Review: The Future Is Bright in ‘Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’
You’ll take the fight to the Golden Gate Bridge. (Activision)
It’s Call of Duty season! Listen closely, and you can hear the fist-bumps of a million stoked dudebros.
I kid. Call of Duty is for everyone, though the name certainly comes with some baggage. Perhaps it makes you think of chest-thumping 10-year-olds screaming obscenities into your headset, or demonically proficient pro gamers playing it like a sport, or Activision boss Bobby Kotick laughing maniacally while swimming in a pool of gold like Scrooge McDuck.
But the most popular shooter franchise in the world got there on the strength of its superb gunplay, blazing speed, and consistently high production values, and while it’s got legions of haters, it’s got just as many die-hard fans, too.
What’s remarkable about Advanced Warfare, the 11th core game in the series, is that it might actually please both camps. Sporting a fresh sci-fi setting and armed to the teeth with interesting new abilities, it’s the fastest, smartest, and tightest Call of Duty in years.
The game’s solo campaign whisks players around the globe in the boots of Jack Mitchell, a soldier fighting the good fight on the futuristic battlefields of 2054. Mitchell eventually hooks up with Jonathan Irons (played by Kevin Spacey), the tech-savvy head of a private military company out to corner the market on war. So off you go, shooting up terrorists to preserve freedom, though of course it gets a bit more complicated along the way.
Past Call of Duty games featured multiple playable characters, but here, you play only as Mitchell. It’s a small tweak that helps keep the plot clean and focused. You’ll know exactly why you’re blasting whomever you happen to be blasting, a pleasant change from the meandering plots of past games.
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Much has been made of Spacey’s role, and the Oscar winner delivers a characteristically strong performance as the manipulative CEO. It’s just too bad the writing doesn’t live up to his chops. By and large, this is disposable blockbuster fare; the dialogue is rote, you’ll see every twist coming a mile away, and at times Spacey slides from nuanced power-broker into cheesy James Bond supervillain.
He absolutely looks the part, however, courtesy of some of the finest graphics yet seen from the new generation of consoles. Developer Sledgehammer Games has had three years to craft Advanced Warfare, and it shows. It’s a visual smorgasbord; hordes of soldiers, dragon-like swarms of drones, and countless sparkly effects congeal into a fast, smooth showpiece for the new systems. Spacey’s subtleties shine through thanks to jaw-dropping character models, a testament to the skills of both actor and developer.
Ultimately, the campaign works as a training ground for the game’s new sci-fi gadgetry. You’re wearing a fancy-shmancy exo-suit outfitted with all sorts of superhuman enhancements, from a handy cloaking device to the ability to slow time. You’ll lob grenades that turn enemies into bright red beacons, shut down electronics, or smartly follow your targeting cursor. Game-changing jump jets transform the typical Call of Duty corridors into vertical playgrounds, though mastering the increased mobility takes time.
You won’t have a ton of that in the solo game — it clocks in at around six hours — but what’s there is classic Call of Duty. You’ll shoot bad guys while hopping between moving cars on a freeway, piloting a monstrously powerful hover tank, and slipping on ice beneath a crumbling glacier. An irritating “Follow” marker still hangs over the head of your squadmate, and you’ll encounter at least one particularly galling quick time event. It’s undoubtedly a Call of Duty game, annoying tropes and all.
But gamers who play Call of Duty games solely for the single player are the rarest of unicorns. For most, multiplayer is the real star, and the new gear and tech are front and center in online play.
The classic modes are all accounted for; fans of Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Domination varieties will be right at home. One new mode, Uplink, is sort of Call of Duty basketball, requiring players to grab a satellite drone and lob it into an uplink net for points. It’s a little ridiculous and a lot of fun: a great showpiece for the jump jets.
Multiplayer matches, unfortunately, are still frustrating for more casual players. The matchmaking doesn’t do a great job keeping the lower-level players safe from the pros, and some problematic player spawning leads to the occasional death moments after appearing on a map.
The game does offer a way around uneven matchmaking, however, in the form of the noob-friendly “Combat Readiness Program.” It’s a safe haven from top players, a padded training room filled with bots and newbies and entirely bereft of audio chat. It’s Call of Duty kindergarten, though I’m not sure it adequately prepares you for the butt-kicking you’re going to get when you graduate to the first grade of the real game.
Besides, that’s where the fun is. The more you play, the cooler the stuff you get to play with. Leveling up and unlocking new weapons, items, and Scorestreaks is just as addictive as it’s ever been, though Advanced Warfare also adds fuel to the fire by slyly introducing cosmetic options. You’ll periodically earn “supply drops” filled with clothes, weapons, and boosts, some of them rare. The concept borrows a bit from loot-hunting games like Diablo or Borderlands, and it effectively preys on the gear-junkie part of your brain.
Best of all, a virtual firing range accessible right from the multiplayer lobby gives you a quiet place to try out the wide assortment of guns and attachments. I have no idea why this feature hasn’t been in Call of Duty since the beginning, because it’s great.
I’m also fond of the game’s cooperative Exo-Survival mode, which pits a team of up to four against increasingly aggressive waves of enemies. It’s a stiff challenge that ramps up quickly, and while some might be bummed that the game doesn’t ship with the over-the-top Zombies mode from past games (it’s coming soon, apparently), I don’t really miss it.
There’s a good chance you don’t miss Call of Duty. The series is far past the point of oversaturation. Still, I’ve had more fun playing Advanced Warfare than any recent Call of Duty, in part because it manages to do the unthinkable for a decade-old shooter: It genuinely surprises. And that’s enough to warrant a hearty fist-bump.
What’s Hot: Outstanding delivery; tons of cool gear; jump jets; Kevin Spacey
What’s Not: Weak writing; clings to annoying Call of Duty tropes
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