Cod Advanced Warfare Single Player

[Ahmend Studioz]

Everyyear, I play the latest Call of Duty installment in the hope of recapturing the thrill that I felt playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the first time back in 2007. Every year, I come away disappointed.

Maybe it's because I've simply put the original Modern Warfare on an undeserved, nostalgia-tinged pedestal in my mind. Maybe it's because Modern Warfare just happened to be the right game at the right time, ushering in something that managed to feel fresh and new after so many World War II games. Maybe it's simply because I've changed and Call of Duty hasn't. Whatever the reason, that same magic is just never there.

The increasing complexity of the Call of Duty games has led Activision to take a three-pronged approach, with three studios (Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer) developing three arcs in parallel. Treyarch will likely continue its Black Ops line, and one assumes that Infinity Ward will continue its mediocre Ghosts series. Sledgehammer, which contributed to Modern Warfare 3, is taking its first stab at a standalone Call of Duty game with Advanced Warfare.

Covering about six years from 2054 to 2060, Advanced Warfare ditches the near-future setting of Modern Warfare in favor of something a little more exotic. The biggest novelty this future setting brings is exoskeletons (or "exos" as the game insists on calling them) that make the soldiers all a little more potent.

The idea behind the exo suit functions is neat enough. In addition to a handy jet-pack double jump/slow descent function and a quick dodge, each level features three exo abilities that just happen to miraculously be the three abilities that make the most sense on that level. Some of these are offensive abilities, such as a sort of sonic boom that temporarily incapacitates nearby enemies. Others are defensive, such as a protective shield that you can pop out to take cover behind.

Unfortunately, with one exception, I never really felt that these capabilities were of much use. Some, like the shield, I only activated accidentally; I just didn't need them. The same was true of a kind of "bullet-time" mode, which made the world go in slow motion to rattle off a bunch of precision shots. I never ended up using it; there was no point in my playthrough when I felt that bullet-time would have made a section easier.

Most of the other exosuit features were like Chekhov's gun, put in place purely to be used by the end of the act. The features would always end up being useful to solve some specific, contrived circumstance during the level. Outside of that, I never found a situation where, for instance, I said, "damn, if only we had magnetic hands, this would be easy!" Instead, the magnetic hands were simply another "press your use key here to do this scripted action," just like the zip lines, placed explosives, door breaches, and so much else we've seen in Call of Duty.

A lot of the time, even double jumping felt perfunctory. Sure, there were one or two parts of the campaign where double jumping afforded meaningful variety in the possible paths to take through the level. But the vast majority of the game was much less open. Instead, I mainly double jumped from time to time because the game forced me to go a certain route that needed a double jump. In previous games, the same effect would be achieved by pressing a special button to give a leg-up or to climb a rope or something.

But one exo attachment stood out above the others: the grappling hook. This addition served a dual purpose, letting me leap from platform to platform, zip up buildings, or dart onto overpasses. It also let me pull off silent stealth kills, as in one legitimate stealth level, where I crept about in the undergrowth, with a detection-meter to warn of being spotted, and used the grappling hook to grab guards, drag them into the bushes, and silently kill them.

The exo isn't the only additional complication that Advanced Warfare introduces. The grenade system is a lot more complex this time around. Both the normal and tactical grenades are magical, multimodal things, each with three different functions. The offensive grenades switch between a regular timed fuse, a contact fuse, and a "smart grenade" that homes in on targets. Tactical grenades offer a flashbang, an EMP that disables heavily armored Iron Man-like AST suits and flying drones, and a futuristic grenade that "paints" enemies within an area of effect, allowing you to see their position even behind walls or through cover.

My feelings toward these were much the same as my feelings toward the exo features. The only tactical grenades I wanted were EMPs, especially as the game progressed and the ASTs became more frequent. Offensively? I wanted frags. As a consequence, the new grenade system just got in my way, especially when I defaulted back to the smart grenade in each level. This led to me throwing a number of accidental smart grenades and watching them fly around the room, going nowhere near where I wanted instead of flying in a nice predictable parabolic arc toward their targets.

On top of this, the method of switching between grenade types felt awkward: hold down the grenade button, then tap a second button to cycle through the three types, then release to throw the grenade. I often wanted to be able to prepare the grenade type before going into a fight, but there's no way to cycle without throwing the thing.

The more traditional Call of Duty cover-based shooter elements were mostly there, and they were more successful. The gunplay and movement feel good, with fluent moves and precise aiming. Short, controlled bursts and aiming down the sights are still the name of the game, only now there's a fun, futuristic, target-painting sight that makes enemy troops show up bright red when looking down the barrel of the gun. It makes picking out and mowing down hostiles a breeze. The guns themselves are a mix of assault rifles, submachine guns, pistols, and sniper rifles, and there are a handful of futuristic elements thrown in, too, such as a continuously firing laser gun and a railgun sniper rifle. The game's viewpoint sticks with a single named character for the entire campaign this time rather than hopping between a number of soldiers, but I'm not even sure if this is a bad thing.

As a neat and actually immersion enhancing nod to the future, the traditional heads up display is also gone. Instead, ammo counters and similar are all depicted as holographic projections around the gun. As the gun moves, so do the counters. It's a nice touch.

This is the best-looking Call of Duty to date, and the first Call of Duty for a long time that makes me want to upgrade my video card. My Radeon HD 6850 isn't remotely cutting edge, but has been a good match for the not-remotely-cutting-edge engines in past titles in the series. Call of Duty still isn't Battlefield-pretty, but Advanced Warfare looks good. Level load times were brutal, though.

As with any Call of Duty game, aggression is greatly rewarded. Sitting back behind cover and trying to pick off visible enemies before pushing forward is a good way to stay in the same place forever. Pushing hard, taking some damage, and then ducking out of the way for a few seconds to recover is the way to blast through the game.

Traditionally, Call of Duty squadmates do a good job of cleaning up any stragglers to ensure that players don't get shot in the back. That wasn't, however, my experience with Advanced Warfare. My squad was essentially worthless, and on a number of occasions I ended up having to backtrack to finish off some enemy who thought that shooting me in the back was a brave move. Enemy AI is similarly worthless. At one point one of the NPCs on my squad told me to watch out for drones; it took a moment before I realized that they were talking about little flying things rather than making a value judgement about the programming of enemy soldiers.

The usual mix of vehicles is well represented in the game. Instead of an AC-130 gunship shelling from afar, your eye in the sky is a drone with a rifle that you use to pick off guards to keep the ground team safe. I wish the drone mission had been longer because it was a good change of pace. The obligatory tank mission used some kind of futuristic walking hover tank, adept at taking on troops, helicopters, and of course, other tanks.

I also enjoyed being able to don one of the heavily armored and heavily armed AST Iron Man suits, laying waste to any enemy that got in my way. A flying mission, in which I controlled a plane using the same directional keys used for walking around, was much less successful, with clumsy and ineffective controls. The only good thing that can be said of this is that it was blessedly short.

After taking a year off in 2018, Call of Duty\u2019s single-player campaign has come roaring back in the revival of the Modern Warfare name. For my money, this is the best campaign the series has seen since 2010\u2019s Black Ops; and if that sounds like a backhanded compliment, I don\u2019t mean it as one. Though it stops short of being as provocative and button-pushing as it seemed poised to be, it is nevertheless an extremely well-designed first-person shooter that refreshes the franchise format just enough with a few cool new ideas and some smart new takes on others we haven\u2019t seen in years.

The plot of Modern Warfare\u2019s rebooted storyline starts out trying to blur the lines between good and bad, but it ends up quickly establishing the good guys as very clearly good. The US team is led by memorably mustachioed fan-favorite Captain John Price, while the sister and brother duo of Farah and Hamir head up an insurgency movement fighting to push Russian forces out of their fictional home country of Urzikstan. That\u2019s right: it\u2019s cool to shoot at Russia again.

That\u2019s not to say that uncomfortable, morally gray things don\u2019t happen in this campaign; they do, and sometimes those events are directly in your control. Unarmed women die. Children are shot. Civilians can catch bullets. Suicide bombers are a threat. But even in Modern Warfare\u2019s biggest moment \u2013 a showdown with a generically named enemy lieutenant called The Butcher \u2013 Infinity Ward wanders near the moral line but never actually steps up to or over it. That\u2019s disappointing, because I\u2019d really hoped this story would really have something meaningful to say about the soul-affecting nature of war in a time when the United States has been involved in so many conflicts for so long.\n

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