath the surface it’s the same old game. If you really like shooters it might be worth picking up when it goes on sale (or what passes for sale for CoD games, anyway); just don’t expect it to be anything really different, because it’s not. It’s CoD. For some people that’ll be reason enough. For me, not so much.

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