It begins with North Korea invading Seoul and a grisly decapitation, and climaxes with a ludicrous mechanised turkey shoot that takes place partially underwater, and yet Advanced Warfare’s single-player offering might just be the least memorable Call Of Duty campaign in the series’ solid history. It neither returns to the sour and sobering roots of the original Modern Warfare, nor does it contain anywhere near enough of the blaring cartoon stupidity that has become the franchise’s stock-in-trade. Instead it falls into the disastrous trap of tackling a ridiculous, amped-up scenario with (relatively) crippling earnestness.
With the exception of a couple of sequences that feel both thoughtfully directed and lavish – the Spacey-led tour of Atlas HQ and the lively freeway chase – the gameplay is even more confined and straight-laced than it usually is. Call Of Duty in single player has never been about freedom or experimentation, but the uncharitable yearly catcalls about it being “on-rails” have never rang truer. This is doubly disappointing because the multiplayer side of things hasn’t felt this fresh and punchy since 2010 at least, and the fact that the campaign isn’t utilised as a platform on which to learn the intricacies of the Atlas exo-suits is simply a clueless, trivial blunder.
Kevin Spacey’s recent confession that he signed on to play Atlas honcho Jonathan Irons without first reading a script won’t come as a gigantic surprise to anybody. The character goes from grieving father to cuckoo warmonger in a matter of minutes, and the actor isn’t shy about bringing out the ham when the time comes for his character to move centre stage. The promise of a sophisticated and coercive villain has never crumbled this quickly, and the plot is left to follow the same shouty, lingo-stuffed fire and brimstone schematic as usual. That said, even if this vague attempt at a narrative wasn’t so perilously uninteresting, it is the staunch lack of flexibility in the gameplay that really sabotages the experience.
The decision to name a lead character “Prophet” is surely an intentional nod to Crytek’s revered Crysis, but the chasm between that game’s strategic modus operandi and this one’s is very stark indeed. The soldiers in Advanced Warfare’s vision of 2054 come equipped with all manner of cool toys for players to mess around with, but you’re only allowed to use them within a string of rigid and segregated windows.
Take out a second floor sniper with designs on using your newfangled boost jump to steal his position, and you’re almost always shut out by an invisible wall. Really neat techniques, like being able to hover over gaps or use boosters to break long falls, can be used once or twice before being discarded altogether. You’re taught to destroy drone swarms with your EMP grenades, before almost immediately being presented with a scripted flock that can’t be interacted with.
The grappling hook (pinched wholesale from Just Cause 2) demands that you wait for a very heavy-handed button prompt before you can use it, and if you think that you aren’t going to have to spend at least five in-game minutes crouching behind various pieces of identical cover to avoid various identical enemy patrols, you are dead wrong. You’re essentially led from familiar set-piece to familiar set-piece, at which point you’re asked to hit a single button to perform a superhero manoeuvre or five.
The game’s repetitive nature isn’t even leavened by a blast of the series’ patented brand of tyrannical lunacy, which is pretty unfortunate when you consider that even the dour Call Of Duty: Ghosts rewarded players for enduring five-plus hours of convoluted seriousness with a demented zero gravity set-piece, in which you faced off against AK-47 wielding astronauts 200 miles above the earth’s surface. Nothing in Advanced Warfare is anywhere near that wacky, and the fun factor suffers as a result.
But while the campaign is an exercise in banal box-ticking, and Kevin Spacey’s involvement is even more tokenistic than it initially appeared to be, the multiplayer is anything but those things, and can stand proudly alongside the finest competitive suites to have ever featured in a Call Of Duty game. The exo-suits are unquestionably inspired by kit from both Crysis and Titanfall, but the reality is that even with the brazen, explicit steals (cloaks, quick stims and instantly deployable shields) this is still, ineffably, a Call Of Duty game.
Play is structured around a modified version of Black Ops 2’s excellent ‘Pick 10’ system, except this time you’re given 13 slots instead, allowing you (for example) to duck score streaks altogether and equip six perks. This broader, more flexible system feels haphazard and prone to exploitation at first, but those suspicions dissipate almost entirely after just a couple of hours. This feels rigorously play-tested in ways that past games in the series often haven’t, and while this is destined to be re-balanced and tinkered with pretty incessantly over the coming year – as is always the case with these games – it has been several years since a Call Of Duty debuted feeling as instantly taut and compelling as this.
It also feels uncharacteristically fair. Without the relevant booster perks enabled, almost all of your exo-suit abilities take the best part of a full second to deploy, and then last for (on average) around six seconds or less. This means that in the heat of a frenzied battle, most of your exo-suit tricks need to be pre-emptive rather than reactive, and senselessly bludgeoning your way to victory with a heavy shotgun has never been less easy to do. Sound design is also downright brilliant throughout, with the loud frothing of enemy boosters alerting you to assailants moving around behind you; another aspect that every player will quickly need to adapt to.
Needless to say, the maps have all been cleverly designed to exploit the verticality of the new combat system, and it’s no surprise to note that the very best levels feel as if they have been torn straight from Titanfall. Retreat is a green mountainside resort in China’s Guilin City that offers innumerable flip-points (via elements like destructible walkway panelling) between the three different plains, while Horizon offers up a very traditional-looking drone facility in the Icelandic highlands, which is embellished no end by the generous supply of sneaky open windows.
If Advanced Warfare’s multiplayer has one single overriding ace up its sleeve – and it does – it comes in the form of Uplink mode. An utterly hilarious (and ingenious) blast of blood-soaked basketball – with a drop of Halo’s Oddball thrown in – it’s one of the few Call Of Duty game types that absolutely demands teamwork and relentless communication. COD’s resident loan wolves are likely to lose interest in it quickly; everyone else might find it hard to play anything else.
What’s most surprising about Advanced Warfare is that the fundamentals of the multiplayer, the aspects that most people would expect to remain permanently unchanged, are where the real innovations have taken place this year. Call Of Duty is a lucrative sport as well as a dumbass solitary action game, and yet single player is where the staff at Sledgehammer Games (along with their cohorts at Raven Software) appear to be at their most circumspect and anxious.
For many, this is going to be nothing less than a classic Call Of Duty game; a robust and imaginative multiplayer spread bolstered by elements which are almost custom-built to be ignored. If you play Call Of Duty online all year round then Christmas has officially come early. But if you’re a sucker for the ludicrous, globe-trotting, re-skinned James Bond adventures that constitute these games in single player, you’ve picked the perfect year in which to take a twelve-month break.
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