Monthly Archives: November 2014

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With Advanced Warfare, Activision is taking the extremely successful Call of Duty mostly to places its already been, which is to say this is a game about war, shooting, explosions and guns. But its also taking a stab at some realistic futurism with the Exo suits your character gets to wear, which augment your ability to navigate your environment and deal damage to your enemies, and weapons that boast some plausibleimprovements over their counterparts of today. And of course, Kevin Spacey is all over the place.

Heres a disclaimer up front: I dont usually spend that much time playing these kinds of games. My interests favor swords, sorcery, giant rolling Katamaris and colourful characters. That said, I also cut my teeth on classics like Medal of Honor for the PC, and the early Tom Clancy Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games. Still, Im coming to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare with only a casual knowledge of the games in the series that precede it.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed Call of Duty: Advanced Warfares single player campaign. It struck a good balance between exposition, basic instruction and making sure you get to the action right away at the beginning, jumping you right in at the start and only then peeling back for the traditional oh heres some training simulation to refine the basics you pick up in the initial live combat opening level.

What surprised me about Advanced Warfare most mightve been how much I enjoyed its story. The plot, while both predictable and shallow, was nonetheless solidly put together, well-told and well-acted by both the animated characters (which look fantastic on the PlayStation 4, by the way) and the voice actors behind them, which include Spacey in a key role thats probably really best described as the lead, given his screen time, Troy Baker as the player character Jack Mitchell, and Gideon Emery as the creatively-named Gideon.

While the story isnt going to blow anyone away, even with its big twist (which you should be able to see coming from basically the opening cutscene) its sort of like any good big budget action movie, in that its a simple story, well-told, with a focus on action and special effects that makes up for the lack of a deep narrative. Again, Im not the most familiar with this series, but as far as action games go, this is one of the better recent entrants from a story perspective.

On the gameplay side, Call Of Duty delivers typically solid first-person shooter action. The fundamentals are all well done, as is the new arsenal of weaponry. Each gun can be found throughout the game outfitted with a number of different sights and scopes, and youll find pretty quickly that youll likely prefer one type over another. Tracking down the right weapon variant for your play style adds to the experience, and I quickly found Id become either frustrated when I couldnt find a weapon with a threat indicator, or feel a wave of relief wash over me when I could.

As for the Exos, the exoskeleton augmentation suits that soldiers wear in Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, they do indeed offer fun gameplay tweaks, including the ability to jump much farther than you can normally in games like this, a hover break for steep descents, grappling hooks for zipping around maps and quietly taking down bad guys, and much more. Each mission has a different loadout, and pretty rigorously guides and limits your use of these new features, but in multiplayer its up to you to determine what powers you carry, and how you use them.

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Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review