Exo suits are awesome, but are they the game changer the Call of Duty series requires? by Arjun Kumar
It’s that time of the year again when a new Call of Duty is unleashed upon the world, but instead of greeting this year’s instalment with feverish excitement, it has been greeted with apprehension. A large part of that can be attributed to the colossal f**k up that was Call of Duty: Ghosts, with franchise fatigue coming in as a close second. But to my surprise, developer Sledgehammer Games has delivered an enjoyable Call of Duty game with a solid single player-campaign, with enjoyable, fastpaced multiplayer to boot. The game isn’t without its issues, but it is without a doubt a massive step up from last year’s effort.
Advanced Warfare’s big gimmick – that plays into both single and multi player – is the inclusion of “Exo suits”. These suits allow players greater freedom in movement, and add in a layer of verticality to a franchise that never really had any to begin with. The comparisons to Titanfall will be inevitable, but I personally thought that pilot movements in Titanfall felt more natural and fluid. Add in the ability to wall run, and a skilled pilot could traverse an entire map without letting his feet touch the ground. In Advanced Warfare, this isn’t the case. Your suit does allow you to double jump and boost in all four directions, but movement just doesn’t feel as natural as it did in Titanfall.
Don’t get me wrong though. This mechanic still adds a certain amount of freshness to a franchise that feels like its predecessors, albeit with minor tweaks.
As you’ve seen in the many...many trailers by now, Advanced Warfare takes place in the future, and you are a soldier in Kevin Spacey’s high-tech mercenary army. His ‘guns for hire’ infiltrate places the US government wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, so it’s nice not to play the goody two shoes operator who will blindly sacrifice his life for his country. The game features a plot twist you can see coming a mile away, but that doesn’t make the story less interesting. Kevin Spacey plays pretty much himself from House of Cards, and that really isn’t a bad thing. You, the protagonist, are voiced by Troy Baker, who well, sounds like Troy Baker, which once again isn’t a bad thing.
The campaign is your by-the-numbers Call of Duty campaign, with massive set-pieces factoring into nearly every level. You don a different Exo suit depending on the level, and it sucks that Sledgehammer doesn’t give you the freedom to use the suit as you see fit. There are certain abilities, such as wall climbing or cloaking, that are only available when the game says so. I know COD games are a linear affair, but this just seems like a wasted opportunity. All things said and done though, the fact that I enjoyed a Call of Duty campaign after all these years is a massive testament to Sledgehammer Games’ efforts.
There are roughly fifteen chapters in total, but don’t let that number fool you. You can run through the campaign on Normal difficulty in around 6-7 hours depending on your skill level. While people mock COD games for their short campaigns, I for one prefer something that is short yet enjoyable as opposed to something that drags on forever just for the heck of it.
Once you’re done with the campaign, you can jump into the game’s co-operative mode, titled Exo Survival Mode. Just like Survival from Modern Warfare 3, this mode pits you and three other players against waves of enemies that gradually get tougher the longer you survive. Besides just surviving, you’ll also be tasked with certain objectives that could include collecting Dog Tags or pieces of Intel from fallen enemies. Netting kills earns you points that you can then use at the end of every wave to upgrade your arsenal, change your loadout, or purchase ammunition.
Once you’re done with this Horde mode, you’ll jump into the meat of the game - its multiplayer. Like the campaign, the multiplayer doesn’t stray too far from the formula, and that could be a good or a bad thing depending on whom you ask. These are small infantry-only skirmishes that take place in tight maps, where reflexes reign supreme, and your TTK (time to kill) is painfully low.
The addition of Exo suits to multiplayer does make regular maps stand out even more as you can now jump through buildings, climb on roofs with ease and blast people below. Besides movements, you can also make use of other Exo based perks, such as invisibility, a stimpack to generate health, and lots more. This adds a whole new layer of strategy to the regular runand-gun style of COD. The movement does take some getting used to, but once you do, I think it will be tough to go back to older COD games. And let’s say you just aren’t enjoying all your new toys, you can enter Classic Playlists, where Exos are disabled by default.
Advanced Warfare is not skimpy on content, as you have a bouquet of modes to choose from. Of course, Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, Hardpoint and Domination will remain fan favourites and they’re the easiest modes to find games in, but there are other new game modes to choose from, such as Momentum, a variation of Domination and Uplink.
Uplink is a brand new game mode that plays out kind of like a violent basketball game, where your goal is to dunk a satellite drone (shaped like a ball) into an uplink (that’s kind of like a hoop). The caveat here is that your weapons get disabled once you’re in control of the ball, so that definitely adds a sense of urgency to this mode.
As the satellite carrier, you can also throw it at an enemy, and as soon as he receives the satellite, his weapons will get disabled. This gives you a short window to turn the tides in your favour and blast him with your weapons before he can figure out what happened.
Sadly, all the enjoyment that you can derive from multiplayer has been marred by terrible net code, a lack of dedicated servers, and the game’s inability to connect you to other players. On the PC version, there is a severe dearth of COD players, but this is still a full priced game. Having to wait in the lobby for ten minutes for a match, only to crash out, or join a game with one red bar is beyond frustrating. I personally haven’t played the console versions, but I do believe such problems persist on the PS4 as well.
So now we get to the million dollar question. Is Advanced Warfare worth your hard earned money? To be brutally honest, no, it isn’t. The addition of Exo suits – while definitely appreciated – isn’t the game-changer people are making it sound like.
More importantly, if you’re already burnt out on the franchise, this isn’t going to reignite your love. If you do decide to pick the game up, however, I would recommend any platform but PC. It’s not that Sledgehammer has done a bad job with the port. In fact, AW is a solid port and looks and plays well, but what’s the point if the game becomes obsolete in a matter of weeks.
VERDICT
While Advanced Warfare is a solid addition to the Call of Duty franchise, the meat of its content – the multiplayer – is marred by far too many technical issues.