A new Call of Duty game released Sunday night at 9 PM Pacific Standard time.
I will state I have never liked the franchise and vowed never to purchase one again.
However the advertisements intrigued me. It seemed to have a plot, a completely new addition to the Call of Duty series. Even the style of game-play seemed different with new combat techniques.
I will start with the positive aspects of the game. There were few, but they are worth mentioning.
The cinematic graphics are absolutely phenomenal, the best I have ever seen. They looked like real people. Even on my sub-par television it was beautiful and I was blown away.
The plot has great potential. You are not in a government affiliated military or clandestine group. Instead you’re a mercenary for the largest and most technologically advanced army in the world and it’s privately owned.
Some of the gadgets are very creative and cool. There is one device you trigger and it creates a sound dampening field in the immediate area for stealth breaches. Also magnetic gloves and boots for scaling metal surfaces, including vehicles and many more.
One negative thing I noticed right away is the field of vision. It is incredibly narrow. It’s hard to see anything except what is directly in front, or slightly to the side of your gun. When you actually aim you can’t see anything at all but the awkwardly large gun now taking up all of your screen.
The guns themselves are boring. They all have nearly identical recoil, firing rate and clip size. In five hours I only found one machine gun that didn’t have a 30 round clip. The sniper rifles don’t feel like sniper rifles, the machine guns don’t feel like machine guns and the same goes for pistols.
The actual in-game graphics are atrocious and that is putting it nicely.
This is a brand new game on the newest and most advanced consoles on the market (PC not included) and the buildings and ground textures look like you’re playing Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64 from 20 + years ago. Even with my HDMI cable. Previous titles I have purchased look exponentially better and those are months old. The characters you are allied with look great, superb rendering but enemies look like generic dark blobs.
Multi-player introduces a cool mode called Uplink, nicknamed basketball, which is a blast. The rest are standard Call of Duty game modes. My biggest complaint with multi-player is, despite all these nifty gadgets and new, dynamic movement methods the online play is just standard Call of Duty with double jumps. You get “powers” depending on your class but they don’t really do anything all that great and you can go through an entire match and see very few people using them.
The way they presented the game made it seem like the maps would be gigantic, elaborate puzzles that would implement all the new devices in order for you to navigate. That was not the case. Instead I played very narrow, close hallway, two story city blocks in maps smaller than Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 which is five years old.
The character customization was also greatly exaggerated. There is no customization of the actual character. You get five, pre-loaded choices of women from the campaign and a couple dozen men. Neither of which you can alter in the slightest.
The only customization is equipment you get from supply drops. Granted there are probably hundreds of awesome, unique pieces but it’s random what you receive.
The game, in my opinion, is a huge let down in comparison to what was advertised. It is a fine game by Call of Duty standards but unless you are one of the millions of fans of this stagnant franchise, I wouldn’t purchase it for full price.
But obviously that is my opinion and not a popular one based on how many devotees miraculously purchase enough to keep the series going over all these years.
I enjoy first person shooters and am adept at most of them however none of the call of duty games hold my interest. Not my style or preference, what about yours?