Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review
Activision‘s golden goose was slowly winding down, or so it seemed when Call of Duty: Ghosts hit last year. Both press and public were disappointed by Infinity Ward‘s latest effort, with serious concerns arising for the future of the franchise; however, Activision had a plan: introducing a third studio in the development rotation, Sledgehammer Games, which would allow each new entry to be in development for three years instead of two before hitting the shelves.
After playing a lot of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare this past week, I can safely say that it was the right choice. While the game doesn’t revolutionize the series at all, a few important additions have been made to the core gameplay and overall, the package is quite polished.
One of the most advertised features of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is undoubtedly the presence of Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey in the campaign mode. Spacey delivers a good performance overall, but that isn’t enough to significantly lift the storyline above previous Call of Duty titles; the rest is par for the course, with a lot of plot twists (not all of them making sense) and fairly shallow character depth on average, though the length (around 6/7 hours) contributes to this particular issue.
It’s an absolutely enjoyable single player experience and a few of the missions stand out more than others, but it doesn’t go anywhere near the quality seen in Metro or Bioshock, for example. It’s just too linear, which is why I wish they had implemented branching missions in a similar (possibly refined) way to Black Ops II. It also isn’t particularly helpful in terms of getting the hang of the gameplay additions brought forth by the ExoSuit, because for some reason Sledgehammer decided to only allow a handful of preset ExoSuit powers for each mission.
The core of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is still the multiplayer mode though, with some players not even bothering with the campaign. The cooperative mode, called ExoSurvival, is a very similar affair to Modern Warfare 3 (on which Sledgehammer worked at the time) in terms of structure and mechanics, although of course the moment to moment gameplay feels different thanks to the movement enhancements; but as expected, the competitive multiplayer is the real gem of the package.
This is where it’s possible to fully appreciate the changes to Advanced Warfare. The biggest one is the ability to boost upwards, which allows players to climb on top of buildings and survey the action from above; it’s also possible to strafe laterally, but this is rarely useful as it’s just a short movement that won’t let you avoid incoming bullets, especially in Hardcore mode. Overall though, the gameplay undoubtedly benefits from the increased movement capabilities, with matches turning into frantic, fast paced affairs that keep you hooked until the last second. There are other Exo abilities, but most of them are either useless (such as Mute Device, since footsteps are basically inaudible) or just retooled versions of perks available in previous Call of Duty titles (Exo Overclock); Exo Hover, Exo Shield and Exo Trophy System are definitely new, but I didn’t find them very useful either, at least for my playstyle.
Prior to release, some had implied that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was merely copying Titanfall, but this gaming experience feels very different from the one made by Respawn Entertainment. That’s in no small part thanks to the great maps designed by Sledgehammer, which have been clearly engineered to take full advantage of the ExoSuit-powered movement; in most cases it’s actually possible to leap from building to building for most of the map, which means that now firefights happen on multiple levels at once.
Another significant difference is that the shooting itself retains that solid, satisfying feeling that has become the trademark of Call of Duty over the years. This is an area where Titanfall fell short, and while guns in Advanced Warfare aren’t quite as powerful as those of Killzone: Shadow Fall, they still pack a lot of punch thanks to good feedback and sounds.
Customizing your soldier has never been this deep. You can choose a series of presets, including some of the characters encountered during the campaign, and then of course there’s the entire Supply Drop system which provides random loot from time to time. Some of it will be cosmetic, such as a new shirt or pants, but there are also variations on the weapons - you may find a more accurate version of a certain gun which however fires at a lower rate than the default version, for example.
The icing on the cake is that you can actually show off your cool drops in the lobby, where anyone can roam between the players to check their characters and loadouts. Pick13 comes back from Black Ops II with three more slots, and it’s a brilliant way to completely customize your character for your preferred playstyle.
There’s one problem that has been plaguing the game in this first week though, and that’s latency spikes when playing multiplayer. There have been a lot of complaints all over the Web and even a petition was started to ask for dedicated servers. While I couldn’t say that my experience has been ruined by lag, there have definitely been instances where the game did not respond as it should have, with bullets not registering and players warping around the place; hopefully this will be fixed through patches.
Technically, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is a noticeable improvement over Ghosts. The image is very clean on PlayStation 4 (which runs at native 1080P) and the lighting is definitely superior to that of its predecessor; overall, the game comes quite close to Killzone: Shadow Fall, arguably the benchmark in the genre on PlayStation 4, although it lacks some of the most sophisticated effects featured in Guerrilla Games’ latest. In the single player mode, the PlayStation 4 version has occasional frame drops, but during multiplayer it’s consistently around 60FPS. If you have a powerful PC, though, you can safely get it there - Sledgehammer reportedly did a great job on this port.