Early COD: AW Adopters Praise The Game; You Can Play As A Zombie In MP

In the past few days, more and more COD: AW impressions have been piling up on the Web by gamers who have been able to get their hands on the game already. Pretty much all of them agree that it’s an improvement over the last entry in the franchise, Ghosts, and generally they seem very happy about the work done by Sledgehammer Games; we have listed a few of the most articulated impressions by these early adopters to offer you an early perspective.

Sedroc (Reddit):

I am level 30 on ps4 and have completed the campaign so I do know a little bit about the game now. Honestly, I fucking love it. The campaign had a great story, great cinamatics, great everything. My only gripe is that I wish it was longer because it was a very fun play through. Not a lot of people care about campaign so let’s go to the multiplayer side.
If you liked create a class in bo2, you’re gonna like it in this game. Very similar when it comes to class making. Ranking up isn’t too bad either. It’s not as slow as ghosts was, I found myself at level 22 in about two hours of playing.

Graphics are great on ps4. The game is super clean and its a huge jump in my opinion. The guns look great and so does the characters in the pre game lobby.
Sounds amazing too. Guns sound crisp and clean. Love the sound of the Exo noises. Footsteps are good, blah blah blah
Maps are absolutely amazing. I have played through all of them multiple times between the private match bots and against actual people. Very colorful, fast paced, and just like the three lanes in black ops 2
Guns are also great. I love the sniping, the assault rifles seem to al be balanced, and the subs are very good too. Subs are a little underpowered and you are better off running without one due to all of the movement and long distance someone could put between you with an Exo. very hard to nail someone who is in mid air and boosting with a submachine gun.

Exo suits are so much fun. I have seen a lot of people saying they are hard to get used to, but I completely disagree. It took me maybe one game of Exo survival and then a multiplayer match to get the basics down. The boosting and dashing is great and it feels very smooth. It’s also a very good way to get out of trouble fast and dodge enemies who have the jump on you. All of the maps and objectives sort of play towards you using your suit to get to places. It’s a great change for cod and I’m in love.
Scorestreaks are underpowered in my opinion, maybe I suck but they don’t last that long either! I got a couple streaks and they would be done after seconds. There’s also a very short supply of them! Only like 8! I don’t care cause I’m not too big into scorestreaks so take it however you want it.
I do have some gripes about the game though. The voice chat in game is annoying because it literally pops up in the middle of your screen. It happens regardless if you run the extended UAV perk so maybe it’s a bug that will be fixed soon.

The armory is also very poorly executed. I have unlocked some stuff that I loved, and then found out that everything (as far as I know) expires. I don’t know why that happens, but I think once you earn it, it should stay..
I honestly really love the game. I am a cod fanboy but I really think everyone is going to have a great time with the game. I’m not gonna go over every detail but I just saw some posting about a negative review so I wanted to give mine to ease some people’s nerves.

Alterno69 (Neogaf):

More impressions after playing two campaign levels.
The first level was phenomenal, same level as the reveal, you get to use lots of cool gadgets, jetpacks etc, simply amazing.
Second level is the proper introduction, firing range, more story, meh.

Third level, no jetpacks, back to CoD stuff I find boring.
Someone asked what other CoD it reminds me of in MP, none basically. Other than the shooting and the menus, loadouts and all of the COD staples, it feels really unique thanks to the way you navigate the maps now, I think sprint is unlimited or lasts a lot, jumping and dashing is a lot of fun. The sound is also a big change from classic CoD, sounds more like a Sci-Fi movie than tipical CoD with all the effects for the jumping and futuristic weapons, it’s pretty cool.

I did notice some performance issues in the singleplayer, voices were out of sync during an inter mission, some stutter in the first mission especially, let’s hope it gets patched day one.
I was really excited after the first mission and then I was disappointed when they took away the double jumps and the dash moves :/

Still feels like the best CoD in years. A breath of fresh air, i anticipate 8+ scores all around if not higher.
Good times. IQ is pristine on PS4, really really clean, i love it. This is the first CoD i’ve played that looks new if you know what i mean.

Karak (Neogaf, also a press member):

The games missions are tied to specific suits so there is no flexibility in using the suits in the levels by thinking off the top of your head. Instead its very linear and a fairly big loss to what could have been a very cool difference.
The environment and atmosphere tie in insanely well though and the unique weapons make the game feel like it is truly showing the future. Many games miss that and it feels like they are a fake future with just a neon coating. But the suits, weapons, and what you do in this games levels feel realistically futuristic. Also Spacey’s performance is probably one of the best of a paid actor face I have seen in a game.

The SP game is fun sure, but this COD: AW MP is simply phenomenal and this is from someone who isn’t a big MP fan. I am still drawing up my thoughts on the package though.

Big_AI (Neogaf):

So I’ve spent most of the day on this and have finished the campaign, played some exo survival and some multiplayer. Obviously it’s early days on the multiplayer front but it’s a huuuuuuuuuge improvement over Ghosts, honestly don’t worry about that. The biggest improvement is the multiplayer (I liked Ghosts campaign and loved Extinction), but I enjoyed the campaign a lot more than Ghosts as well. I thought Sledgehammer Games did a pretty damned decent job with the campaign within the COD framework. That sounds like ‘damning with faint praise’ but it really isn’t. They know how to pace the campaign, constantly change things up and give the player variety and even subvert the players expectations as well at times throughout the campaign. It won’t change your mind if you don’t like the COD gameplay but there’s a good number of excellent setpieces which I really enjoyed. Personally I still think Black Ops 2 was a ‘braver’ game in that I admire Treyarch for trying to do a branching story and it’s (admittedly not great) RTS style sections but it’s obvious SG knows how to put together a good, well polished campaign with great setpieces and if I get that from a COD campaign I’m pretty happy.

The big thing of course is the Exosuit and what it brings to the gameplay which is quite a bit, especially campaign wise. I’m really interested to see how the COD faithful handle the verticality. Straight away I was double jumping, boosting, sliding etc (and still not getting many kills in multi ). But I saw a lot of people still running about not doing much of that and you could tell it would be frustrating for them. The TTK seems to be between Ghosts and Black Ops 2. If you’re caught out and the player has bad aim then there’s a chance you can boost out of sight but if they’ve got you firmly in their sights you get nailed. Hopefully people will learn to adapt but there is a classic playlist without Exo movement for those that want it, it does make me wonder how folks would handle that as the maps seem pretty much designed for the exo movement. I’ve only played multiplayer for an hour or two so it’s just far too early to tell until everything is unlocked how much the exosuit can do in multi. I look forward to finding out though, and it’s obvious the Exosuit is adding a pretty new (and cool IMO) dynamic to the battlefield.

I only tried a little bit of Exosuit survival and it seems decent enough. You have three tiers of maps 1, 2 and 3 and you have to complete a number of rounds on each set of tier maps to progress to the next tier set of maps. It’s the mode I spent the least time with.

But of course, you may be even more interested to learn how to unlock the zombie player model you’ve seen above in the featured image. According to Reddit user lookbehindyousir:

Survival mode in COD: AW has 4 tiers, 4 maps in the first 3 tiers, 1 map (Riot) in the last tier. To unlock the 2nd tier, you need to complete 50 rounds overall in the 1st tier, to unlock the 3rd tier, you need 75 rounds overall in 2nd tier, for the 4th and final tier, you need 100 rounds completed in the 3rd tier. You receive 2 pieces of zombie equipment for unlocking the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tier.

To get the final 2 pieces (‘zombie top’ and the zombie player head) you need to reach round 10 on Riot (the 4th tier) at which point a DNA bomb drops, and you then have to fend off a single wave of zombies for about 3 minutes before evacuating and getting shown that cut scene that leaked earlier. There is no ‘zombies mode’ or any extra reward for doing this. These are permanent items.

Judging from these impressions, it looks like COD: AW is an improvement over its predecessor and overall a good FPS; the zombie player model (or, more precisely, items) should prove very popular, too, and I’m positive Sledgehammer Games will release a proper zombie mode via DLC at some point.

For those who are still doubtful, look forward to our full Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review next week.