As soon as I fired up Advanced Warfare for the first time, I realised just how bad Ghosts was.
The latest Call of Duty completely blows 2013's away – it's the best the franchise has delivered since the first Modern Warfare and puts it in a great position to maintain its dominance as the biggest first-person shooter brand on the planet.
It's the first Call of Duty to be developed primarily by Sledgehammer Games, and the first to have a three-year development cycle instead of two. That longer period is evident in the sky-high level of polish laid upon the game, which as a gorgeous-looking beast that plays great.
There's also palpable sense of passion in Advanced Warfare. Sledgehammer came to the series as fans first, wanting to emphasise what made Call of Duty great, but also bring some freshness to it and propel it into a new era. They've achieved that.
The biggest change comes in the form of mobility. The boost-dash and double-jump mechanics might sound like a small change, but to fans they are one of the most dramatic changes to basic gameplay this series has ever seen.
It takes some getting used to, being able to glide over all sorts of large objects you used to run around. It gives the game a more omnidirectional feel and opens up an exciting verticality in the maps.
Set in the 2050s, what allows the soldiers of Advanced Warfare to boost about the place is a future-tech exoskeleton suit that gives them superhuman abilities. In addition to the expanded move set, soldiers can use exo features such as cloak (partial invisibility), overclock (extended sprint) and stim (health boost).
The awesome future technology does raise a lot of questions as well. How can the exo-suits allow superhuman strength but not mitigate a firearm's recoil? How can hover tanks fire huge rockets but stay motionless as they do it? How do the laser guns work?
Such questions probably shouldn't be applied to a science-fiction game, but some of the future technology seems quite realistic so the stuff that doesn't sticks out a bit more. It is the most sci-fi Call of Duty yet, but however researched and based on fact it might be, it's a big departure from the historically accurate military realism of the franchise's origins.
While Ghosts ended up being a disappointment, it was still a new-gen Call of Duty game and loyal fans such as myself found ways to enjoy it despite its shortcomings. Playing private matches of Hunted FFA with a few mates and lots of bots was the best.
But that adrenaline-filled, accomplishment-driven buzz that can only come from public match-making Call of Duty is most certainly back with Advanced Warfare. It's terrific.
The maps are generally very well-designed and offer a good mix of ranged and close combat. The new mobility range makes objective-based games in particular more exciting, with some very hectic B flag areas that can be approached from above, as well as through the ground level access points.
The one bit of stupid map design is in perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing, Greenband. It's a beautiful Korean high-rise park filled with little walls that are constantly boost-jumped over, but one section contains a super-frustrating fatal drop. In the frantic battles you inevitably get into, it's all-too-easy to plummet to your death through it, always a disappointing end to a firefight.
The Pick 10 system of Black Ops II is back and expanded into the Pick 12 system, allowing more freedom than ever in choosing how you fight. There's also been some real care put into balancing to try and ensure it's always player skill that is ultimately rewarded.
Quickscoping, a frustrating flaw in several Call of Duty titles that many players exploited to reduce the fun of others, has thankfully been seriously moderated. You can still hip fire a sniper rifle and get a one-hit kill with it, but it happens far less often and is always more the sort of silly fluke you'd imagine it to be, rather than a ludicrously cheap tactic.
There's a nice range of scorestreaks which are, for the first time, customisable. Want your sentry gun to shoot grenades rather than bullets? Can do, for a slightly higher price of course. Want your UAV or care package to have points accrue toward it, even through death like the Support streaks of MW3? Sweet as.
Co-op modes are back in the form of a sort of hybrid of Infinity Ward's Spec Ops and Treyarch's Zombies. Exo Survival is a horde or survival mode in which up to four players get amongst wasting wave after wave of enemies.
You acquire a range of weapons to knock the waves down, which are formed by human enemies for a few stages but zombies later on.
It's jolly good fun but thus far, less than two weeks since the game's release, the competitive multiplayer modes have been way too addictively good for me to spend much time on co-op.
The customisable soldier options introduced in Ghosts are back and expanded upon. Female soldiers are again an option, thankfully, and I hope we never go back to the sausage parties of old.
There are only a handful of pre-set avatars to choose from, each with a set gender, race and features. At first it would've been nice to make it fully customisable, but then, you cover your soldier from head to foot in full rigouts and can't see their features anyway.
It's pretty weird unlocking a nice new pair of shoes or gloves for your soldier and then popping them on, I must say.
There are a few things Ghosts got right that Advanced Warfare gets wrong - melee, for example, is back to being a crappy, way-off animation in the general direction of the enemy to kill them. It's functional as is and suits the game well in terms of balancing, sure, but it looks ugly.
A lot of comparisons have been made to Titanfall. There's elements of the Halo and Crysis franchises that can be seen in Advanced Warfare too, and there's a definite exaltation of mech suits that this Sledgehammer game shares with Titanfall, but it still feels unmistakably like a COD game.
I don't know who is influencing who or if it's just a natural simultaneous progression the whole genre is going through, but the verticality, high-tech gadgetry and so on are a good thing for shooters. There's some advances Titanfall made that I wish Sledgehammer had adopted. Domination has been my favourite game mode for years and I really wish capture assist points, and flag hold points, had of been introduced.
There's a whopping 16 levels of Prestige to unlock after you hit rank 50 for the first time, but it doesn't feel like a slog, mainly thanks to a far greater volume of unlockable items. The new loot system and vast array of wearable items to unlock mean that there's something new to tinker with, implement or trade for XP after almost every match.
The new firing range feature is also a brilliant and very simple addition that lets you test a loadout before taking it into combat. Very nice.
Call of Duty is as crazily successful as it is for a very good reason - it hit on a spot-on formula for multiplayer shooter joy and has iterated on that, successfully and unsuccessfully, for 10 years now. Advanced Warfare takes the best elements of the Black Ops and Modern Warfare releases, adds some originality and delivers a truly exceptional multiplayer experience.
The single-player campaign is pretty great at delivering the high-octane thrills and core shooter action I wanted it to.
It puts you in the role of Jack Mitchell, originally a US marine and later a mercenary for a Blackwater-esque private military company (PMC). Terrorists of the 2050s are up to their old tricks: killing masses of innocents, kidnapping Prime Ministers and so on.
The PMC Mitchell signs up with eventually reveals itself to be a terrorist organisation that he has to help take down, pretty much saving the world. No big whoop.
After the first level, you're put through a training segment. That's right, after the first level, in which you learn all the stuff that the training teaches you again. It's a bit weird and briefly tedious, but it's only for a moment before you're thrust back into the action.
You jump around the globe, waging war at locations across the United States, in Antarctica, Iraq, Thailand, Greece, Bulgaria, Nigeria and South Korea before the game is done. None of them are boring and they're not all that repetitive thanks to the different tech and interesting set-pieces implemented in each.
Of course, some levels are more fun than others and the obligatory on-rails segments and quicktime events will still displease some gamers, but overall it's a hell of a fun six-to-eight hours of gameplay.
Kevin Spacey is fantastic as antagonist Jonathan Irons, even when the character's scripting leaves a little to be desired. The cutscenes are incredibly beautiful, displaying some of the best graphics and animation seen in any game ever.
The single-player campaign gets predictably ridiculous, but towards the end it does so in a few over-the-top ways that are completely unnecessary. Why is the PMC harvesting organs from hundreds if not thousands of human victims, for example? That's just mentioned briefly and never gone into, just to make them even more unspeakably evil.
They were evil enough before the organ-harvesting stuff is casually thrown in, and it was silly enough as is. The story would've been far more interesting had the PMC not become full-blown terrorists intent on wiping out huge masses of the world's population for cloudy reasons, but rather a more believable but still highly immoral corporation motivated purely by greed.
But I'm not playing Call of Duty campaigns for a clever narrative, I'm playing them for amazing action thrills and exciting set-pieces to shoot enemies in. Advanced Warfare delivers that comfortably, despite promising a story more interesting than what it ends up being.
The highly fun single-player campaign combined with the great co-op mode and bot stomp options in private matches, along with the superb multiplayer, it all adds up to a spectacular package.
As a passionate Call of Duty fan, this will keep me happy week upon week for the year to come, easily.
Come November 2015, I'm already excited for how Treyarch is going to top it.
Five stars.
3 News
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
:: Publisher: Activision
:: Developer: Sledgehammer Games
:: Format: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360,
:: Rating: R16
source: newshub archive
