Kris Wall reviews Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare…
I reload the clip on my assault rifle. Spotting three members of the opposing team high up on a ledge, I dispense with conventional routes and use my exo suit to boost jump on to a bus and then on to a roof above where I get the drop on all three of them simultaneously. I leap over a barrier and crash down on another rival, crushing him under foot. I toss a smart grenade which takes out another rival that has managed to flank me with me barely glancing a look. A burst of rival gunfire catches me off guard so I use the boost on my suit to dodge right quickly and punch him so hard he flies across the battlefield. Hurtling around a corner I take out another two rivals without blinking, constantly moving, always trying to think two or three moves ahead. I spot an enemy up high, switching to my scoped rail gun, I take him down without him knowing I was there. I call in one of my killstreaks, more rivals fall before me. I deflect a volley of gunfire by quickly deploying the exo shield mounted inside my wrist armour. I feel untouchable, invincible even, I leap through a window two floors above, crashing through a window and come face to face with a small squad who have the drop on me, I’m dead and I know it yet I don’t care, I’m having my Butch and Sundance moment and I’m taking as many of them with me as I can. I go down in a blaze of glory. 30 seconds of absolutely glorious unscripted action of my own design in a match that is full of these little moments that are just mine. I’m thrown out to the respawn screen where I’m given 5 seconds to briefly catch my breath, double check and realise that I’m playing a Call of Duty game, a series I haven’t truly enjoyed for many years and have become quite a big detractor of, yet here I am absolutely loving it. 5 seconds are up, I’m charging back into the fray with a new game plan. Welcome to the future, this is Advanced Warfare.
Let’s rewind the clock twelve months. Hi, my name is Kris and I am an addict. I first came into contact with Call of Duty back in 2007 and it ruined everything. Days, weeks and months lost to chasing that next level up, that next weapon, that next perk. That exhilaration of learning a map and the rush of dominating a match. Then it happened again in 2009 with Modern Warfare 2, only this time it was much worse, any concept of time went out the window, days and nights blurred into one, my social life crumbled into ashes, the levels, the weapons, the perks, the killstreaks, it was all consuming and I was hooked, looking bad I didn’t realize how bad. Every Call of Duty since has felt like a pale imitation of those first two highs, and I bought into each and everyone, eventually becoming sicker and more jaded at being force fed the same thing over and over again, the idea that bigger obviously meant better but I’d grown tired and bored, yet still I continued to play each one in the hope that it would return to glory, even as my vocal derision grew louder with each installment.
Black Ops 2 went a small way to restoring the franchise but any hopes were ruined when Ghosts arrived, the franchise had hit its low point and scraping bottom I was finally done, I was getting out, I was getting clean and putting Call of Duty behind me. If you had asked me to review a Call of Duty game after Ghosts, I would have laughed and sooner given away my hands than play another round or write another word about it. I’ve been clean for 12 months, not a single level up, perk or killstreak has been employed. I hadn’t even thought about it for a year. Being a huge sci-fi fan, I even ignored Sledgehammer’s pretty cool reveal trailer for Advanced Warfare showing its shift to the future and a scowling Kevin Spacey ruling over all, it looked like war imagined by the mind of Neill Blomkamp and therefore relevant to my interests. Damn you, Sledgehammer Games, you’ve got me hooked like it’s 2007 all over again.
In Advanced Warfare, you play Private Jack Mitchell, a soldier in the U.S Marines who is deployed into Seoul to assist South Korea in repelling the North after they invade. Naturally, as these things go, the mission ends in catastrophic failure and tragedy, your best friend makes the ultimate sacrifice while Mitchell loses his arm, ending his career in the marines. Enter Jonathan Irons, CEO of Atlas Corporation, the biggest private military organization in the world, their technological advancements on the battlefield are cutting edge and unsurpassed, their grip and control over war seemingly unprecedented. Irons offers Mitchell a place in Atlas, a nifty new cybernetic arm, the chance to serve in the most powerful army in the world. What could possibly go wrong?
The game goes through familiar Call of Duty motions, the camaraderie between your brothers (and sister) in arms, an experimental warfare McGuffin dubbed ‘Manticore’, the ever escalating epic set pieces, the heavily scripted moments, and all the twists, turns and betrayals that you’ve come to expect from the series. At the centre of it all is another fantastic performance by Kevin Spacey, absolutely devouring the scenery and everything else in his path, going complete Bond villain and it’s great fun to watch. Spacey can play Frank Underwood in his sleep now and here we’re given a glimpse of what Frank Underwood would have become if he had joined the military instead of the White House. The game suffers just one slight mis-step, forcing the player to press a button to pay their respects at a funeral, which raised more of a yawn than anything approaching emotional attachment, each game in the franchise has had one of these awkward moments that stands out from the rest of the game and with Sledgehammer moving every other aspect of the game forwards, it would have been nice to leave these little moments in the past where there belong. The campaign is still cheesy as all hell and despite the game signposting its biggest twist pretty early on, you’ll be too busy having fun to even care, it’s almost impossible not to be swept up in the escalating chaos of the story.
Single player campaigns in Call of Duty games have always suffered for feeling like an afterthought to the multiplayers main focus, a linear corridor shooter linking each ever escalating and crazy set piece to the next, and by and large, Advanced Warfare follows pretty much the same template. However, Sledgehammer have been smart enough not to give you the power of the exo suit and then contain it within levels that can’t and won’t let you utilize it. Levels have an element of verticality to them now that allows you to use the suit to outmaneuver your enemy in a variety of ways that will leave you feeling like an awesome super soldier of the future. The campaigns usually don’t stand up to anything more than a single playthrough so it’s great that Sledgehammer have put more thought into their single player campaign. It’s still a heavily scripted affair but the inclusion of the exo suit really opens up the majority Call of Duty’s campaign to repeated plays and different approaches each time.
At the heart of Advanced Warfare is the exo suit which underpins the mechanics of Advanced Warfare. ‘Power Changes Everything’ is Advanced Warfare’s motto and it’s an idea that permeates every part of the game, everything is geared towards making you feel a super soldier with abilities far beyond that of a mere man.. Depending on the loadout of the suit, it’s fitted with boosters for jumping incredibly high and quickly dodging/dashing out of harms way while stealthier play is afforded with a predator style camouflage cloak and a grappling hook that lets you zip silently around vantage points to get the drop on your enemy. In a series that is famed for its scripted moments, it’s great that using the exo suit will allow you to create these exciting moments for yourself. A firefight in Baghdad had me under attack from a gunship hovering around the battlefield. Spotting a monorail beneath it, I used my grapple hook to get below it and then grapple up to the side, yanking out the gunner, punching its passenger straight out the other side, shooting out the pilot and then leaping to the ground, crushing enemies troops below me as the gunship exploded above in a firestorm of steel. Obviously I felt pretty great after that.
The game certainly can’t be criticized for lacking in variety, after the initial opening battle in South Korea, you’ll be tracking terrorists through Greece, battling through cataclysmic events in Detroit, flying alongside and then lasering the wings off a plane and then fighting over, under and through a glacier to retrieve its cargo once it crashes, a frantic car chase and desperate gun fight across the Golden Gate Bridge and an absolutely superb stealth level which has you prowling rooftops at a fancy villa with your grappling hook, seeking out vantage points and hauling unsuspecting enemies to their deaths. Every level is a new and glorious assault on the senses and while the end could possibly be seen as anti-climactic, it’s only because that everything has come before it has been so epic that anything short of blowing up the sun would have felt underwhelming.
Multiplayer, while not radically different from previous iterations, is given a sufficiently fresh, interesting and exciting perspective with the inclusion of the exo suit allowing for radically different tactical approaches, offering up exciting offensive and defensive capabilities. The suits boosters have a slight cooldown period on them which means that you can’t dash or jump indefinitely, they have to be employed tactically for them to really have any use other than setting you up to be shot out of the air pretty quickly and it really pays to learn the nuances of how the suit works to really get the best out of the multiplayer. Black Ops 2’s ‘Pick 10’ has been expanded to a ‘Pick 13’ whereby players can pick an assortment of 13 weapons/items/killstreaks that suit their play style. Sledgehammer opening up to a ‘Pick 13’ essentially offers ultimate freedom to tailor your online experience the way you want it to be, don’t feel strong enough to get the best out of killstreaks, give them up for an extra weapon and some perks that give you an immediate advantage on the battlefield. You’ve been given the tools to play how you want, it’s entirely up to you how you use them. All your favourite game modes return from classic Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed and Capture The Flag alongside returning mode Hardpoint which was last seen in Black Ops 2 along with Uplink Mode which is all new to Advanced Warfare’s roster of game types where two teams fight for control of a ball, like a modern version of Speedball.
New to Advanced Warfare as well is the supply drops the games awards you as you level up which rewards the player with random items for use in game, they can also be traded back in for experience to level up faster which I’ve found myself doing more often than keeping them the items. Levels have been crafted with the verticality of the suit in mind and it won’t be uncommon to see the skies full of players bounding around trying to find the best vantage point or the best route to escape and catch a breather. It’s also nice that levels have been designed specifically with multiplayer in mind, where previous Call of Duty’s used segments of main missions, Advanced Warfare is mostly crafted from original designs. Unfortunately I found that classic CoD problems like ‘quickscoping’ and camping are still rife in Advanced Warfare but this is more a player fault than Sledgehammer’s design. For Co-op players, there is the exo survival mode which works like horde mode where 4 players are assaulted by ever increasing and tougher waves of enemies and tasked with…….well surviving. The reveal of a zombies mode has also been teased for release in the near future so there’s more than plenty for you to be getting stuck into with Advanced Warfare.
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare looks absolutely fantastic, Sledgehammer have really honed the power of next gen tech in their visuals. Characters models, especially those of actors Kevin Spacey and Troy Baker are near lifelike in a way that only The Last of Us has managed so far, facial animation has now gotten to the point where the line between games and films have really started to blur. Sledgehammer have crafted some great locales for your travels as well with Santorini looking as gorgeously picturesque as you would expect Greece to look while Baghdad is re-imagined as New Baghdad, a gleaming metropolis of steel and glass in the middle of a desert while a post apocalyptic Detroit is a haunted nightmare of desolate concrete and flood streets. Right down to the minor intricate detailing on weapons and the individual moving parts of the exo suit and the particle effects it uses in its blockbuster moments, Advanced Warfare is currently the most impressive looking game available and as an example of really showing what next gen technology is capable of, it’s up there with The Last of Us as an absolute powerhouse of technical brilliance.
Every now and again, a game along that truly surprises you with its brilliance, or completely proves your doubts wrong, never did I expect it to be a Call of Duty game, especially after the franchise low of Ghosts. I was all ready to award Shadow of Mordor with my big surprise of 2014 but without doubt that accolade must go to Advanced Warfare. As a new entry in the franchise at large, as part of maybe its own mini series within the franchise, Sledgehammer have created a staggeringly confident and assured debut in the franchise, it’s creative, empowering and endlessly exciting and has raised the bar for Infinity Ward’s and Treyarch’s next ventures to stratospherically high proportions. While it’s not the radical game changer that Modern Warfare was back in 2007 and my criticisms about Call of Duty’s apparently ‘passionate’ (read : verbally abusive) online community still remain justified, the exo suit and the sci-fi future setting offers up a sufficiently fresh experience, marking exciting and inventive new possibilities in the series and making Advanced Warfare the best entry in the series since Modern Warfare 2. If you’re a die hard Call of Duty fan, go ahead and give this a full 10 as you’ll most likely be already on your way to completing Veteran mode or deep into your 4th or 5th prestige online without a single care what any review might tell you but if you, like me, have been suffering with Call of Duty ‘fatigue’ for the past few years, this should be one that pulls you back in and I for one can’t wait to see where Sledgehammer goes with this series next, with their first entry effectively granting them the keys to kingdom, they captured my attention with their setting and ideas but now they have my undivided curiosity. Take it from someone who has been quite a vocal detractor of the franchise since Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare is absolutely stellar and is among the best of 2014. Welcome back to the frontline.
Pros:
The best Call of Duty since Modern Warfare 2
The exo suit is great fun and a smart addition
Endlessly inventive and empowering
Story campaign is interesting and exciting
Multiplayer feels great with the inclusion of the exo suit
Strong performances by Kevin Spacey and Troy Baker
Cons :
Single player is over too soon
A few online stability issues (Should be patched pretty quickly)
‘Quicksoping’ and camping are still rife in multiplayer (More a player fault than a game fault)
The online community for Call of Duty still aren’t the nicest or most welcoming of people
Rating: 9/10
Kris Wall – Follow me on Twitter
