Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare review: Ace campaign, but skip the multiplayer

Takes the series to its logical conclusion with new ideas held back by tired conventions.

GAME DETAILS

Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One (PS4 reviewed)
Rating: M for Mature
Release Date: November 4
Price: Standard Edition: £44, $60 / Legacy Edition (with Modern Warfare Remastered): £61, £80
Links: Amazon (UK) | Amazon (US) | Official website

Since the release of Modern Warfare back in 2007, the Call of Duty series has increasingly flirted with futuristic combat—each new iteration has brought us a little closer towards full-blown sci-fi, adding advanced weaponry, introducing jetpacks, and making wall-running a method of traversal through its many war-torn environments.
With Infinite Warfare that skirting flirtation goes out the window completely. This is a game rife with spaceships, warp drives, and laser weapons, which feel more in line with Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica than Call of Duty. Rather than fight through the cities of Earth, Infinite Warfare sends you to the far reaches of the solar system to battle above planets; instead of ultranationalist radicals you fend off a Martian insurgency, hell-bent on taking your home world for its own.

It makes for a far fresher game, at least in single-player. This is a campaign that not so much shrugs but violently shakes off the lacklustre Ghosts moniker—Infinity Ward’s previous entry in the franchise—which many people (myself included) interpreted as a sign that the developer was out of ideas. While it’s clear that its ideas are still relatively thin on the ground, Infinite Warfare is by far the best campaign the series has seen in years. It’s just a shame that its multiplayer, while robust, is substantially lacking where rivals like Battlefield 1 have excelled.

Going it alone

This large shift in focus is the most surprising thing about Infinite Warfare. For years now, multiplayer has always been the main draw in Call of Duty, but here that’s different, with the seven-hour campaign taking centre stage. It’s the writing that really seals the deal; despite its huge leap into the intergalactic future, Infinite Warfare retains a relatable sense of humanity that grounds its hyper-intense action. You might be fighting against mechanised infantry and skating across the frozen surface of Europa, but developer Infinity Ward delivers the most intelligently scripted Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare, one that avoids absurd ideas like Ghosts’ obsession with VR and strips things back. It focuses on a single band of soldiers, the pressures of leadership, and whether the success of a mission is more important than the lives of the men carrying it out.

Those missions are vital to the survival of Earth’s population. As humanity progressed beyond present day, so Infinite Warfare’s story goes, it ventured out into the solar system to offset Earth’s dwindling resources. This colonisation of other planets and moons subsequently leads to the rise of insurgencies beyond Earth’s borders.

The group you fight throughout Infinite Warfare’s campaign is the Settlement Defense Front, Martian rebels lead by Kit Harrington’s Admiral Kotch—a ruthless ideologue and ultimate bad guy who’s hell bent on destroying Earth. He makes this clear in the game’s opening hours, wherein Earth suffers a devastating attack. It reminded me of Halo 2’s introductory assault by the Covenant, but despite Kotch’s overwhelming cruelty his character feels underworked, and rather than give him any real motivations, Infinity Ward leaves Kotch as a bad dude who does bad things because…reasons.

The rest of the cast fares far better, though. You play as Nick Reyes, a Tom Cruisealike who has been thrust into the unenviable position of inheriting a capital ship, the Retribution, and its hundreds of crew. Your mission is to buy Earth time to rebuild its fleet before you take the fight directly to Kotch and his SDF goons. It’s a simple, no-nonsense story, but it’s told with such fervour that Infinite Warfare is elevated far beyond its recent predecessors.

Nick is likeable, loyal and honourable, and his crew and close teammates are just as personable. David Harewood’s Sergeant Omar is an absolute badass Englishman, while Reyes’ closest partner, Nora Salter (or Salt to those who know her best) is as strong minded and likeable as he is, delivering the pitch-perfect mix of admiration and criticism towards his decisions as a leader. Then there’s Ethan, the highlight of the game’s cast, an AI robot whose wit is only as good as his abilities in combat, and who acts as lighthearted relief to what is an otherwise fairly dour tale of survival and impossible odds.

These varied personalities give Infinite Warfare a surprising amount of heart, which you wouldn’t expect from a game that has you traversing through asteroid fields and fighting above the rings of Saturn. It’s here, in its litany of missions, that Infinite Warfare delivers the slick action that the Call of Duty franchise is so famous for. The on-the-ground combat remains near identical to previous games, but there’s a thrill to finding and experimenting with its host of new weapons. There are anti-gravity grenades, for instance, which lift groups of enemies into a vulnerable stasis for you to pick off one by one, and seeker grenades that scuttle along the ground like terrifyingly effective metal spiders, attaching themselves to unfortunate victims and exploding on their faces.

It’s much bloodier than other Call of Duty games, too—an experimental laser weapon disintegrates enemies to a bloody mist, while there’s great satisfaction to be had (and probably a hint of guilt) mêléeing enemies out in space, ripping their helmets off so they suffocate in front of you. Then there are the dogfights, in which you hair around in a small fighter ship, locking onto enemy targets to pursue them through debris fields and across the bows of enormous capital ships. To begin with, these are surprisingly exciting distractions that capture the frantic nature of dodging enemy lock-ons and casting flares to avoid being hit by incoming missiles. But they eventually lose their shine and feel more like repetitive filler that, while visually spectacular, just aren’t varied enough to justify how frequently they pop up.

Luckily, a lot of these missions can also be undertaken at your leisure. Infinite Warfare retains its linear storytelling so don’t expect any branching narrative paths, but certain missions are entirely optional and can be completed in any order. While this allows you to decide what you want to do at most points throughout the story, it’s an odd design decision that breaks up the action and leads to a number of boring plods through the Retribution’s bridge area to choose your next objective. It’s clear what was intended—a period of downtime with your crew to punctuate the unrelenting drama—but it doesn’t work.

Still, the campaign’s best moments are fantastic. A breakneck excursion to the Moon is a particular campaign highlight (I shan’t spoil specifics), and there’s also a brilliant mission set on an asteroid that’s orbiting Mercury at ridiculous speeds, giving it a 30-second day/night cycle where the intense heat of the sun roasts you alive if you’re caught outside for more than a second.

Infinite Warfare looks beautiful, too, running at a near-flawless 60FPS on PlayStation 4 (there are resolution enhancements for PS4 Pro players) and dazzling with just the right amount of lens flare to make it feel science-fiction, while grounding everything with a pragmatic function-not-form aesthetic to vehicles and spacecraft. Don’t be fooled by the jump to hyperspace—this is still very much a military shooter.

What happened to the multiplayer?

Disappointingly, Infinite Warfare’s multiplayer modes aren’t nearly as fresh or as impressive as its single-player. In a way, the multiplayer reverts back to the lows of Ghosts, while the single-player looks forward. That’s not to say the online modes aren’t worth your time, but it’s a shame to see that Infinite Warfare’s freshest and most original ideas (dog fighting, zero-g combat, and wall-running) are either nowhere to be seen in multiplayer or, in the case of wall-running, not facilitated by good map design. This is a weird decision, because there’s even a space facility map where, upon dying, players’ bodies float around in zero gravity. It looks cool to see the corpses of your enemies floating towards the ceiling once they’ve died, but why Infinite Warfare doesn’t use its setting to create cool gameplay challenges is a mystery.

https://youtu.be/fYOB5eS76Nw

What you get instead is very much the same as before: a solid, functional multiplayer mode with the futuristic weapons that Infinite Warfare’s setting allows. Against this year’s fierce competition (Titanfall 2, Overwatch, and Battlefield 1), Infinity Ward is on the back foot. It’s most notable in some of the game’s tighter indoor maps, where the action is still slick and occasionally exciting (adopting the three lane approach of the MOBA genre), but, more than frequently, individual games lack any real spectacle or scope—at times it even feels stiff. Even in some of the most visually impressive maps—the icy surface of Europa with Jupiter looming in the distance is entirely reminiscent of Destiny’s wonderfully vibrant skyboxes—Infinite Warfare’s overwhelming reliance on tight 90-degree angles and flanking corridors make for a game that feels far smaller than it is.

Perhaps more frustrating is how Infinite Warfare devolves progression into a boring, tedious metagame. Not only does this ruin how guns are customised, removing seemingly all downsides to certain upgrades so that gunfights are hopelessly imbalanced, but it also turns things into a grind. Throughout my hours of play I didn’t feel like I was progressing particularly far.

Despite this odd change, Infinite Warfare does do something well: it takes the series’ broad number of customisation options, perks, and improvements you can make to your loadouts and assigns them to rigs—six unique combat suits that take the game’s character abilities and builds entire classes out of them, albeit with a couple of interesting quirks that are unique to Infinite Warfare’s space-age setting. The Warfighter is the all-rounder, and Merc is a heavy specialist, for example, while the Synaptic thrives in close combat. There are six rigs in total, but the latter three (FTL, Stryker, and Phantom) are unlocked at later levels. Each different rig has its own traits and abilities to unlock, with some awesome super abilities like the Warfighter’s Claw, a ridiculous looking weapon with an insane rate of fire and ricocheting bullets that guarantee maximum devastation.

The final pillar in Infinite Warfare’s three-part foundation is Zombies. What used to be Call of Duty’s co-op gimmick is now its most enjoyable online mode. It’s just as fleshed out as its campaign or multiplayer, and comes complete with slick stylised cartoon cutscenes, a great soundtrack and barmy ‘80s characters that head into the abandoned (and zombie infested) amusement park, Spaceland.

Zombies is, as ever, a whole load of fun with friends—I tried playing alone but it wasn’t nearly the same—and while Infinity Ward has once again chosen to play things safe, not messing with the familiar formula and instead just refining a concept, Zombies in Spaceland still has the legs to make repeat plays an absolute joy with a group of other players. Its map design also feels far better than some of the maps in the vanilla multiplayer, and the issues with weapon imbalance are far less of a problem when you’re playing against the AI undead rather than a skilled 12-year-old.

Depending on which version of the game you buy, Infinite Warfare also comes bundled with Modern Warfare Remastered, a fantastic remake of one of the genre’s best campaigns, complete with the technical overhauls to bring it up to modern standards. It looks beautiful, plays wonderfully and, perhaps most surprisingly, its various statements about politics and war are still hugely impactful. It strings together set-piece after set-piece, and to see it’s held up this well after almost ten years is really impressive.

The most disappointing thing is that Modern Warfare Remastered outshines its newer counterpart in many ways; Infinite Warfare is a game that feels undercooked compared to its more accomplished contemporaries. 2016 has delivered some exemplary shooters that have pushed several boundaries. The spectacle of Battlefield’s trenches, the pace of Titanfall 2’s arenas and the sheer creative depth of Overwatch’s team-based strategics are simply too much for Call of Duty to best this year.

If you believe that Infinite Warfare’s name implies that this is as far as the series can go then you might be worried that the king is dead. But we all know that Call of Duty will be back. Hopefully, a little bigger, a little better, and maybe even a little bolder too.

The good

Fresh, well-written single-player campaign
Colourful collection of characters
Remains grounded, despite the sci-fi theatrics
Thoroughly entertaining weapons
Beautiful 60FPS visuals
The bad

Tired multiplayer modes
Lack of visible progression in multiplayer makes everything a grind
Doesn't always make the best use of its futuristic setting
The ugly

The bundled Modern Warfare Remaster is simply more fun
Verdict: Infinite Warfare takes the series to its logical conclusion, delivering one of the best single-player campaigns in ages. But the trademark multiplayer modes need a serious overhaul.

Sam White is a writer, journalist, and regular contributor to the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, and GQ. He passionately believes he has a claim to at least one duchy—which is by disputed by genealogists everywhere. Find him on Twitter at @Samwrite.