The Quill

I loved the original Call of Duty 1. Fell in love with Call of Duty 2. Was mesmerized by Call of Duty Modern Warfare and then lost interest in the rest of the series that were just clones.

So does the latest Call of Duty catch my attention again ? Hell yes ! read more to find out why.

The Call of Duty franchise started out quite well but turned into a stale high budget cash cow after the original Modern Warfare.

Black Ops 1 did try to infuse some new creative blood the mix but totally failed and became another clone in its sequel Black Ops 2 while Modern Warfare 2 & 3 where certified mindless clones of their own and Ghost was pure horrific uninspired shit.

Yes i know i might piss off some gamers for dissing the previous titles but this is how i see it. Call of Duty long lost its charm as a creative new experience and went on a crusade to milk the original expensive cinematic formula to such a point as to end up milking our apathy as well.

This latest game in the franchise is not perfect, but thankfully it is again fresh to experience.

Hopefully Sledgehammer Studios wont fall back to cloning itself in the future like Infinity Ward and TreyArch sadly did.

This time around the setting is set in the near future around 2050 and its very well done. You actually feel impressed by the new things you discover while playing like beefy exosuits, cool hover crafts, walking tanks, drone bots and alot of sci fi personal warfare gadgetry.

The production value for the levels is top notch and well done which impressive stuff happening in levels on epic scales while the game engine visuals are the best in this series yet although that gem comes as the expense of having at least 6gb of ram which is a first.

Storywise it’s nothing fancy with you fighting terrorists again and/or north koreans with a few plot twists and even bigger stupid plot holes. No academy level stuff but it gives you most of the time a good pacing for the touristic carnage as you now play as a mercenary for ATLAS even though the rest of the plot its littered with overused cliche jokes. Oh you just wait til you see the ending if you don’t believe me.

You get to see a realtime CG version of Kevin Spacey in this release as well as he is a main character now. It is mostly well done too, for only few times was i annoyed by the uncanny valley in his eyes.

They littered the loading screens of each level with rendered cinematic which are pretty good quality honestly and give you the only chance you’ll get to get a glimpse at your own guy.

Gameplay wise the weapons handle perfectly well. It retains in this respect this good Call of Duty mastery touch. I was at first doubtful that this critical part will get messed up with all the futuristic weapons i saw earlier in the trailer, but my doubts were put aside after i tried it out.

Haven’t tried it multiplayer yet as i have developed an allergy lately to playing with psycho hyper kids online from the Call of Duty franchise (unless its Battlefield 3 where annoying obsessive nags under massive map destruction relatively drown down, unless they are the fucking level100 jet pilots).

The enemies NPCs in the single player campaign do give you a normal challenge, but my main problem was with my allied NPCs who i preferred if they just died. They are annoying, stupid and useless as hell. Meticulously blocking your path around doorways on indoor levels, repeating the same voice audio clip each 5 seconds to drill your head while fighting and magically not detecting nor shooting at enemies right next to them which during a firefight sucks as you easily can mistake them them all as all factions dress in dull grey.

My biggest problem with the game though is the quick time events.

Whoever thought those were fun in this game needs to get his/her brain checked.

I know the original idea behind introducing them was to increase immersion level, but they don’t work, you never fucking notice them on time while an ingame cinematic is playing and they are stupid as shit. Note to developers, ingame cinematics are a small break time where you drink your fucking Coke not a fucking time to introduce random quick time events.

That said, all in all the game is pretty well done and mostly very good fun.

Its fresh and playable and these are very good points the last Call of Duty clones seem to have forgot.

So if you have the zillion gigabyte of ram required to run this game it might be a good choice buy it on discount since it has been released since a while now.