Platforms: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, and PC.
Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision
MSRP: $59.99
Introduction:
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has gotten a bad rap since it was revealed in May and honestly I think it was undeserved. Infinity Ward had a misstep with Ghosts and people used that and the fact the series has gone head first into the future as a reason to hate the game. Sure, it might not be what you want but does that mean it can’t be a good game? Of course, it’s the internet and people will complain about anything, especially if it’s Call of Duty. People are also hating on Infinity Ward for bundling Modern Warfare Remastered with the collector’s editions of the game but realistically, it probably wasn’t their idea. It was most likely Activision’s. I’ve been giving Infinity Ward the benefit of the doubt the whole year due to the fact they created some of the best first person shooters out there. I respect them, even if some of the people who were there when those games were created have parted ways with the studio. My respect for them is also so high that I am also more critical of their entries in the wildly successful franchise. However, besides the beta of the game which got me a little worried, I have been pretty optimistic about the game. Has my optimism (for the most part) paid off? In some ways, yes.
One of the best campaigns since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:
The campaign of Infinite Warfare is brilliant and goes beyond the “Hell yeah, war is awesome!” feeling. It has depth, characters you care about, and isn’t afraid to take risks. This is one of the most well-crafted stories in the series since the Modern Warfare trilogy. The stakes are high and you’re on the defense, rather than the offense like in some of the previous games.
The premise of Infinite Warfare flips the usual formulaic Call of Duty plot on its head. Usually, you’re a member of a squad going to another country to take down some menace causing chaos for the world, you’re on the assaulting side. In Infinite Warfare, you’re defending all of Earth as just one small group of people. After a massive surprise terrorist attack from a community that resides off of Earth returns to the planet take over, you must gather your forces and defend your home from the despicable Admiral Kotch (played by Kit Harington from Game of Thrones), leader of the Settlement Defense Front. Their goal isn’t to just take control of Earth by wiping out the leaders and controlling the civilians already here, it’s to kill everyone here and move some of their people here. They are ruthless and will do whatever it takes to accomplish their mission. You play as Nick Reyes, a Lieutenant forced into the role of Captain of the Retribution, a space warfare carrier ship, after the death of Captain Alder during the terrorist attack. This war rests on your shoulders, you call the shots, regardless if you’re prepared or not. The SDF are coming and they won’t wait for you to gather yourself after the devastating number of casualties in the attack.
The initial attack wiped out most of the military and all that is left is the Retribution and another ship titled the Tigris. While the main game is about defending Earth, it’s also about the cost of war and how no matter how hard you try, you can’t save everyone. Reyes wants to complete the task but keep his entire crew alive but the fact is, they’re severely outnumbered and it’s a war. There’s not going to be a way to win and keep every single one of his friends alive. He struggles as Captain to make decisions because he’s not entirely qualified for the position. He doesn’t realize that these people serving under him joined the military to protect their planet, even if it means giving their lives. It’s a great underlying theme and story that plays out over the course of the game in a brutal and dark way. It’s one of the horrors of war that has been done in other games and other media but it feels as if the stakes are even higher here because it’s not just about completing a mission somewhere in the Middle East, it’s about the safety of Earth.
A diverse cast of brilliant characters:
The story feels very personal even though it’s on a galactic scale, partially thanks to the characters. You grow super attached to your crew throughout the campaign thanks to excellent writing, performances, and pacing. One of my favorite characters is a robot named Ethan. Although he is made entirely of metal and doesn’t physically behave like a human, he has the heart and soul of a human. He has feelings and traits to make him feel like a human. Initially, when I met him I saw him as just a robot, but by the end of the game, I saw him as another member of the Retribution and a human. I cared about him and he cared about Reyes. I can tell he will go down in Call of Duty history as one of the most memorable characters in the series.
Another great character is Nora Salter, she is Reyes’ best friend and acts almost like a sister to him. The two have such a strong bond and great chemistry together. Salter supports Reyes no matter what decision he makes, she’s loyal but she is willing to disagree with him when necessary.
The best part about Infinite Warfare’s story though is that none of our heroes, no matter how major or minor they are, have “plot armor”. They can be killed off at any moment and that makes the story all the better. The writers weren’t afraid to kill people off and it raises the stakes so much when you realize this. No one is safe in this story, and they shouldn’t be. I won’t say who makes it out and who doesn’t but it makes the story so much more impactful and makes it feel more like a real war rather than just a season of a TV show which has those characters who won’t die just because fans love them or something.
The only character I thought fell flat was with Admiral Kotch. The character is introduced in such a way that I as a player was intimidated. He’s unsettling and clearly isn’t one to be crossed and Kit Harington gives a great performance as him. The problem is he’s really underutilized after his stellar introduction. You only seem a handful of times through broadcasts from his ship where he hacks into your HUD or your ship to just reiterate how he will win and will kill everyone on Earth. He didn’t really do anything too crazy or villainous beyond the prolog of the game and didn’t have a looming presence throughout the game like Makarov, Zakhaev, or Raul Menendez. It seemed like a waste of talent from Kit Harington as he was never used to his full potential.
A mixed bag of side missions:
Aside from the story and setting, the campaign is one of the most unique campaigns in the series’ history due to variety. In Black Ops 2, we had “Strike Missions” that served as base defense missions. They were fairly generic but depending on how many you did and whether you won or lost, it would impact your story. In Infinite Warfare, you have a variety of side missions that range from boarding an enemy ship carrier and assassinating a target to destroying a fleet of airships in your personal jet, The Jackal. These missions all help progress the narrative and unlock extra bonuses for your loadout that will help you on your mission to destroy the SDF. They all have unique objectives and dialogue and they don’t just feel added in for the sake of being added in. From a story perspective, they’re vital to reducing the SDF’s control over the galaxy and taking out their numbers so it has a purpose in the game. On top of that, the ship boarding missions are incredibly fun and I didn’t feel annoyed that I needed to do them to unlock extra gear.
The Jackal missions, however, felt really weak. The flying feels too “arcadey” and floaty and I never wanted to fly the damn thing which is annoying because you use it a LOT both in side missions and main missions. It’s almost a main character itself but it’s kind of just an annoying main character. The combat in it is super unengaging and just annoying because you have to lock onto smaller targets which are basically just other jets and it basically turns into the most uninteresting on-rail shooter ever. When you move on to larger targets like Destroyers, you just have to sit there and shoot at it for what feels like an eternity until it explodes. Throughout my whole time playing, I never found a weak point to hit on a Destroyer, unlike the carrier ships which are smaller versions of Destroyers where you can destroy their engines on the back. If I shot the engine on a Destroyer, nothing happened! It was bizarre and frustrating and made the vehicle combat even blander as I just circled the ship shooting at it for several minutes waiting for it to blow up.
The multiplayer lacks in several places:
Last month, I got my hands on Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer beta and I came away feeling really negative about the game's multiplayer. It felt like a lazy copy and paste of Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 with inconsistent combat that caused people to absorb bullets like sponges or take you down in the blink of an eye. I was worried we would get another game that is received like Call of Duty: Ghosts but I still went in with hopes that the campaign would be great and that it would have some saving grace, and luckily it does. Infinity Ward also took the criticisms from the beta and made the game better. Although it’s not perfect, it’s a step up from what I played in October.
I have come to accept that the multiplayer is what it is. Nothing can be changed about the core mechanics that have been clearly “borrowed” from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. If you care to see me rant about that, you can go back to my beta impressions from last month. Despite its lack of innovations, the game can be fun but it needs some work. The time to kill seems a bit too quick now rather than too long like in the beta, the way you earn salvage still makes no sense, and the movement can feel a bit clunky.
At times I would jump over a gap where there’s a surface I can wall run across but my character wouldn’t attach to the wall and would fall to his death, causing me to lose my killstreak. There are also objects and things that can’t be climbed on even though you can reach them by boosting. It causes confusion because I often go to jump up onto higher platforms but then there ends up being an invisible wall and it really breaks the flow and momentum of the movement. It’s really just poor map design and makes me wonder why they don’t let you climb on these things if you can reach it.
The crafting system is mediocre at best:
One of the few new things in Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer is the incredibly insipid crafting system. You can build your own weapon variants by earning a material called salvage. The more salvage you have, the better weapon you can make. Ever since weapon variants got introduced in Advanced Warfare, the weapon balance in the series had just been terrible. Some of the best guns have incredible fire rates or accuracy and it makes it so unfair. You could argue that the people who have these guns earned them by playing a lot and saving their salvage, but within 24 hours of the game’s launch, I saw people with the highest weapon variant tier. I was absolutely floored as to how this happened so quickly (probably through supply drops which give you random gear), it made my first few matches completely insufferable. All I had was one of the default weapons and there was a guy with an epic energy weapon firing at the speed of light, I could barely fight back.
The actual crafting system itself feels lazy. It’s not even crafting, you just save up a currency and then buy a weapon. It’s not remotely satisfying and part of that comes from how long it takes to buy a weapon. I wasn’t able to craft my first weapon until at least level 15 because the rate at which you get salvage takes forever and it isn’t entirely clear how you get it. I couldn’t figure out any sort of pattern to earn it. No matter how well you perform in a match, you may get no salvage or you may get a lot. It’s super unrewarding and confusing and it isn’t explained very well.
The game has potential to be fun and great if the game gets updated:
The core gameplay of Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer can be fun if things are working right, but that seems to be pretty rare. Every match there seems to be something I can pick out that causes the match to be significantly less fun, whether that’s the pretty terrible spawns or clunky movement, I could pick out something.
The spawns in Infinite Warfare are just mind boggling. I spawned in front of enemies all the time and would get gunned down just milliseconds after coming back to life, it just made me so infuriated. The final kill in one of my matches was someone spawning in and immediately being gunned down, the spawns need to be tweaked very soon or it’s going to continue to cause headaches.
Although it rarely works right, when it does, the game is really fun. There’s nothing like running across a wall at high speeds to flank a group of pesky enemies, heart pounding as you take aim and annihilate them. It feels excellent and the flow is great when everything works properly. It can create some of the most adrenaline-pumping multiplayer matches ever and it feels satisfying as a player pulling off those exciting kills after chaining together moves with the advanced movement.
With some patches and fixes, the multiplayer has the potential to be wildly fun. I would’ve liked to see Infinity Ward do something different so we aren’t saturated with all this future warfare but for what we got, it has great potential. I’m not sure I can recommend the multiplayer in its current state, but in the near future, it could be excellent.
Infinity Ward's zombie mode is fun, stylish, and full of things to do:
The last thing I’ll touch on is the really awesome zombies mode. Infinity Ward abandoned their alien mode from Ghosts and has switched over to the iconic zombies mode. Although I am kind of down on zombies in general, I really appreciate how Call of Duty continues to manage to keep it fun and fresh. They know it’s stupid and over the top and embrace it. Infinite Warfare’s Zombies in Spaceland map is about 4 young actors who go to audition for a famous movie director’s newest horror film. The director is a bit “unconventional” in his filmmaking and tends to put his actors in real danger to get genuine reactions out of them and make his movies feel real. So, he teleports them through a portal and sends them back to the 1970’s. The 4 unlikely heroes are stuck in an abandoned theme park called Spaceland which has a variety of rides that serve as large traps for fighting off the zombie horde. The map also features other attractions that offer other gameplay bonuses like a robot that offers you challenges and in return for completing them, will offer you rewards.
The map has so much color and style as well as David Hasselhoff playing a DJ who plays licensed tracks as you slaughter the undead. Without going too much into detail as I think it’s something that should be experienced with little knowledge, Zombies in Spaceland is one of the best zombie maps in a long time. I think longtime fans will really appreciate the map and will fall in love with the style of Infinity Ward’s take on the classic mode.
Verdict:
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is, for the most part, a great shooter. The campaign is a personal, emotional experience about the cost and horrors of war set in a unique setting filled with heart and soul thanks to its excellent cast of characters. The multiplayer on the other hand is a bit of a mixed bag, it lacks innovation and where it does innovate, it falls flat. It needs some tweaks in order to meet its full potential, but once that’s done it could be a lot of fun! Infinity Ward also does a fantastic job of making a stylish new zombies map filled with content that’ll bring dozens of hours of fun to players. Even though the multiplayer falls short in some places, it’s still an enjoyable game and I’m interested to see where Infinity Ward takes the Infinite Warfare series.
