Available on Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC
We played on Xbox One
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is by no means a thinking man’s game. It is, instead, a fast paced, brutal, romp that starts on Earth and goes all over the solar system.
The Story
2016 is a very weird year for first person shooters. If you had forced me to start writing my review for Call of Duty earlier this year, sight unseen, I would have likely started by comparing it to this year’s Battlefield game. That would have been a natural decision considering how previous games in both series have run nearly parallel to each other. That pattern has been shot out of the sky this year. Battlefield has traveled to the past and placed gamers on the front lines in The Great War. Whereas Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare puts gamers far into the future on the front lines of a conflict between Earth and a military organization that wants to liberate a series of space colonies from Earth.
The main villain in the game, played convincingly by Kit Harington (Jon Snow for those wondering) is more than just the driving force behind the plot. He managed to get under my skin like few villains do, and it really drove me personally through each mission. I just wanted to get rid of that guy! It isn’t very often at all that that happens!
The Gameplay
It is hard to be critical of the mechanics in a Call of Duty game. It was superb on all levels. The visuals are great. The shooting is as good as ever. This entry even included a number of stages where players are in space battling it out in zero gravity and relying on a cleverly designed grappling hook or dogfighting in a space jet. These levels offer a great change of pace compared to the standard ground battles. I would have liked the interface to be a bit easier to read during the spaceship combat, but that is a relatively small issue. I enjoyed them a lot.
Multiplayer
The multiplayer in Infinite Warfare is its best feature. I truly enjoyed the single-player campaign, but nothing in the single player even comes close to the exhilaration that I felt when running through maps with my teammates.
The multiplayer features a number of different gameplay modes that will be familiar to fans of the series. The maps are also very diverse. The game is spread all throughout the solar system and the level designers took advantage of that fact to craft some very cool levels.
The Rating
Call of Duty is rated M for Mature. This is a worthy rating considering how brutal some of the action is during the single player. I had high hopes that the multiplayer would be a bit more palatable considering the amount of armor that each character wears. Unfortunately, each kill is accompanied by a dramatic death animation.
The Takeaway
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is pure fun. Fans of the series should buy this one right away. You will not be disappointed. Everyone else should, at least, look into buying this game as its price drops because the single-player campaign is excellent.
