REVIEW

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Review (PS4)

by Ford James, November 28th, 2016

Ever since the original Infinity Ward team split up to form Respawn Entertainment, the remaining studio was just a shell of its former self. Innovation was a thing of the past, with Modern Warfare 3 arguably being the series worst entry to date, while Infinity Ward’s next attempt, Ghosts, was considered a step backwards after the progression Treyarch made with Black Ops II. Recent instalments to the Call of Duty franchise have been set in the future, with a new movement mechanic resembling that of Halo and much faster paced gameplay. Infinite Warfare has taken this one step further, setting most of the campaign and many of the multiplayer maps in space.

Call of Duty campaigns are infamous for being excruciatingly boring and one dimensional, albeit with a lot of high octane explosions and fast paced action. Infinite Warfare is no different, but this time the single player feels like more time was spent crafting the world and the characters, rather than just being a second thought tacked on to the multiplayer mode.

You’re Nick Reyes: A high ranking official in the United Nations Space Alliance (UNSA) who soon becomes the captain of the SATO Retribution, a space warfare carrier. This promotion gives you some pseudo-freedom, in that you can walk from the captain’s office, through the bridge where your team are surrounding a holographic map, to a lounge area with marines relaxing and watching news briefings of the missions you’ve just completed. Interacting with the map on the bridge allows you to choose which mission you tackle next, with a few different missions available to you.

This is where most of the length of the campaign lies. Optional missions that fall under one of two categories; either you’ll be on foot, infiltrating an enemy space fleet or base, or you’ll be in your Jackal; a high-speed space fighter jet. While floating through space, rappelling onto asteroids and shooting enemies whilst upside down is pretty cool, it’s still the same old Call of Duty shooting we’ve seen for the past two games. They claim to have energy weapons, but they behave no differently to standard guns other than shooting lasers instead of bullets.

The Jackal missions are even more basic, with most objectives being to simply take out the grunt enemies flying about, before tackling the ‘Aces’; exceptionally talented pilots in the Settlement Defence Force (SDF), the main enemy in the game. Each optional mission is focused on a few ‘most wanted’ targets, which you must eliminate to complete the mission. Afterwards, you can track the status of each of your targets on a wall aboard the Retribution but it’s essentially useless, as all it tells you is the name of the targets you have and haven’t killed, with a mugshot of those you have eliminated. It serves no real purpose than to give the player the appearance of choice and to slightly add to the immersion.

Where the Infinite Warfare campaign shines is purely with the character development. Despite the story spanning over just a couple of days, you start off in the shoes of this typical army macho man but after just a few missions Nick Reyes becomes one of the most memorable Call of Duty protagonists ever, perhaps second to only Soap MacTavish. Ethan, your selfless robot pal from the beginning creates a charming dynamic between the two of you. He’s like a talking, flawlessly obedient metal dog – the epitome of a man’s best friend.

On the contrary, despite being marketed as having big name faces in the game such as Kit Harington and Conor McGregor, only the former plays anyone of note and he’s painfully boring. The complete opposite of the protagonist, Salen Kotch is as cliché an enemy as they come. He is willing to kill millions of civilians just to destroy the UNSA and nearly all the interaction you have with him is via video calls he broadcasts to the Retribution, where he seems more unbelievable and ludicrous than malicious.

This year, Infinite Warfare could be replaced with Star Wars and everybody would be none the wiser. The space combat looks fun as hell, but when playing the game heavily punishes you for trying to do anything cool. Even in the missions where you’re floating through space, you’re encouraged to stick to surfaces and peek out from behind cover, rather than using the lack of gravity to your advantage. You have a lot of tools and equipment, but they’re all along the same vein; you can hack and control an enemy robot from behind cover, or deploy a drone that will shoot at the targets you aim at. They all look cool, but they’re dull to use.

I think if they took the plot of Infinite Warfare, made some minor tweaks and turned it into a movie, it’d perform far better than it has as a video game. Without spoiling it, I had waterworks flowing by the end of the campaign, simply due to how well Reyes, Ethan, Salter, Kashima and the rest of the main cast were developed and portrayed. I didn’t find the campaign particularly enjoyable and I have no reason to replay it, especially since there aren’t any collectibles to find, but I was emotionally invested. There’s a lot of padding to make a four hour story a 10 hour experience, but if you’re looking for a story about heroics and sacrifice, then Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare delivers exactly that.

Campaign: 7/10

Multiplayer this year is astonishingly bad. It’s pretty much a carbon copy of Black Ops III, but nothing is quite as refined or polished. Every single weapon can be found under a different name in a previous Call of Duty, most of the maps are indistinguishable from one another to new players due to similar settings, colour palettes and layouts, and the specialist system has carried over, this time called payloads. Planetary bases and space stations make up most of the multiplayer maps, which limits the variance in environments considerably. Payloads now have a passive ability along with the ultimate that needs to be charged to 100%, but it doesn’t change the flow of the game whatsoever.

There’s a severe lack of recoil on nearly all of the weapons, which means the skill ceiling is even lower than it’s been before. To their credit, the time to kill feels slightly higher than recent instalments, but the increased accuracy of the weapons means there’s still next to no chance of turning around and killing someone who’s missed their shots in your back.

Infinity Ward have also taken the utterly dreadful Black Market mechanic from Black Ops III and taken it one step further with the Quartermaster. Previously, guns available through microtransactions were either cosmetic only, or weren’t outright better than any of the other guns in the game. This time however, it’s possible to unlock upgrades to the base guns in the game that have outright stat boosts. This is unforgiveable. It’s a triple A game, that promotes gambling for better weapons to give players an edge online. It’s a practice that makes each Call of Duty iteration less appealing and it’s the primary reason I won’t be returning to Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer again.

Multiplayer: 3/10

Zombies makes its way into an Infinity Ward Call of Duty for the first time, and they haven’t strayed too far from the familiar at all. They’ve taken a leaf out of Treyarch’s book with a whole bunch of Easter eggs and collectibles to find, while keeping the core mechanic exactly the same. There’s four brand new characters in Andre, Poindexter, Sally, and AJ roaming around Spaceland Theme Park in the 1980’s, and each of them fills a funny stereotype. The map is colourful, there’s a lot of different areas to explore, including an innovative rollercoaster you can ride which has targets you can shoot to win tickets, that you can then spend on different items dotted around the park. There’s next to no criticisms to make for the Zombies mode other than for new players, the amount of stuff to collect and find can be rather daunting.

Zombies: 8/10

Infinity Ward have taken a bold step by basing nearly all of the game in space, but it hasn’t really paid off. Players were starting to get tired of the Black Ops III multiplayer, so poorly emulating it hasn’t done them any favours. It needed something new and fresh to keep the game interesting, but instead it’s just the same old thing we’ve seen for three games now, as Advanced Warfare isn’t too different either. The campaign is worth playing through but not for full price, so wait until it gets to £20 or lower to go for that and Zombies. At the end of the day, in a world where Titanfall 2 exists, there is absolutely no reason to buy Infinite Warfare.