Beta impressions: Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is literally just a half-baked, reskinned version of Black Ops 3

Introduction:

When Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was announced, most of the internet hated it right away. People were hoping that Infinity Ward would keep the series fresh and not move into the futuristic warfare that the series has evolved into. Sadly, they did exactly that, they jumped head first into the futuristic side of Call of Duty. For the last three games, we have gotten futuristic warfare that has gone from boost jumping, to running on walls and boost jumping, to running on walls and boost jumping in space. The series has gone so far from its roots that many fans are angered and are worried for the future of the franchise.

I was initially optimistic of Infinite Warfare. I would’ve prefered to go back in time or at least stayed in modern day (maybe Modern Warfare 4), but I had faith in Infinity Ward. After all, they are the ones who changed the FPS genre in a massive way by giving us the Modern Warfare series. They took a risk by going outside of the norm and making a shooter set in our current time period, where the events in the game reflected events in real life. It gave us kill streaks, visceral and cinematic campaigns (I know, they didn’t invent this or even popularize it but they took it to another level), and changed the shooter space forever! Who’s to say they couldn’t do it again with Infinite Warfare? Sure, they had a misstep with Call of Duty: Ghosts and they’ve acknowledged that but they could easily go back to the studio they used to be and deliver an excellent game, right?

Probably not. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is one of the laziest games I have seen in a long time from such a high caliber studio such as Infinity Ward. They literally rip animations, mechanics, and even the HUD from Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. They didn’t even attempt to change these things in the slightest, if it looks remotely like something from Black Ops 3, it hasn’t been changed whatsoever.

Stolen mechanics and pure laziness:

One of the biggest things they have copy and pasted is the movement system. Last year, Treyarch built on the movement system created by Sledgehammer Games in Advanced Warfare. Black Ops 3 allowed players to run on walls, swim, slide, boost through the air, and dodge dangers with its new movement system. It was well crafted and felt natural, it was incredibly fun to chain together moves and build momentum and speed while popping headshots on enemies. It is easily one of the most innovative features in Call of Duty and whether you liked Black Ops 3 or not, you have to admit it was damn satisfying when you chained together crazy moves and get an awesome kill.

Infinity Ward has literally copy and pasted this great mechanic and added little to no changes to it. The animations are the same, the bar for recharging your boosts is the same, it feels the same, etc. While the movement system is enjoyable, it feels incredibly lazy and sort of wrong to take someone else’s work and slap your name on it. I don’t even know how Infinity Ward got away with this. They have had three years to develop this game and this is what they were able to come up with? How is Activision even letting them do this? You would at least hope they would make some subtle changes so they could say they did something to the movement system! It feels disrespectful to hardcore fans of the series, as if we would be too stupid to notice something this obvious.

Not only did they copy that, but the HUD is the exact same. Your super move is in the same spot, it charges up the same way as it would in Black Ops 3, you press the same button to use it, everything is exactly how you remember it! Worst of all, they’re making most people pay $80 for this rehash of last year’s CoD so they can give out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered which is a much better game, and they clearly know that.

As I mentioned before, the game features “super moves” that come from the game’s several specialist characters. Sound familiar? That’s because this was another major innovation in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. The game added 9 specialist characters that would all play the same for most of the match, but you could charge up a special attack or bonus by performing well during a match and unleash hell for a short period of time. These characters had flamethrowers, explosive bow and arrows, mini-guns, and much more. It felt rewarding to use these awesome attacks while earning even more rewarding kill streaks and some of these weapons even required a bit of skill to use. Infinite Warfare has yet again copied something from Black Ops 3 by adding this in, and some of the character’s features in Infinite Warfare are literally reskinned versions of the characters in Black Ops 3. One character has a gun that kills enemies in one shot (similar to the Annihilator in BO 3) and another character has the ability to teleport away when in danger (similar to the Glitch ability in BO 3). There are a few other reskinned abilities and weapons but you get the gist of it.

Gameplay is flawed but can be fixed:

Infinite Warfare IS fun, but that’s because Black Ops 3 was fun and had a really good multiplayer mode (you’ll probably hate Infinite Warfare if you hated Black Ops 3). One of the few things the game didn’t copy from BO 3 is the gun play. The gun play feels like an updated version of Ghosts. That may sound pretty alarming as Ghosts was pretty abysmal but it actually works really well in this game, probably because they tweaked it and made it feel more engaging and less stiff. However, the time it takes to kill people is way too long. It can easily be fixed, thankfully, but it totally killed the pacing of the fast paced gameplay and movement. Enemies took so much damage and the weapon balance is all over the place. Some guns feel just utterly useless, some guns feel incredibly overpowered. It is very frustrating when you get shot by a gun with a very high fire rate and you have little to no time to react. Hopefully this all gets fixed or improved by the time the game releases.

Maps don't feel fully thought out:

Based off the 4 maps in the beta, the maps are designed pretty well. The only fault I have with them is that some maps just make some killstreaks nearly useless. There’s a map called Frontier which puts all the players inside a space station. Everything is inside with a few windows overhead to allow aerial killstreaks to peak in. The problem with this is, some killstreaks like the T.H.O.R, a orbital ship that allows you to rain down predator missiles for about a minute, have no real room to work with. They can barely damage anyone inside, there were maps in Ghosts with this same issues and it feels as if Infinity Ward didn’t learn from this mistake. It was really frustrating to earn 13+ kills for my T.H.O.R. and then not be able to use it to its full potential because of poor map design.

A poorly executed crafting system:

Another poorly designed feature is the brand new crafting system in Infinite Warfare. You save up “salvage” that you earn by playing the game and use it to craft better versions of the default, base weapons the game gives you. Sadly, this crafting system is pretty barebones and uninteresting. There’s no real crafting, you just save up a type of currency and buy the weapon variant. It’s a cool idea, but it’s executed poorly. There’s also only four types of variants you can unlock per weapon, common, rare, legendary, and epic. You can’t unlock epic variants right away, you must unlock the common, rare, and legendary versions first unless you just get lucky and pull one out of a supply drop, the game’s loot crate that give you three random items.

The crafting system almost feels useless because you can unlock everything through supply drops which will be purchasable with real money if previous CoD titles are anything to go off of. So if someone has a lot of cash in their bank account, they can easily get the best gun in the game.

It’s also super unclear on how to earn salvage and supply drop keys in the game. There were times where I would perform really well and earn literally nothing besides XP. I don’t feel rewarded for my performance and it makes it feel as if the items in the game are unreasonably priced since the distribution of the currencies seems to be completely random. There are challenges in the game that change each match which tell you to get kills with certain weapons or in certain ways, and one would assume accomplishing these tasks would give you quite a few keys or some salvage. Sadly, if you work your butt off to get 25 kills in one match or kill 6 players with 6 different weapons in one match, you may get rewarded with roughly 2 supply drop keys.

Weapon variants are also really annoying this time around because some of them have a feature that allow you to get a tactical nuke after getting 25 kills without dying. That’s right, the nuke isn’t really a killstreak anymore. It’s just for whoever is using a specific weapon variant, and the best part, not all weapons have a variant that has a nuke! It excludes people from getting a nuke and forces people to use guns they may not want to use.

Takeaway:

It feels like Infinity Ward just can’t stop making stupid mistakes. While this is a step up from 2013’s Call of Duty: Ghosts, it doesn’t restore my faith in the studio. I’m concerned with how they’ve been managing their time for the last three years and why they think it’s ok to straight up copy mechanics and animations from previous Call of Duty games. Infinite Warfare is most definitely the most fast paced Call of Duty in a long time, but I can’t give all, if any, of the credit to Infinity Ward for that. It’s pretty crushing as a Call of Duty fan to see a once great studio fall to such low levels. Infinite Warfare feels like one of the laziest, sloppiest attempts at a AAA game in a long time. They steal ideas and mechanics, and their own original ideas are mostly half-baked and poorly executed. The only promising thing left for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare besides their attempt at zombies is its campaign which looks pretty amazing thanks to the fact they brought on some people from Naughty Dog. Only time will tell how well the final game will end up being.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare releases on November 4th, 2016 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.