Call of Duty Advanced Warfare

Call of Duty: Ghosts really felt like the last gasp of the series' immensely successful last-gen shooter formula. 

It was a totally solid game throughout – which you’d expect considering it was the culmination of several years of iteration on the same engine and overall approach. But the premise felt limp, the campaign only went through the motions, and it couldn't help but feel like a stopgap to something better. 
Luckily, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is just that: something better. 
It’s still not quite amazing, revolutionary, or back to the very best of the series, but it is the biggest step forward since the muddy trenches of WWII were swapped for the concrete battlegrounds of the original Modern Warfare. 

The near-future setting of those recent entries was starting to wear thin, so what does Advanced Warfare do? Go even further: almost 50 years into the future by the time the story wraps up, in fact. That ends up being a smart move, as the wild, creative military tech that Sledgehammer Games has dreamed up livens up the familiar gameplay in a fairly significant way.

Key to that approach is the exoskeleton, a hulking frame of armor that attaches to your soldier and allows him (or her if you’re playing multiplayer) to boost-jump high into the air, cloak, utilize super strength, and eventually fire off a grappling hook to zip around stages. In multiplayer, the impact makes for a much faster, more chaotic experience.


Decades dashed





Add to that hovering bikes and tanks, walking mech suits, forced-energy shotguns, and all manner of other future tech, and Call of Duty looks and feels different to all of the previous entries - if only slightly in some cases. Granted, some of the similarities to Titanfall are awfully curious, even if the development timelines make that more likely a coincidence than anything else.



Powered up






Ghosts' campaign was the least remarkable in the modern series, and Black Ops II before it had been rather inconsistent in tone and execution. Advanced Warfare thankfully delivers the strong single-player experience the series has lacked of late, although it unsurprisingly trades coherence for chaos and wild set pieces.

The adventure kicks off in 2054 as your young U.S. soldier is severely injured in battle – but quickly recruited by private military corporation Atlas to be patched up with prosthetics and dropped back into action. Atlas is overseen by the ambitious Jonathan Irons, sharply portrayed by Kevin Spacey in both look and voice; and believe it or not, power sure can corrupt. And so a new kind of villain for the series takes shape.

It's entertaining stuff, even if often silly or seemingly belligerent. Best to focus on the intense moments and occasionally stunning graphical flourishes. The campaign does end abruptly, but the seven-or-so hours that lead up to the credits pack in enough cinematic bombast to make it feel worthwhile.


Suit up and shoot





While most of the familiar online modes remain intact (Domination, Kill Confirmed, etc.), Advanced Warfare's multiplayer is sharply affected by the introduction of the exo suits. Double-jumping and power-launching your body through the air adds a new kind of mobility to the action, and the result feels very fast, very chaotic, and admittedly intimidating at first.






All of that adds to the initial learning curve, even for hardened series vets. But surprisingly, I've found myself having more online success than in any previous entry. Perhaps my opponents are still wrapping their heads around the new moves, and I'm simply taking advantage (fine with me). Whatever the case, I'm relieved to find that the new additions don't seem to overcomplicate the multiplayer design over time. Some traditional modes sans exo powers are included, too, if you do want something a little simpler.

Either way, Call of Duty online is still great fun. Here, the Pick 13 approach to character customization is much appreciated, as you can tweak your loadout down to minute details – and the game awards new guns and gear rather rapidly, thanks to level-based unlocks and the occasional bonus supply drop.

Also, having played on public servers for ove a week now, I haven’t noticed a single hint of lag. This is no Battlefield 4-like botch-up, thankfully.













Sadly, the last piece of the puzzle – the four-player Exo Survival co-op mode – comes off as a dull, obligatory addition. It's similar to the wave-based survival mode in Modern Warfare 3, albeit now with you and your mates outfitted with super suits and able to spend points on upgrades between rounds.


















As ever, it's fun to play a shooter alongside your pals; that's a given. But Exo Survival proves unremarkable in its basic design and enemy assaults. Still, you might stick with it anyway, as there's a zombie-filled treat pulling you in as a final unlock. However, you'll have to complete a couple hundred rounds before it opens up. As if the mode didn't seem like enough of a slog as it is.



Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare verdict





Advanced Warfare is thankfully the exoskeleton-powered kick in the pants that Call of Duty has needed of late, even if it feels like an evolutionary shift for the still-familiar core series design.

The enticing future tech and stirred-up online play do an admirable job of making Call of Duty enticing and even exciting once more.



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Far Cry 4

Far Cry 4

14 November 2014


You need time to deal with Far Cry 4. A lot of time.

You certainly ideally want more than the four days we were allowed with Ubisoft’s new open world shooter. This isn’t to say you won’t be able to finish the game’s main campaign in the time we were allotted to play it in, because we did. That’s just to say that that there’s so much more going on in Far Cry 4 beyond its narrative that it could keep players glued to it for weeks. Possibly months.

The reason for this is that Far Cry 4 puts a premium on distraction. Players may set out intent on taking part in a story mission, but on their way to a checkpoint they’ll invariably run across a radar tower or an enemy-held outpost or even a herd of animals whose pelts they need to unlock a weapon slot and all of a sudden, their original motivation goes flying out the window.





Far Cry 4 is a true open world game in that it entices – in fact, flat out encourages – players to go off piste. This is a game that offers unbridled freedom as a given. There’s a story anchoring the action, but the best moments in Far Cry 4 are those that players create for themselves – like riding an elephant through an enemy outpost or escaping from insurmountable odds by leaping off a cliff and deploying a wingsuit. Far Cry 4 has a decent plot, sure, but its biggest strength is the fact that, for the most part, it doesn’t get in the way of players experimenting.

The game’s map compliments an open-ended approach. It’s filled to bursting with activities, from radar towers to unlock, to outposts to raid to races to take part in and more. Once players engage in any of these missions, a laundry list of new activities opens up. The hardest task players are likely to encounter in Far Cry 4 is to stay focused on the task at hand.




The story of Far Cry 4 centres on Ajay Ghale and his quest to scatter his mother’s ashes in the country of her birth, Kyrat. Upon arriving, he’s snapped up by the local dictator – a flamboyant psycho named Pagan Min – from whose clutches he quickly escapes. Ajay soon comes into contact with Kyrat’s freedom fighter movement, The Golden Path, and it’s here the narrative starts to splinter.

The Golden Path has two leaders, Amita and Sabal, and both of them have very different ideas on how best to bring down Pagan Min’s brutal rule of Kyrat. Sabal is a conservative; while he puts a premium on the value of human life, he’s also committed to bringing Kyrat back to what he sees as traditional values. Amita, for her part has no time for Sabal’s borderline sexist outlook, but she’s not above taking over Pagan Min’s drug running operations if it means schools and hospitals can be built.

There’s no clear moral compass between the pair of them and the narrative is made all the more compelling by the fact that the player is eventually forced to pick a side. In Kyrat there are no easy choices and the player will likely have to reflect on the path they’ve chosen in the closing moment of the game.




In the meantime, Far Cry 4 tosses up a ton of distractions to engage the player. You can hunt animals, unlock radar towers, attack fortresses, take down outposts, take part in races, rescue hostages – the list goes on and on. Far Cry 4 is likely to keep players glued to it for hours at a time and the principle draw here is that no activity feels forced or mandatory. All the game’s tasks run into each other organically so players never feel like they’re being yanked in a direction they’re not comfortable with.



  

That having been said, it’s worth pointing out that some story missions box players into a style of play they may not be on board with. There are one or two plot missions that demand a stealthy approach and players who lack patience will find these segments heavy going. This is compounded by the fact that being spotted by the AI results in an instant fail; after allowing players such an innate sense of freedom, constricting their movements to such a degree feels almost draconian.




But these moments are few and far between. Players are far more likely to spend a ton of time exploring Kyrat, looting chests, killing and skinning animals, unlocking the map and generally exploring their environment to its deepest depths. Far Cry 4 also introduces two-player co-op on the campaign map, so if you’re finding a particular fort or outpost something of a pain to take down solo,you and a mate can team up to make shorter work of it.






There’s also a PVP multiplayer, although the strength of the single-player campaign makes it feel like something of a third wheel. A lot of the match types in the multiplayer are team-and-objective based, with players defending or attacking points in the map. There’s an asynchronous quality to the PVP as one side is armed with traditional firearms and the other with bows and arrows and the ability to cloak and command animals in the map. It’s a compelling affair but it’s doubtful that Far Cry 4 is going to eat into the online audience numbers of Call Of Duty, for example.




No, Far Cry 4’s principle attraction is most certainly its campaign, which is easily the best thing about it. The land of Kyrat is a vast and beautiful playground and players have every reason to get lost in it.

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