Advanced Warfare has a predictable story, one that 9/11 conspiracy theorists ought to love. A manufactured tragedy gives rise to the iron rule of a weapons company named Atlas, with a Bond-ian bad guy, Irons, in charge. You know Irons is the villain because Kevin Spacey is in the game, and each of his lines before the reveal has all the subtlety of, well, a sledgehammer.
What follows is the usual globetrotting tale you expect in a Call of Duty title. You shoot guys (and robotic drone swarms straight out of The Matrix) in whack-a-mole galleries set in South Korea, Detroit, New Baghdad, and other locations. Respawning enemies and regenerating health (duck behind cover and wait!) are the main nuisances you endure as you follow squad mates, drive through tunnels, follow some more guys, or sit in vehicles and let scenes play out without much input at all.
Despite the polished controls and excellent sound design, the biggest problem with Call of Duty games is the lack of agency and the emphasis on Hollywood-style scripted sequences in which you feel more like a bystander than an active participant. You can't even open doors on your own without your commander giving you the okay. You're just along for the ride, and it's disappointing that Advanced Warfare still keeps your arms and legs inside the glorified tutorial at all times. There is little freedom or choice in this theme park ride of a game.
Advanced Warfare excels when it comes to spectacles of danger and destruction. Stand-out scenes like a crumbling nuclear power plant and swarms of Sentinel-like robots look impressive, and guns and grenades pop satisfyingly. The best visual detail is the lack of a HUD. The only numbers or indicators on-screen appear as holographic displays on whatever gun you have equipped. A very smart touch.
Still, the aesthetic is a bit generic. Interiors lack the lived-in feel that Alien: Isolation$24.99 at Amazon possesses, and cars speed by uninterrupted in set Frogger-like patterns, despite the carnage happening around them. You can idle about and shoot wine bottles from time to time, but I expected more interaction and immersion in a game released long after Half-Life 2 and Metal Gear Solid 2.
The touted facial animation disappoints, too. Kevin Spacey and the other characters look good in screen shots, but in motion, they appear rubbery, especially when they speak or stare at you with emotionless eyes. PlayStation 2 game Final Fantasy XII and, again, Half-Life 2, look more convincing. The further games inch closer towards realism, the deeper we delve into the Uncanny Valley.
Storming the Castle
Call of Duty is all about the multiplayer. If you want to get into some quick deathmatches, capture the flag, or simply level up and unlock new perks and weapons, then Advanced Warfare has you covered. It is brimming with options, guns, abilities, and, sure enough, opponents to frag. The guns feel and sound good, and if you don't like how they fire, you can reduce their recoil and augment them to your liking. Want to add a laser scope? Once you unlock or find it in a loot drop, you can. You can mix and match and arrange everything to suit your own individual play style. It would be cool if the game had better avatar customization, but humans aren't really Call of Duty's thing. It's all about the hardware.
Speaking of hardware, the exo-suit, Advanced Warfare's raison d'etre, adds a welcome layer of mobility and speed previously unseen in a Call of Duty game. The double-jump, activated by double-tapping the X button, feels great, while the quick-dodge sliding maneuver gets you out of harm's way by pressing in the left analog stick up, down, left, or right. Use these moves, however, and you might appear as a blip on an enemy's radar if they have the ability Exo Ping equipped. Other abilities, like Cloak, aren't as useful, and some, like Hover, will outright get you killed mid-air.
Obscene lag will get you killed, too. Because of Activision's choice to go with peer-to-peer networking, you have to rely on other players for hosting games. More often than not, that renders multiplayer a choppy mess, resulting in many unfair deaths. I would pump round after round into an adversary only to have him bump me off with one bullet. Players would teleport all over and I'd die without knowing why. Not very fun. Hopefully dedicated servers go up sooner rather than later, but the AAA "Eh, we'll fix it later" attitude has grown tiresome.
To add more fuel to the fire, those game-breaking killstreaks that allow superior players to insta-kill you with helicopters and unmanned drones make their unwelcome return. It's not fun to go about your business, die, wonder how you died, then find out via a bird's-eye-view killcam.
Same Old Call Of Duty
And that's all Advanced Warfare is concerned with: Keeping the core Call of Duty crowd happy. Which it does very well by barely changing. Why should it? Besides a couple new weapons and abilities, it hardly strays from the mega-successful formula. I doubt the core crowd will enjoy the lack of dedicated servers, though. There's no Share Play available for the PS4 version, either, so adjust expectations if you were hoping to game with friends that way. It's too bad Sony can't secure that feature for every game.
Meanwhile, first-person-shooter fans in need of more complex weaponry, level design, and mechanics may want to replay an old favorite, or at least check out this year's Wolfenstein: The New Order. Also consider Titanfall$59.99 at Dell, a futuristic shooter from ex-Call of Duty developers with a more refined emphasis on speed, verticality, and jumping in and out of giant mechs. That game is closer to what I thought Advanced Warfare would be.
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