Review: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Call of Duty is a video game staple, thanks to the series’ capability to pull in massive sales year after year. The series has, for better or worse, remained the same since its fourth iteration: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. 

Advanced Warfare promises to change all of that, by offering a campaign with innovative new features and a multiplayer mode that makes full use of the game’s newly added mobility. Sledgehammer Games has taken the reins of the series and deemed that their first entry into the franchise needn’t walk in the footsteps of its predecessors by offering the same old stuff. 

The Campaign

Front and center to the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare experience is its lengthy and surprisingly well written single-player campaign pitting players in the role of a soldier-for-hire named Mitchell. Played and voiced (though not in-game) by Troy Baker, who like many of the other characters in the game has their faces almost perfectly replicated in the game’s cinematic sequences, Mitchell finds himself trapped as a pawn in a war being waged by the Call of Duty series’ best-written villain to date: CEO of the Atlas corporation, Jonathan Irons, who’s played by Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey. Spacey turns in an amazing performance. I was personally worried that he would simply phone it in—but Spacey is present and captivating. The punchy delivery of his well-written monologues wouldn’t sound out of place if spoken by Spacey’s own character in House of Cards. 

If you like him in House of Cards, you’ll love Spacey’s portrayal of Irons. 

The other three main characters, Cormack, Gideon, and Ilona played by Adetokumboh M’Cormack, Gideon Emery, and Angela Gots, respectively, provide equally good dialogue and lend strong, individual portrayals to their characters. I was a bit disappointed not to hear more of Troy Baker’s Jack Mitchell, as the protagonist is only voiced during cutscenes and not during the game proper. I would have enjoyed some quips and side remarks, but thankfully the game always found a way to keep me company with the support of Cormack, Gideon, and Ilona, who serve as the player’s teammates at various points in the story. There’s a distinct “band of brothers” feel to the game in that regard regard, and the four characters, who are inseparable at times, feel like the player’s family.

Like other Call of Duty games, Advanced Warfare’s campaign spans globally and takes players to various corners of the world, which serve as more than simple playgrounds to the player’s destructive tendencies. Set several decades into the future, the environment feels “lived in” and its various set pieces, which includes a particularly memorable prison camp, are well constructed. 

If there’s something to be said about Advanced Warfare’s campaign, it’s the fact that it doesn’t glorify war, focusing instead on its distaste of the subject. Despite being a war game and a first person shooter, the game’s narrative makes no qualms about decrying war indeed for what it is—a bad thing. It’s sort of refreshing given how the previous games in the series celebrated war in a jingoistic fashion. 

And finally, the game provides strong incentive for players to go through the campaign on harder difficulties and search for collectible items in the form of military intel scattered throughout each of the game’s missions through an unlock system that provides not just upgrades to the player’s innate abilities (such as reloading faster and flinching less when shot) but also rewards the player with vanity items for use in the game’s multiplayer mode.

The Multiplayer

The game’s multiplayer mode is arguably the meat of the game, at least to players who buy it explicitly for the purpose of playing with their friends. There’s a host of regular multiplayer playlists including Capture the Flag, Domination, Momentum (a virtual tug of war in which players wrestle over control points), Hardpoint, and a host of other staples from the series. 

While the playlists remain very much the same as previous games, what’s changed in multiplayer is the inclusion of the Exo-suit, which itself has heavy use in the single-player campaign. More than a gimmick, the Exo-suit changes things up by adding a good degree of verticality to the proceedings. Players can boost themselves to higher ground, dash to the left, right, forward, or back in mid-flight and strafe to avoid enemy fire, slam the ground with a devastating attack, or utilize a wide variety of special functions including a cloaking device and the ability to run at almost twice the speed that puts Crysis’ multiplayer to shame. 

The new Exo-suit features give even the most hardened players the incentive to master all new tricks. 

Coupled with rewarding customization options, players are able to dress their characters up (both male and female) with weapons and vanity gear unlocked simply by playing the game. Every so often, players receive Supply Drops that contain gear for players to equip or salvage for experience points. Those who play a lot of the game will undoubtedly find themselves kitted out with really cool items. 

In addition to the regular playlists, the game comes with a cooperative multiplayer mode called Exo Survival that sees players going up against waves of enemies in various formations while completing unique objectives during each wave. Playing enough of the mode even unlocks vanity items to use in regular multiplayer, so there’s that. 

Final Verdict

10 out of 10

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare offers some of the biggest, and most interesting changes to the series since Modern Warfare, and promises hundreds of hours of fun in its fantastic multiplayer mode and gripping single-player campaign that’s the best one in the series to date. Don’t miss it. 

 

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is developed by Sledgehammer Games and published by Activision. The game retails for $59.95. A PS4 copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.